Motivations for Participation in a Crowdsourcing Application to Improve Public Engagement in Transit Planning

Governments increasingly turn to the Internet to aid in transparency, accountability, and public participation activities, and there is growing interest in innovative online problem-solving models to serve the public good. One such model, the crowdsourcing model, leverages the collective intelligence of online communities for specific purposes. Understanding how and why people participate in these kinds of activities is important for developing better new media tools for the public good going forward. In 2009, the Federal Transit Administration supported the Next Stop Design project, an attempt to use crowdsourcing for public participation in transit planning. Based on interviews with 23 Next Stop Design participants, the present applied communication study discusses the motivations of those participants to engage the project.