Paper short abstract:

By drawing on different empirical material and current STS literature, citizensourcing, an OI governmental practice, will be presented as a technology of government . This approach could contribute to a better understanding of OI practices, altering challenging the present nature of policy making.

Paper long abstract:

Open Innovation (OI) is in everyone's minds and one of its main approaches is crowd- or citizensourcing. During the last decade the governmental sector has adopted the crowdsourcing practice to generate innovations with the help of external actors and it was renamed as citizensourcing.

Crowd-sourced and peer produced solutions have partly derived from a sense of urgency to improve the efficiency and quality of government service delivery (Mergel 2015). Research results indicate that the current focus is more on the citizensourcing-process itself; and raising public awareness is seen as the main goal of OI initiatives.

This talk will nevertheless argue against such a perspective and considers citizensourcing as a new generation of technologies of government (Rose und Miller 1992). The analysis is based on an empirical case study: "ideenkanal", which is an online and offline idea challenge and which has been investigated through a collaborative ethnography.

Until now, a micro perspective of technologies of government has played only a subordinated role in research literature. In this context especially the role of materiality becomes increasingly important. Analyzing the micro-level - which includes both humans and non-humans - could generate new perspectives on this field of research.

With reference to concepts of materiality, it becomes possible not only to dig into the assemblages of technologies of government, but also to support governments developing and improving citizensourcing-formats. While investigating the interplay between different entities, it will be demonstrated that citizensourcing as a technology of government does not only produce responsible but also innovative citizens.