CrowdLaw Manifesto


At the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center this spring, assembled participants  met to discuss CrowdLaw, namely how to use technology to improve the quality and effectiveness of law and policymaking through greater public engagement. We put together and signed 12 principles to promote the use of CrowdLaw by local legislatures and national parliaments, calling for legislatures, technologists and the public to participate in creating more open and participatory lawmaking practices. We invite you to sign the Manifesto using the form below.

Draft dated May 29, 2018

  1. To improve public trust in democratic institutions, we must improve how we govern in the 21st century.
  2. CrowdLaw is any law, policy-making or public decision-making that offers a meaningful opportunity for the public to participate in one or multiples stages of decision-making, including but not limited to the processes of problem identification, solution identification, proposal drafting, ratification, implementation or evaluation.
  3. CrowdLaw draws on innovative processes and technologies and encompasses diverse forms of engagement among elected representatives, public officials, and those they represent.
  4. When designed well, CrowdLaw may help governing institutions obtain more relevant facts and knowledge as well as more diverse perspectives, opinions and ideas to inform governing at each stage and may help the public exercise political will.
  5. When designed well, CrowdLaw may help democratic institutions build trust and the public to play a more active role in their communities and strengthen both active citizenship and democratic culture.
  6. When designed well, CrowdLaw may enable engagement that is thoughtful, inclusive, informed but also efficient, manageable and sustainable.
  7. Therefore, governing institutions at every level should experiment and iterate with CrowdLaw initiatives in order to create formal processes for diverse members of society to participate in order to improve the legitimacy of decision-making, strengthen public trust and produce better outcomes.
  8. Governing institutions at every level should encourage research and learning about CrowdLaw and its impact on individuals, on institutions and on society.
  9. The public also has a responsibility to improve our democracy by demanding and creating opportunities to engage and then actively contributing expertise, experience, data and opinions.
  10. Technologists should work collaboratively across disciplines to develop, evaluate and iterate varied, ethical and secure CrowdLaw platforms and tools, keeping in mind that different participation mechanisms will achieve different goals.
  11. Governing institutions at every level should encourage collaboration across organizations and sectors to test what works and share good practices.
  12. Governing institutions at every level should create the legal and regulatory frameworks necessary to promote CrowdLaw and better forms of public engagement and usher in a new era of more open, participatory and effective governing.

The CrowdLaw Manifesto has been signed by the following individuals and organizations:

Individuals

  • Victoria Alsina, Senior Fellow at The GovLab and Faculty Associate at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University
  • Marta Poblet Balcell , Associate Professor, RMIT University
  • Robert Bjarnason — President & Co-founder, Citizens Foundation; Better Reykjavik
  • Pablo Collada — Former Executive Director, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente
  • Mukelani Dimba — Co-chair, Open Government Partnership
  • Hélène Landemore, Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University
  • Shu-Yang Lin, re:architect & co-founder, PDIS.tw
  • José Luis Martí , Vice-Rector for Innovation and Professor of Legal Philosophy, Pompeu Fabra University
  • Jessica Musila — Executive Director, Mzalendo
  • Sabine Romon — Chief Smart City Officer — General Secretariat, Paris City Council
  • Cristiano Ferri Faría — Director, Hacker Lab, Brazilian House of Representatives
  • Nicola Forster — President and Founder, Swiss Forum on Foreign Policy
  • Raffaele Lillo — Chief Data Officer, Digital Transformation Team, Government of Italy
  • Tarik Nesh-Nash — CEO & Co-founder, GovRight; Ashoka Fellow
  • Beth Simone Noveck, Director, The GovLab and Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering
  • Ehud Shapiro , Professor of Computer Science and Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science

Organizations

  • Citizens Foundation, Iceland
  • Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, Chile
  • International School for Transparency, South Africa
  • Mzalendo, Kenya
  • Smart Cities, Paris City Council, Paris, France
  • Hacker Lab, Brazilian House of Representatives, Brazil
  • Swiss Forum on Foreign Policy, Switzerland
  • Digital Transformation Team, Government of Italy, Italy
  • The Governance Lab, New York, United States
  • GovRight, Morocco
  • ICT4Dev, Morocco

