On Participedia: Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitutional Drafting Process

Alexander Kok and others have posted Icelandic Constitutional Council 2011, on Participedia, the open global knowledge community for researchers and practitioners in the field of democratic innovation and public engagement.

This page describes the processes by which Iceland has drafted a new national constitution, and the institutions involved in those processes. The page includes a helpful diagram of the drafting process.

Those processes are notable in part because they involved crowdsourcing the drafting of parts of the constitution by means of online social media.

The page also includes links to several sources that describe or analyze these drafting processes.

For more information, please see the complete page.

Disclosure: I contribute to Participedia.

April 15: Legal Hackathon, at Brooklyn Law School Incubator and Policy (BLIP) Clinic

A legal hackathon will be held 15 April 2012 at the Brooklyn Law School Incubator and Policy (BLIP) Clinic, in Brooklyn, New York, USA.

The agenda includes sessions and workshops on:

• “Crowdsourced Policymaking and Fostering Civic Engagement through Technology”;
• “Hacking Contracts”;
• hacking privacy policies;
• developing “a platform to publish corporate resolutions” for benefit corporations, as part of an online platform for such corporations, called O-Corporation.

For more information, please see the Website.

HT Tim Hwang.

Wyner on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted Note on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis, was featured at the Workshop. Click here for more information about Project IMPACT.

Here is introductory information about the post:

On January 27th, 2012, I attended a workshop in Sheffield, United Kingdom on current FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects. This was an opportunity to hear from and meet participants in other projects, largely based in the United Kingdom. The information (somewhat augmented) about the workshop is below. My colleagues in the IMPACT Project, Professor Ann Macintosh and Neil Benn, presented our side of the story.

Aims

• To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
• To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
• To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Fernández-Barrera on User-Generated Knowledge Through Legal Ontologies

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, entitled User-generated knowledge through legal ontologies: how to bring the law into the Semantic Web 2.0, at the European University Institute Department of Law, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID.

Here is the abstract:

This thesis presents a study of the epistemological and cognitive assumptions which currently underlie knowledge acquisition for legal ontology engineering. The hypothesis is that such assumptions might have a qualitative effect on the final ontological-terminological resources and therefore on the performance of the systems which use them.The first part of the thesis presents the state of the art in legal ontology engineering (the computational concept of ontology, a review of available legal ontologies and modelling methodologies). The second part of the thesis shows that currently knowledge acquisition in legal ontology learning is limited to very concrete legal genres, namely, legislation, case law and legal doctrine. The third part presents a case study in which two different legal genres are used for building a consumer law ontology: a traditional legal genre, Italian consumer regulation, and a Web 2.0 genre, namely an online corpus of citizens‟ queries regarding consumer justice. Results proof the impact of legal genre variation on the construction of the domain ontology. Thus main findings suggest that Web 2.0 corpora are a rich source for the construction of ontological resources, and at the same time these new types of ontological resources might be useful in e-government applications aimed at increasing online communication with citizens.

Some parts of the thesis are summarized in Dr. Fernández-Barrera’s recent VoxPopuLII post, entitled Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

For the full text of the thesis, please contact Dr. Fernández-Barrera.

New on VoxPopuLII: Fernández-Barrera on Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has posted Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera describes new, innovative methods of analyzing very large quantities of law-related user-generated content.

In two recent studies described in the post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera and colleagues analyzed thousands of consumer law queries and complaints submitted by citizens to consumer protection agencies in Spain and Italy. Using a combination of automated text extraction techniques and expert input from lawyers, the researchers mapped the citizens’ lay terminology to formal legal terms. The technical legal language was expressed in legal ontologies — the Mediation Core Ontology and the Consumer Mediation Ontology — or in statutes: the Italian Consumer Code. The results of this research give us new insights about citizens’ knowledge of consumer law, and about the relationships between formal legal language and the way law is expressed in lay language.

Dr. Fernández-Barrera then describes her recent research into methods for making legal semantic analysis of user-generated content scalable. In studies of citizens’ online queries about consumer law and noise-nuisance complaints, she and her colleagues found that by focusing on language patterns involving emotions, events, and “stereotypical situations appearing in the description of legal cases by citizens,” automated techniques alone could successfully analyze very large quantities of user-generated content. Dr. Fernández-Barrera concludes by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of governments’ use of citizen comments in law- and policy making.

This post should be of interest to policy makers, the e-government and Government 2.0 communities, the Web 2.0 community, those who study legal language, and developers of legal information systems.

Project IMPACT: Two New Reports

Two new reports were issued in June 2011 by the EU-funded Project IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis:

• A report on the Argument Analysis, Tracking and Visualisation tool (AVT) (specifically, a report “describ[ing] the requirements analysis and specification, as well as the construction plan” for this tool); and
• A report describing the Argument Reconstruction tool (specifically, a report “formulat[ing] the requirements, review[ing] the applicability of currently available computational linguistics techniques, discuss[ing] the functionality of comparable existing tools and provid[ing] a specification of the first version of the tool with a walk-through of an example”).

In addition, the Project IMPACT Website now includes pages listing the publications and presentations produced in connection with the project.

