Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the exploration of crowdsourcing’s usage in the public sector by tracings its conceptual structure, application’s advantages and potential adoption from the government’s or the citizen’s side.
Design/methodology/approach: A systematic narrative literature review is the suggested method, which captures the latest trends of crowdsourcing by diving the existing bibliography into thematic categories and analyzing the findings.
Findings: The study resulted in the suggestion of new elements for the definition of crowdsourcing, including privacy, big data, political will and other important aspects. Moreover, the current academic work discusses the advantages of crowdsourcing in the public sector such as cost reduction, decision making, public issues monitoring in real time, etc. At last, this paper argues about the adoption of crowdsourcing and the obvious issues such as lack of trust, crowdsourcing’s importance for the public servants and other serious subjects. Originality/value: The value of the study lies in the fact that it helps the decision makers to outsource the information seeking process for new ideas and services to the public. This is a guide for those who wish to minimize the cost of information management, with the help of volunteers who contribute to the public governance.