Open data work: understanding open data usage from a practice lens


Paper by Emma Ruijer in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and quality barriers of open data usage. Although useful, these issues fail to acknowledge that the meaning of open data also depends on the context and people involved. In this study we analyze open data usage from a practice lens – as a social construction that emerges over time in interaction with governments and users in a specific context – to enhance our understanding of the role of context and agency in the development of open data platforms. This study is based on innovative action-based research in which civil servants’ and citizens’ initiatives collaborate to find solutions for public problems using an open data platform. It provides an insider perspective of Open Data Work. The findings show that an absence of a shared cognitive framework for understanding open data and a lack of high-quality datasets can prevent processes of collaborative learning. Our contextual approach stresses the need for open data practices that work on the basis of rich interactions with users rather than government-centric implementations….(More)”.

Open government – Open for business?


Dieter Zinnbauer at OGP: “Many activities related to opening government have a demonstrated, empirical potential to create business value, foster broader economic opportunities, and promote a business climate for growth and dynamism. What’s more, opening government plays a highly relevant, if not essential, role for economic stewardship and for putting economies on sustainable, inclusive trajectories of good growth. These are the central insights from this scan of the empirical literature on the economic and business dimension of open government. More specifically, opening government is found to have created sizeable business opportunities, innovation impetus, and to a somewhat lesser extent, new jobs—particularly in the area of open data. A growing body of empirical evidence also suggests that opening government has helped countries attract investments and capital, boost trade, reduce red tape, and remove barriers to market entry, all pointing towards an enhanced business and investment climate. At least equally important, there is compelling evidence that opening government supports good growth by enabling the containment of some of the major negative side effects of economic growth, by improving the targeting and efficacy of inclusive economic policies and benefits schemes, and by making it easier for businesses to live up to some of their fundamental societal responsibilities. Overall, the research landscape on opening government and business and economy nexus is still rather fragmented, and there are many promising, feasible, and much-needed avenues for future investigations in this fast-moving area….(More)”.

Could the open government movement shut the door on Freedom of Information


 and  in The Conversation: “For democracy to work, citizens need to know what their government is doing. Then they can hold government officials and institutions accountable.

Over the last 50 years, Freedom of Information – or FOI – laws have been one of the most useful methods for citizens to learn what government is doing. These state and federal laws give people the power to request, and get, government documents. From everyday citizens to journalists, FOI laws have proven a powerful way to uncover the often-secret workings of government.

But a potential threat is emerging – from an unexpected place – to FOI laws.

We are scholars of government administration, ethics and transparency. And our research leads us to believe that while FOI laws have always faced many challenges, including resistance, evasion,  and poor implementation and enforcement, the last decade has brought a different kind of challenge in the form of a new approach to transparency….

The open government movement could help FOI implementation. Government information posted online, which is a core goal of open government advocates, can reduce the number of FOI requests. Open government initiatives can explicitly promote FOI by encouraging the passage of FOI laws, offering more training for officials who fill FOI requests, and developing technologies to make it easier to process and track FOI requests.

On the other hand, the relationship between open government and FOI may not always be positive in practice.

First, as with all kinds of public policy issues, resources – both money and political attention – are inherently scarce. Government officials now have to divide their attention between FOI and other open government initiatives. And funders now have to divide their financial resources between FOI and other open government initiatives.

Second, the open government reform movement as well as the FOI movement have long depended on nonprofit advocacy groups – from the National Freedom of Information Coalition and its state affiliates to the Sunlight Foundation – to obtain and disseminate government information. This means that the financial stability of those nonprofit groups is crucial. But their efforts, as they grow, may each only get a shrinking portion of the total amount of grant money available. Freedominfo.org, a website for gathering and comparing information on FOI laws around the world, had to suspend its operations in 2017 due to resources drying up.

We believe that priorities among government officials and good government advocates may also shift away from FOI. At a time when open data is “hot,” FOI programs could get squeezed as a result of this competition. Further, by allowing governments to claim credit for more politically convenient reforms such as online data portals, the open government agenda may create a false sense of transparency – there’s a lot more government information that isn’t available in those portals.

