Roxana Radu, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Nicolo Zingales, Tilburg Law School
Enrico Calandro, Research ICT Africa/Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
The online crowdsourcing of ideas for institutional change and legislation drafting has been widely adopted by public bodies from the local to the international level, for improving transparency, legitimacy and accountability. In multistakeholder set‐ups, such an approach seems to fulfil the promise of real‐time engagement and cross‐fertilization of ideas. Global Internet policy‐making, in particular after the Snowden revelations of mass surveillance, appears as a natural experiment for harnessing the potential of crowdsourcing for institutional change. Our study investigates two key recent initiatives of online collective brainstorming: ICANN’s Multistakeholder Innovation Strategic Panel and the NetMundial process, highlighting the merits and limitations of crowdsourcing as an emerging form of multistakeholder participation.
