RAPID VOSS: Understanding the challenges inherent in the design, execution and participation in governance challenge platforms

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There is growing interest in the use of information and communication technologies for community engagement and for crowd-sourcing solutions to difficult problems through challenges and prizes. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations are being encouraged to design, deploy, manage and support appropriate online platforms to address both goals and improve economic competitiveness. These governance challenge platforms can create novel pathways for citizen participation, increase openness of governance activities, and increase both the effectiveness and legitimacy of the governing organization. Arizona State University is developing a new University-wide challenge platform to enhance community engagement and to solicit ideas from its 50,000-member University community to solve eight broad challenges, but little is known about the design, use and effects of such platforms. The research team will engage the platform design team to incorporate the affordances required to improve the overall user experience and to test applicable theories of team composition, governance structures, legitimacy, and team capacity and commitment. Once these features have been developed, they will be used in a series of field studies designed to identify theoretical extensions and potential boundary conditions in online community engagement. The studies will initially map community participation, trace how participation spreads through the community, and test the effects of real-time feedback on the community?s participation patterns. The next phase will explore the impact of voting mechanisms on community dynamics, on perceptions of governance accountability, and on more sophisticated forms of community involvement. Finally, relationships between team formation, structure, diversity and effectiveness will be investigated focusing on the quality of the solutions generated.