Vertical crowdsourcing in Russia: Balancing governance of crowds and state-citizen partnership in emergency situations

Abstract

Crowdsourcing can be analyzed not only as a mechanism for empowerment, but also as operating a form of control over volunteers. This article applies Foucault's notion of governmentality to examine relations between traditional governmental institutions and users of crowdsourcing platforms in Russia. Through a comparative analysis of two emergency volunteering portals, Dobrovoletz, and Rynda.org, we describe "vertical crowdsourcing" as a strategy by traditional (government affiliated) actors to use crowdsourcing platforms to govern and control volunteers. This is in contrast to horizontally organized, or ground-up understandings of crowd-volunteering platforms. Two alternative discourses around the role of crowd members are further discussed: volunteers as actors who can contribute resources to the achievement of a common goal, and the crowd as a threat to central government that needs to be controlled.