law – Page 38 – The Living Library

‘Democracy vouchers’

Curated on November 11, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gregory Krieg at CNN: “Democracy vouchers” could be coming to an election near you. Last week, more than 60% of Seattle voters approved the so-called “Honest Elections” measure, or Initiative 122, a campaign finance reform plan offering a novel way of steering public funds to candidates who are willing to swear off big money PACs.

For supporters, the victory — authorizing the use by voters of publicly funded “democracy vouchers” that they can dole out to favored candidates — marks what they hope will be the first step forward in a wide-ranging reform effort spreading to other cities and states in the coming year….

The voucher model also is “a one-two punch” for candidates, Silver said. “They become more dependent on their constituents because their constituents become their funders, and No. 2, they’re part of what I would call a ‘dilution strategy’ — you dilute the space with lots of small-dollar contributions to offset the undue influence of super PACs.”

How “democracy vouchers” work

Beginning next summer, Seattle voters are expected to begin receiving $100 from the city, parceled out in four $25 vouchers, to contribute to local candidates who accept the new law’s restrictions, including not taking funds from PACs, adhering to strict spending caps, and enacting greater transparency. Candidates can redeem the vouchers with the city for real campaign cash, which will likely flow from increased property taxes.

The reform effort began at the grassroots, but morphed into a slickly managed operation that spent nearly $1.4 million, with more than half of that flowing from groups outside the city.

Alan Durning, founder of the nonprofit sustainability think tank Sightline, is an architect of the Seattle initiative. He believes the campaign helped identify a key problem with other reform plans.

“We know that one of the strongest arguments against public funding for campaigns is the idea of giving tax dollars to candidates that you disagree with,” Durning told CNN. “There are a lot of people who hate the idea.”

Currently, most such programs offer to match with public funds small donations for candidates who meet a host of varying requirements. In these cases, taxpayer money goes directly from the government to the campaigns, limiting voters’ connection to the process.

“The benefit of vouchers … is you can think about it as giving the first $100 of your own taxes to the candidate that you prefer,” Durning explained. “Your money is going to the candidate you send it to — so it keeps the choice with the individual voter.”

He added that the use of vouchers can also help the approach appeal to conservative voters, who generally are supportive of voucher-type programs and choice.

But critics call that a misleading argument.

“You’re still taking money from people and giving it to politicians who they may not necessarily want to support,” said Patrick Basham, the founder and director of the Democracy Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“Now, if you, as Voter X, give your four $25 vouchers to Candidate Y, then that’s your choice, but only some of [the money] came from you. It also came from other people.”…(More)”

Government as a Platform: a historical and architectural analysis

Curated on November 10, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bendik Bygstad and Francis D’Silva: “A national administration is dependent on its archives and registers, for many purposes, such as tax collection, enforcement of law, economic governance, and welfare services. Today, these services are based on large digital infrastructures, which grow organically in volume and scope. Building on a critical realist approach we investigate a particularly successful infrastructure in Norway called Altinn, and ask: what are the evolutionary mechanisms for a successful “government as a platform”? We frame our study with two perspectives; a historical institutional perspective that traces the roots of Altinn back to the Middle Ages, and an architectural perspective that allows for a more detailed analysis of the consequences of digitalization and the role of platforms. We offer two insights from our study: we identify three evolutionary mechanisms of national registers, and we discuss a future scenario of government platforms as “digital commons”…(More)”

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Curated on November 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jan Whittington et al: “Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect.

Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country.

The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data….(More)”

Teaching Open Data for Social Movements: a Research Strategy

Curated on November 3, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alan Freihof Tygel and Maria Luiza Machado Campo at the Journal of Community Informatics: “Since the year 2009, the release of public government data in open formats has been configured as one of the main actions taken by national states in order to respond to demands for transparency and participation by the civil society. The United States and theUnited Kingdom were pioneers, and today over 46 countries have their own Open Government Data Portalⁱ , many of them fostered by the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international agreement aimed at stimulating transparency.

