Crowdsourcing and planning

Thanks to Mark for the post on crowdsourcing. I'm drawn to crowdsourcing for lots of reasons:

• it allows activists to succeed
• it isn't centrally directed
• it functions very much the way that healthy cities have long functioned (here I'm drawing on Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities where she argues that diverse interests expressing themselves actually build much healthier communities than where zoning and planning dictate proper use and design)

That said, I wonder about a couple of implications of crowdsourcing when it is applied to real communities as opposed to virtual ones. Here are my concerns:

• in the real world, people who don't crowdsource can be hurt by the behavior of people who do. This is much rarer in a virtual world where unlimited space and virtual resources mean that groups can do what they wish. But in real communities it is often those with connections who bring about change, and the poor and marginalized who suffer the effects.
• crowdsourcing can be seen as an end-around existing processes that are meant (at least) to be democratic and deliberative.

I don't mean to suggest that crowdsourcing ought to be considered a bad thing. I wonder, though, what the process that goes from innovation (or crowdsourcing) to stablity looks like. Can communities incubate innovations and then, at some point, choose those that best suit it, while letting the others pass away? How?

And more specifically, how can Sugar House do it? Does it have particular sources of innovation? Resources that allow innovations to flourish, and then to sustain themselves?