Citizen Lawmaking and Technology: What’s New and What’s Ahead?

Citizen Lawmaking and Technology: What’s New and What’s Ahead? is the title of my new post at Slaw, the Canadian legal blog. The post describe recent developments in law-related eParticipation, such as ePetition, eConsultation, eRulemaking, electronic voting, and voters’ guides that describe ballot propositions, in the UK, EU, and US.

If you know of other recent developments in these areas, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Stromer-Galley et al. on Deliberative e-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation: Challenges to Enacting Real World Deliberation

Professor Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley of the University of Albany Department of Communication, Professor Dr. Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University Center of Communications Research, and Nick Webb of the University at Albany Institute for Informatics, Logics and Security Studies, presented a paper entitled Deliberative e-Rulemaking Decision Facilitation: Challenges to Enacting Real World Deliberation, at OD 2010: The Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation, held 30 June-2 July 2010, at the Leeds University Business School, in Leeds, England, UK.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes the challenges facing a federal government funded initiative [DeER - Deliberative E-Rule Making Decision Facilitation Project] to promote deliberation to improve the public comment process by federal and state government agencies in the U.S. The three year project has met several difficulties. Some have been technical, such as the challenge of producing quality summaries. But our primary obstacle has been in securing partnerships with government agencies. Due to institutional, legal, and organizational challenges many government agencies are resistant to opening up the public comment process to a deliberative structure. The paper describes the objectives of the original research project and details the challenges faced.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

Thanks to Professor Dr. Stromer-Galley for providing the abstract.

Summary of Muhlberger dg.o 2010 Panel on Information Technology and Public Deliberation

Travis Kriplean of the University of Washington Department of Computer Science has posted a summary of Professor Peter Muhlberger’s panel entitled Information Technology and Public Deliberation: Research on Improving Public Input into Government, held at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico.

The panel included:

• Mr. Kriplean’s presentation on Reflect, a tool enabling users to add summaries to online comment boards;
• A presentation by Mark Deckert of the University of California Santa Cruz Department of Computer Science on using the Metavid Congressional video service as a platform enabling scientists to comment on others’ scientific testimony at Congressional hearings;
• A presentation by Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University College of Mass Communications about the Deliberative E-Rulemaking (DeER) project, and particularly about the technology used in the project and his team’s experience collaborating with government agencies to test that technology.