The premise of these open data portals is that, by making data publicly available in re-usable formats, society would take care of building applications and services, and gain value from this data (Huijboom & Broek, 2011). According to the same authors, the discourse around open data policies also includes increasing democratic control and participation and strengthening law enforcement.

Several recent works argue that the impact of open data policies, especially the release of open data portals, is still difficult to assess (Davies & Bawa, 2012; Huijboom & Broek, 2011; Zuiderwijk, Janssen, Choenni, Meijer, & Alibaks, 2012). One important consideration is that “The gap between the promise and reality of OGD [Open Government Data] re-use cannot be addressed by technological solutions alone” (Davies, 2012). Therefore, sociotechnical approaches (Mumford, 1987) are mandatory.

The targeted users of open government data lie over a wide range that includes journalists, non-governmental organizations (NGO), civil society organizations (CSO), enterprises, researchers and ordinary citizens who want to audit governments’ actions. Among them, the focus of our research is on social (or grassroots) movements. These are groups of organized citizens at local, national or international level who drive some political action, normally placing themselves in opposition to the established power relations and claiming rights for oppressed groups.

A literature definition gives a social movement as “collective social actions with a socio-political and cultural approach, which enable distinct forms of organizing the population and expressing their demands” (Gohn, 2011).

Social movements have been using data in their actions repertory with several motivations (as can be seen in Table 1 and Listing 1). From our experience, an overview of several cases where social movements use open data reveals a better understanding of reality and a more solid basis for their claims as motivations. Additionally, in some cases data produced by the social movements was used to build a counter-hegemonic discourse based on data. An interesting example is the Citizen Public Depth Audit Movement which takes place in Brazil. This movement, which is part of an international network, claims that “significant amounts registered as public debt do not correspond to money collected through loans to the country” (Fattorelli, 2011), and thus origins of this debt should be proven. According to the movement, in 2014 45% of Brazil’s Federal spend was paid to debt services.

Recently, a number of works tried to develop comparison schemes between open data strategies (Atz, Heath, & Fawcet, 2015; Caplan et al., 2014; Ubaldi, 2013; Zuiderwijk & Janssen, 2014). Huijboom & Broek (2011) listed four categories of instruments applied by the countries to implement their open data policies:

voluntary approaches, such as general recommendations,
economic instruments,
legislation and control, and
education and training.

One of the conclusions is that the latter was used to a lesser extent than the others.

Social movements, in general, are composed of people with little experience of informatics, either because of a lack of opportunities or of interest. Although it is recognized that using data is important for a social movement’s objectives, the training aspect still hinders a wider use of it.

In order to address this issue, an open data course for social movements was designed. Besides building a strategy on open data education, the course also aims to be a research strategy to understand three aspects:

the motivations of social movements for using open data;
the impediments that block a wider and better use; and
possible actions to be taken to enhance the use of open data by social movements….(More)”

When Lobbyists Write Legislation, This Data Mining Tool Traces The Paper Trail

Curated on October 28, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

FastCoExist: “Most kids learn the grade school civics lesson about how a bill becomes a law. What those lessons usually neglect to show is how legislation today is often birthed on a lobbyist’s desk.

But even for expert researchers, journalists, and government transparency groups, tracing a bill’s lineage isn’t easy—especially at the state level. Last year alone, there were 70,000 state bills introduced in 50 states. It would take one person five weeks to even read them all. Groups that do track state legislation usually focus narrowly on a single topic, such as abortion, or perhaps a single lobby groups.

Computers can do much better. A prototype tool, presented in September at Bloomberg’sData for Good Exchange 2015 conference, mines the Sunlight Foundation’s database of more than 500,000 bills and 200,000 resolutions for the 50 states from 2007 to 2015. It also compares them to 1,500 pieces of “model legislation” written by a few lobbying groups that made their work available, such as the conservative group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and the liberal group the State Innovation Exchange(formerly called ALICE).

