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.
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.
Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University Center of Communications Research has organized a panel entitled Information Technology and Public Deliberation: Research on Improving Public Input into Government, to be held at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico.
The panelists include:
Here is the abstract:
We propose a panel to examine research programs on the uses of information technology (IT) tools with public deliberation to enhance the value of public input into government. “Wicked” planning problems and intractable policy issues require novel solutions. Better public input can contribute to resolving such difficult issues. IT and deliberation have both been promoted as means of improving public input on difficult issues. These methods may help the public better understand the issues, motivate their involvement, develop better ideas for addressing the issues, and enhance the legitimacy of eventual policy decisions. A number of researchers are examining whether deliberation and IT in combination can be especially helpful. The panel will examine several such efforts and their research questions, methods, experiences, and results. The panel should help build synergies between research groups, disseminate novel approaches, and raise awareness of the strengths and potential pitfalls of research in this area.
For more information about the panel, please contact Professor Muhlberger.
Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University Center of Communications Research and Professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley of the University of Albany Department of Communication have published Automated and Hand-coded Measurement of Deliberative Quality in Online Policy Discussions, in dg.o 2009: Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government 35-41 (2009). Here is the abstract:
A number of research projects are now underway to assess how IT tools and deliberative techniques could enhance public input into government at all levels. The success of such projects depends to an important degree on objective measurement of the quality of discussion under different utilizations of tools and techniques. This paper explores the value of two techniques for determining the quality of policy discussion in the context of federal agency rulemaking: a human-coded technique and a technique involving statistical bootstrapping of natural language processing data. The hand-coded technique utilizes counts of verbal behaviors that are indicative of intellectual engagement. This includes such behaviors as raising questions, disagreeing, and introducing new topics. The automated technique develops a measure of sophistication of reasoning based on significant co-occurrence of concepts in participants’ speech. Such co-occurrence clarifies the network of conceptual relations utilized by participants. The more connections participants make between policy-relevant concepts, the more sophisticated their speech should be. Data consist of discussion of the federal rulemaking issue of network neutrality regulation by a sample of 53 volunteers. Correlations and ordinary least squares regression find that the conceptual connection and hand-coded measures, despite being qualitatively quite different, significantly predict each other and several other measures of sophistication, including two indicators of network neutrality knowledge and sophistication of views of government.
