Abstract
The Park Geun-hye Administration of Korea (2013–2017) aims to increase the level of transparency and citizen trust in government through the Government 3.0 initiative. This new initiative for public sector innovation encourages citizen-government collaboration and collective intelligence, thereby improving the quality of policy-making and implementation and solving public problems in a new way. However, the national initiative that identifies collective intelligence and citizen-government collaboration alike fails to understand what the wisdom of crowds genuinely means. Collective intelligence is not a magic bullet to solve public problems, which are called “wicked problems”. Collective deliberation over public issues often brings pain and patience, rather than fun and joy. It is not so easy that the public finds the best solution for soothing public problems through collective deliberation. The Government 3.0 initiative does not pay much attention to difficulties in gathering scattered wisdom, but rather highlights uncertain opportunities created by collective interactions and communications. This study deeply discusses the weaknesses in the logic of, and approach to, collective intelligence underlying the Government 3.0 initiative in Korea and the overall influence of the national initiative on participatory democracy.
Highlights
Linus’s law: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” [1].The past decade has given rise to collective intelligence with the prevalence of crowd-sourcing and open-source software
Since citizen-government governance, as one of the focal points of the Government 3.0 initiative, highlights citizen participation, this section discusses the relationship between collective intelligence and participatory democracy with a focus of the national initiative
If a government wants to know the determinants of diversity and activeness of citizen participation in collective intelligence, it should take a close look at substantive reasons of participation in public matters
Summary
Linus’s law: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” [1]. The past decade has given rise to collective intelligence with the prevalence of crowd-sourcing and open-source software. The incumbent administration defined Government 3.0 as “a new paradigm for government operation to deliver customized public services and generate new jobs in a creative manner by opening and sharing government-owned data to the public and encouraging communication and collaboration between government departments” (see the website for more information in detail [2]) This new paradigm seeks public sector innovation in three directions: transparent government, competent government, and service-oriented government. One of its key strategies involves encouraging and facilitating citizen-government collaboration and collective intelligence, thereby expecting to improve the quality of policy-making and implementation and solve public problems in a creative way. The Government 3.0 initiative in Korea, from which the incumbent administration seeks to draw collective intelligence, has not been free from concerns about inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and inequality inherent in processes and the results of collecting scattered wisdom and solving public problems.
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