Papaloi and Gouscos on E-Parliaments and Novel Parliament-to-Citizen Services

Aspasia Papaloi and Dr. Dimitris Gouscos, both of the University of Athens Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, have published E-Parliaments and Novel Parliament-to-Citizen services, JeDEM: Journal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 3(1), 80-98 (2011). Here is the abstract:

In an era of citizens’ discontentment on democratic institutions, parliaments as a democratic cornerstone, are constantly striving to create alluring services taking, at the same time, into account the difficulty of achieving accessibility and transparency in citizens’ e-participation. At the same time, the evolution of ICT tools presents opportunities to revamp the traditional character, functions and services of parliaments worldwide, giving rise to new capabilities and opportunities that can transform their political and social role. An e-enabled parliament can not only offer flexibility in parliamentary proceedings and facilitate the work of its members, but also strive for the inclusion of citizens, without annulling the representative character of the institution. In this paper, we present an initial overview of the characteristics of modern parliaments, recording existing service offerings and proposing a stakeholder-based categorization, with specific categories that can best accommodate explicit and active citizen participation within parliamentary functions. A number of existing citizen deliberation applications and research projects are highlighted as potential candidates for deploying novel extrovert parliament-to-citizen services, focused directly on citizen involvement. Moreover, the focus area based on the procedure from inclusion to feedback will give good evidence for all those factors that are necessary for a successful adoption of novel e-parliament services.

New on VoxPopuLII: Baca and Parker on Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop

Matt Baca of the New York University School of Law and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Olin Grant Parker, also of the Kennedy School, have posted Collaborative, Open Democracy with LexPop, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Baca and Mr. Parker describe LexPop, a new wiki that enables the crowdsourcing of legislative drafting. LexPop appears to be the first legislative crowdsourcing platform in the U.S.

The authors explain how LexPop works by reference to the current legislation being developed at the site, a net neutrality bill to be introduced in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

In their post, the authors lay out the key ideas motivating LexPop: (1) collaborative democracy, or the empowerment of citizens to make laws that serve the public interest, rather than the needs of special interests; and (2) the application of social media technology — Gov 2.0 — to achieve this.

The authors also discuss the two methods that the public can use to write legislation on LexPop: Policy Drives, which are structured, multistage processes that facilitate deliberation during the drafting process; and WikiBills, which are unstructured drafting exercises.

Finally, the authors respond to skeptical questions frequently posed to them about LexPop. In their responses, the authors explain how successful Web-based crowdsourcing projects — including Wikipedia, Linux, and Mozilla Firefox — serve as valuable models for LexPop. The authors conclude by encouraging readers to become involved in LexPop.

This post will be of interest to all citizens who wish to participate more fully in policy making; to the public policy community; to government technologists; and to the legal informatics community.

Federal Register 2.0: Release of Unofficial Prototype

An updated online version of the Federal Register, called Federal Register 2.0 (FR 2.0), will be introduced on 15 July 2010, at an event at the Office of the Federal Register, in Washington, DC, according to a 12 July 2010 press release issued by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

According to the press release, on 26 July 2010, FR 2.0 will be made available — “as an unofficial prototype” — to the public at FederalRegister.gov.

The press release states that the purpose of the public release is “to gather public feedback,” and that an official version of FR 2.0 could be made public sometime in 2011.

The press release provides the following additional background on FR 2.0:

The concept of FR 2.0 originated with Open Government advocates, and was later advanced by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In technology terms, FR 2.0 uses the bulk XML from GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) to present regulatory material in new configurations. The applications on the site are built from open source code, which will be returned to the open source community for unrestricted use in other applications. [...]

The FR 2.0 web site will be similar to a daily web newspaper, with a clear layout and new tools to guide readers to the most popular topics and relevant documents. The site will display individual news sections for Money, Environment, World, Science & Technology, Business & Industry, and Health & Public Welfare. FR 2.0 will have greatly improved navigation and search tools and will highlight each agency’s significant rules. The new web site takes advantage of social media and integrates seamlessly with Regulations.gov and the Unified Agenda to make it easy for users to submit comments directly into the official e-Rulemaking docket, and view the history of rulemaking activity through a regulatory timeline.

HT @AdvertisingLaw and beSpacific.

The IMPACT Project: Policy Argument Modeling & Text Analysis

A number of legal informatics scholars and institutions are involved in the new EU research project called IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis.

The goal of the project is to apply those computing methods to “facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level.” Many of the policy debates targeted by the project will inform law-making processes.

The project also seeks to develop applications and tools to assist officials and citizens in deliberating about policies, including “tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet.” The tools will be designed as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) or widgets, so that they can be integrated into a variety of systems.

The tools are to be integrated into an open source content management system. The project developers plan to make publicly available an Application Programming Interface (API) for services required by the tools.

Legal informatics institutions involved in the project include:

• The University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law;
• Fraunhofer FOKUS;
• The University of Leeds’s Centre for Digital Citizenship (whose project team includes Dr. Adam Wyner);
• The University of Liverpool’s Department of Computer Science; and
• Zebralog GmbH & Co KG.

For more information, please see the project’s Website.