Will crowdsourcing create more headaches than it was intended to solve? A new project sponsored by a prominent scientific association seeks to overcome this challenge.

We’re starting to see the possibilities from applying crowdsourcing to tough questions. Rather than rely on an limited staff of experts, some organizations are turning to much vaster online communities, with their ranks of potentially undiscovered experts. However, as many organizations either are or will be finding, this may be too much of a good thing. Turning to social networks for answers to problems may result in overwhelming volumes of responses. The risk with crowdsourcing, then, may be that it generates even more work for the core staff members engaged in the problem.

That brings us to the largest organization in the world, the US government. Is it worthwhile that the government look for ways to manage a crowdsourcing approach? Anil Dash, director of Expert Labs, a project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, proposes to extend the crowdsourcing approach to the public policy sphere. Federal agencies, he says, could benefit from the wisdom of crowds.

Anil hopes Expert Labs will serve as a catalyst to boost federal policy decision-making with an “entrepreneurial model that reaches out to places like Silicon Valley and the tech community as well as the policy community.”

At the recent Supernova conference held in San Francisco, Anil spoke with David Weinberger about the possibilities. And here’s a video of Anil discussing the history and possibilities of crowdsourcing at the recent Web 2.0 expo, along with his announcement of the Expert Labs project.

Of course, it could be argued that a democracy is a form of crowdsourcing. But administrative and technical decisions are often made at the high levels of federal agencies, based on input of experts and managers within or close to those agencies. Now, thanks to computer networks and social media, there is a tremendous opportunity to open up these processes to a wider world. By opening up perplexing questions to a broader community, Anil hopes to increase the diversity of opinions available to policymakers. “There’s a real opportunity for moving past the model today, in which we get expert opinions from a half dozen or a dozen people in a room for an hour or two,” he explains. “Today on thew Web we float a question to a couple thousand contacts. Imagine what we could do on a national scale.”

In the process, policymakers may have access to expert opinion that formerly was out of reach for various reasons. “There are many experts out there among us, they may not be accedited through the traditional means of earning a degree in a certain topic, or being a member of a certain organization. We can expose their views, collaboratively.”

Of course, crowdsourcing federal policy decisions to a wide online audience will result in an untenable amount of answers to be managed and filtered. This will be the second phase of the challenge, Anil says. “There will literally be too much to know. I think were going to be confronting questions such as ‘how do we define expertise?’ and ‘How do we define authority?’

To some degree, such a community will have an inner circle, Anid states. While the federal policymaking collaboration platform will be open to all, preference will be given to members of AAAS, for example, Anil points out. “We’re never going to constrain who can respond,” he explains. “But there are a lot of issues that are naturally going to do better with answers from the scientific community. And that is where where being a part of AAAS gives us an ‘unfair advantage’ that I’m really happy to make use of.”

Other criteria that will develop over time include previous contributions and votes from other community members. Expert Labs is currently working on tools and a platform to launch its crowdsourcing platform, as well as address filtering issues. “For this first year, we’re going to focus on developing a  platform for getting questions answered,” Anil explains.  “I think by our very social nature innately were going to get questions answered.  I look at some of the communities that do a fantastic job of it online, and I know that is something we can tap into.  If we set up the right reward and incentive structures, people are going to want to collaborate by their own nature.”