The results are interesting. In one example of the program in use, the team—all from the Data Science for Social Good fellowship program in Chicago—created a graphic (above) that presents the relative influence of ALEC and ALICE in different states. The thickness of each line in the graphic correlates to the percentage of bills introduced in each state that are modeled on either group’s legislation. So a relatively liberal state like New York is mostly ALICE bills, while a “swing” state like Illinois has a lot from both groups….

Along with researchers from the University of Chicago, Wikimedia Foundation, Microsoft Research, and Northwestern University, Walsh is also co-author of another paperpresented at the Bloomberg conference shows how data science can increase government transparency.

Walsh and these co-authors developed software that automatically identifies earmarks in U.S. Congressional bills, showing how representatives are benefiting their own states with pork barrel projects. They verified that it works by comparing it to the results of a massive effort from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to analyze earmarks for a few limited years. Their results, extended back to 1995 in a public database, showed that there may be many more earmarks than anyone thought.

“Governments are making more data available. It’s something like a needle in a haystack problem, trying to extract all that information out,” says Walsh. “Both of these projects are really about shining light to these dark places where we don’t know what’s going on.”

The state legislation tracker data is available for download here, and the team is working on an expanded system that automatically downloads new state legislation so it can stay up to date…(More)”

Advancing Open and Citizen-Centered Government

Curated on October 28, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Today, the United States released our third Open Government National Action Plan, announcing more than 40 new or expanded initiatives to advance the President’s commitment to an open and citizen-centered government….In the third Open Government National Action Plan, the Administration both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered. The plan includes new and impactful steps the Administration is taking to openly and collaboratively deliver government services and to support open government efforts across the country. These efforts prioritize a citizen-centric approach to government, including improved access to publicly available data to provide everyday Americans with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions.

One example is the College Scorecard, which shares data through application programming interfaces (APIs) to help students and families make informed choices about education. Open APIs help create an ecosystem around government data in which civil society can provide useful visual tools, making this data more accessible and commercial developers can enable even more value to be extracted to further empower students and their families. In addition to these newer approaches, the plan also highlights significant longstanding open government priorities such as access to information, fiscal transparency, and records management, and continues to push for greater progress in that work.

The plan also focuses on supporting implementation of the landmark 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which sets out a vision and priorities for global development over the next 15 years and was adopted last month by 193 world leaders including President Obama. The plan includes commitments to harness open government and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) both in the United States and globally, including in the areas of education, health, food security, climate resilience, science and innovation, justice and law enforcement. It also includes a commitment to take stock of existing U.S. government data that relates to the 17 SDGs, and to creating and using data to support progress toward the SDGs.

Some examples of open government efforts newly included in the plan:

Promoting employment by unlocking workforce data, including training, skill, job, and wage listings.
Enhancing transparency and participation by expanding available Federal services to theOpen311 platform currently available to cities, giving the public a seamless way to report problems and request assistance.
Releasing public information from the electronically filed tax forms of nonprofit and charitable organizations (990 forms) as open, machine-readable data.
Expanding access to justice through the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable.
Promoting open and accountable implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals….(More)”

Git for Law Revisited

Curated on October 26, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ari Hershowitz at Linked Legislation: “Laws change. Each time a new U.S. law is enacted, it enters a backdrop of approximately 22 million words of existing law. The new law may strike some text, add some text, and make other adjustments that trickle through the legal corpus. Seeing these changes in context would help lawmakers and the public better understand their impact.

To software engineers, this problem sounds like a perfect application for automated change management. Input an amendment, output tracked changes (see sample below). In the ideal system such changes could be seen as soon as the law is enacted — or even while a bill is being debated. We are now much closer to this ideal.

