A Crowdsourced Constitution

Posted by Shayna Pollock on June 15, 2011

CEOs for Cities is redifining civic engagment and public participation through technology. In the last six months, CEOs for Cities ran the Give a Minute campaign, which crowdsourced city improvement ideas, in Memphis and Chicago. Next week, New York City will launch Change by Us, an evolution of the Give a Minute campaign.  In addition to crowdsourcing sustainability solutions, Change by Us will also form action groups of interested citizens around specific ideas. Using a similar form of public participation through social media, Iceland is crowdsourcing a constitution. In Iceland, the Constitutional Council is soliciting feedback on the constitution from all citizens. According to an article in Fast Company, this progressive form of citizen participation is a "useful testing ground for exciting new citizen crowdsourcing in the future."