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

人们对利用信息和通信技术促进社区参与以及通过挑战和奖励以众包方式解决难题的兴趣日益浓厚。鼓励政府和非政府组织设计、部署、管理和支持适当的在线平台，以实现这两个目标并提高经济竞争力。这些治理挑战平台可以为公民参与创造新的路径，增加治理活动的开放性，并增加治理组织的有效性和合法性。亚利桑那州立大学正在开发一个新的全大学范围的挑战平台，以加强社区参与，并从其5万名成员的大学社区征求想法，以解决八大挑战，但人们对这些平台的设计、使用和效果知之甚少。研究团队将与平台设计团队合作，纳入改善整体用户体验所需的负担，并测试团队组成、治理结构、合法性以及团队能力和承诺的适用理论。一旦开发了这些功能，它们将被用于一系列实地研究，旨在确定在线社区参与的理论扩展和潜在边界条件。这些研究将初步绘制社区参与地图，追踪参与如何在社区中传播，并测试实时反馈对社区的影响？S参与模式。下一阶段将探讨投票机制对社区动态、对治理责任的看法以及更复杂的社区参与形式的影响。最后，将研究团队组成、结构、多样性和有效性之间的关系，重点是生成的解决方案的质量。

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.