Changes to 16 U.S.C. 3835 by law 113-79

On Quora, on this blog, and elsewhere, I’ve discussed some of the challenges to using git, an automated change management system, to track laws. The biggest technical challenge has been that most laws, and most amendments to those laws, have not been structured in a computer friendly way. But that is changing.

The Law Revision Counsel (LRC) compiles the U.S. Code, through careful analysis of new laws, identifying the parts of existing law that will be changed (in a process called Classification), and making those changes by hand. The drafting and revision process takes great skill and legal expertise.

So, for example, the LRC makes changes to the current U.S. Code, following the language of a law such as this one:

Sample provision, 113-79 section 2006(a)

LRC attorneys identify the affected provisions of the U.S. Code and then carry out each of these instructions (strike “The Secretary”, insert “During fiscal year”…”). Since 2011, the LRC is using and publishing the final result of this analysis in XML format. One of the consequences of this format change is that it becomes feasible to automatically match the “before” to the “after” text, and produce a redlined version as seen above, showing the changes in context.

To produce this redlined version, I ran xml_diff, an open-source program written by Joshua Tauberer of govtrack.us, who also works with my company, Xcential, on modernization projects for the U.S. House. The results can be remarkably accurate. As a pre-requisite, it is necessary to have a “before” and “after” version in XML format and a small enough stretch of text to make the comparison manageable….(More)”

Lawyer’s crowdsourcing site aims to help people have their day in court

Curated on October 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary O’Hara in The Guardian: “With warnings coming thick and fast about the stark ramifications of the government’s sweeping cuts to legal aid, it was probably inevitable that someone would come up with a new way to plug some gaps in access to justice. Enter the legal crowdfunder, CrowdJustice, an online platform where people who might not otherwise get their case heard can raise cash to pay for legal representation and court costs.

The brainchild of 33-year-old lawyer Julia Salasky, and the first of its kind in the UK, CrowdJustice provides people who have a public interest case but lack adequate financial resources with a forum where they can publicise their case and, if all goes to plan, generate funding for legal action by attracting public support and donations.

“We are trying to increase access to justice – that’s the baseline,” says Salasky. “I think it’s a social good.”

The platform was launched just a few months ago, but has already attracteda range of cases both large and small, including some that could set important legal precedents.

CrowdJustice has helped the campaign, Jengba (Joint Enterprise: Not Guilty by Association) to raise funds to intervene in a supreme court case to consider reforming the law of joint enterprise that can find people guilty of a crime, including murder, committed by someone else. The group amassed £10,000 in donations for legal assistance as part of their ongoing challenge to the legal doctrine of “joint enterprise”, which disproportionately prosecutes people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds for violent crimes where it is alleged they have acted together for a common purpose.

In another case, a Northern Irish woman who discovered she wasn’t entitled to her partner’s occupational pension after he died because of a bureaucratic requirement that did not apply to married couples, used CrowdJustice to help raise money to take her case all the way to the supreme court. “If she wins, it will have an enormous precedent-setting value for the legal rights of all couples who cohabit,” Salasky says….(The Guardian)”

Privacy Bridges: EU and US Privacy Experts in Search of Transatlantic Privacy Solutions

Curated on October 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

IVIR and MIT: “The EU and US share a common commitment to privacy protection as a cornerstone of democracy. Following the Treaty of Lisbon, data privacy is a fundamental right that the European Union must proactively guarantee. In the United States, data privacy derives from constitutional protections in the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment as well as federal and state statute, consumer protection law and common law. The ultimate goal of effective privacy protection is shared. However, current friction between the two legal systems poses challenges to realizing privacy and the free flow of information across the Atlantic. Recent expansion of online surveillance practices underline these challenges.

Over nine months, the group prepared a consensus report outlining a menu of privacy “bridges” that can be built to bring the European Union and the United States closer together. The efforts are aimed at providing a framework of practical options that advance strong, globally-accepted privacy values in a manner that respects the substantive and procedural differences between the two jurisdictions….