*Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya
**Lecturer, Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya
***Lecturer, Biomechanical and Environmental Engineering Department, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya
Online published on 13 February, 2014.
Crowdsourcing is a new concept enabled by evolving information and communication technologies. It is based on the framework of group intelligence. It is a promising way to encourage citizens to participate in monitoring of government projects. Social media applications facilitating real-time data collection, categorization and redistribution from crowds to crowds can also make project monitoring efficient. In view of the above this study was conducted to determine the parameters that can be used in the design and development of a crowdsouring platform for monitoring government projects. In order to achieve this, data from the Ministry of Public Works, Government of Kenya was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire, and was analysed using SPSS. The results show that there is very little interaction between the government and citizens in project monitoring as the response rate was low at 4%. Forty-five (45%) percent of the project monitoring work is done by the technical staff perhaps because they have the expertise and can provide opinions depending on their experience, specific abilities, specializations or skills. Majority (43.3%) of the respondents were below 30 years of age, and had work experience of less than 5 years. The results further indicate that a significant proportion of the people involved in government project monitoring are male at 80% response rate. The most critical parameter in project monitoring is the status of the completion of the project. The monitoring is mainly through site visits and the response rate for it corresponded to 88.3%. It was noted that most (36.7%) of the respondents monitored projects on monthly basis. The study establishes various parameters for designing a crowd-sourcing platform for monitoring government projects. These include the nature of the crowd, contributions made by the crowd, incentives and motivations of the crowd and the process of evaluating the contributions that are made.
Crowdsourcing, information-communication-technologies, group-intelligence, social-media, real-time
