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In crowdsourcing, knowledge search is turned from people’s local knowledge neighbourhood to a number of distant knowledge neighbourhoods, as we can learn from studies in management science and engineering (for example Afuah and Tucci, “Crowdsourcing as a Solution to Distant Search”). This makes crowdsourcing an efficient tool for knowledge search. For example, in the case of crowdsourced constitution in Iceland, the extended search brought in information that the Constitution Council wouldn’t have known to search for. Crowdsourcing also functions as a tool for sensing citizens’ values. In a participatory budgeting process in Calgary, Canada, the city asked the residents to prioritise services by using simple, binary decision-making software. In a similar vein, the City of Chicago is inviting its residents for the second year in a row to share their ideas and wishes about the city’s budget. If there’s enough participation and residents’ submissions are thoroughly analysed, the participation can reflect citizens’ values. As crowdsourcing in policy-making is becoming more common, the challenges that the method faces are becoming identifiable. Firstly, there should be a substantial volume of diversity in the crowd in order to realise the ideal of collective intelligence (see Hong and Page’s “Some Microfoundations of Collective Wisdom” in Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms). The diversity can correlate with the volume of participation: the more people participate, the more likely the crowd is to have both cognitive and social diversity. Crowds easily lack that diversity, particularly in pioneering initiatives where there’s little information available to people about the new method. Therefore, governing bodies should make serious efforts to inform the citizens about these possibilities for participation. Several crowdsourcing processes in policy-making lack proper communication to citizens about the possibility and impact of participation. This raises the following question: how should governing bodies communicate this new opportunity to participate to the residents, for example in participatory budgeting? Should city councils send all residents a letter to inform them or have adverts on television? Citizens should also be informed about the outcomes of the processes in which they have participated. That feedback loop is important because it also 19