Working Paper on Crowdsourcing for democratic engagement in the EU

ECAS study

European Citizen Action Service has been researching how to apply the crowdsourcing method as a complementary tool to existing frameworks in order to expand the number of contributors to EU policy-making, remove potential barriers to participation and “engage the unengaged” throughout Europe. This has been done by assessing 27 national case studies of crowdsourcing worldwide in order to examine if the EU can benefit from the lessons learnt in this field.

However, in order to launch a crowdsourcing pilot at the EU level, there are still several questions which need answering. ECAS will be working with several civil society organisations under a EUCROWD project to facilitate national debates and focus groups on potential subjects to be crowdsourced at the EU level, the time-frame for their completion and the technological platform to be utilised. It is envisaged that a successful pilot would be a catalyst for a wider change in EU decision-making to enable greater citizen participation.

Source: http://ecas.org/read-new-paper-crowdsourcing/.


Access the working paper in pdf format here.