This criticism was leveled recently against Kenya, whose government launched a high-profile open data portal for publishing data on government performance and activities in 2011, yet delayed passage of an FOI law until 2016.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, one government minister said in 2012,“I’d like to make Freedom of Information redundant, by pushing out so much data that people won’t have to ask for it.”…(More)”

Opening Government to Improve Outcomes


Laura Wesley at Canada Beyond 150: “Open Government is a concept. It’s a view into government. It’s an invitation to stakeholders, citizens and civil society to help shape government decisions and actions. It is not a program or policy, yet both can be part of achieving the vision of a government that encourages civic participation, invites accountability and demonstrates transparency. Examples of open government include proactively disclosing financial and human resources-related information online and publishing expenditures that can be displayed visually or as machine-readable charts. These measures are intended to strengthen public sector management.

From my place within the public service, I see opening government as a verb. To me, it’s what we are doing to create opportunities for people – wherever they work or reside – to contribute to the activities that go into governing so that the country reflects the values of those who live in it. Engaging citizens and stakeholders in the context of policy shaping builds trust, seeks others’ perspectives, enables accountability, and allows us to collectively design better policy, programs and services.

What is engagement in the context of public policy?

Engagement processes can be structured and formal like parliamentary committees to study an issue or those that allow for anyone to provide feedback on legislation as it moves through Parliament. They can be done by elected officials or by public servants working on their behalf, for example, through processes that invite stakeholders to comment on proposed regulatory or legislative changes. They can be informal, like hosting conversations online. They can be open and transparent, moderated or unmoderated, multilateral or bilateral. There are many options, yet deciding which methods to employ at the right time can be cloaked in complexity, with much at risk if we get it wrong. So how can we teach “engagement” as a mechanism to improve policy-shaping?

Canada Beyond 150 is a participatory learning program for public servants to experience new ways of developing and delivering public policy. I was excited to learn that engagement, along with design and foresight, was one of the three pillars of the program. My team had mapped some of the system-wide gaps that needed to be filled in order to build the organizational muscle required to engage broadly; this was our chance to understand how to support new public servants through change….(More)”.

The People’s Right to Know and State Secrecy


Dorota Mokrosinska at the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence: “Among the classic arguments which advocates of open government use to fight government secrecy is the appeal to a “people’s right to know.” I argue that the employment of this idea as a conceptual weapon against state secrecy misfires. I consider two prominent arguments commonly invoked to support the people’s right to know government-held information: an appeal to human rights and an appeal to democratic citizenship. While I concede that both arguments ground the people’s right to access government information, I argue that they also limit this right and in limiting it, they establish a domain of state secrecy. The argument developed in the essay provides a novel interpretation of Dennis Thompson’s claim, who in his seminal work on the place of secrecy in democratic governance, has argued that some of the best reasons for secrecy are the same reasons that argue for openness and against secrecy….(More)”.

Foursquare to The Rescue: Predicting Ambulance Calls Across Geographies


Paper by Anastasios NoulasColin MoffattDesislava Hristova, and Bruno Gonćalves: “Understanding how ambulance incidents are spatially distributed can shed light to the epidemiological dynamics of geographic areas and inform healthcare policy design. Here we analyze a longitudinal dataset of more than four million ambulance calls across a region of twelve million residents in the North West of England. With the aim to explain geographic variations in ambulance call frequencies, we employ a wide range of data layers including open government datasets describing population demographics and socio-economic characteristics, as well as geographic activity in online services such as Foursquare.

Working at a fine level of spatial granularity we demonstrate that daytime population levels and the deprivation status of an area are the most important variables when it comes to predicting the volume of ambulance calls at an area. Foursquare check-ins on the other hand complement these government sourced indicators, offering a novel view to population nightlife and commercial activity locally. We demonstrate how check-in activity can provide an edge when predicting certain types of emergency incidents in a multi-variate regression model…(More)”.

Government data: How open is too open?


Sharon Fisher at HPE: “The notion of “open government” appeals to both citizens and IT professionals seeking access to freely available government data. But is there such a thing as data access being too open? Governments may want to be transparent, yet they need to avoid releasing personally identifiable information.

There’s no question that open government data offers many benefits. It gives citizens access to the data their taxes paid for, enables government oversight, and powers the applications developed by government, vendors, and citizens that improve people’s lives.

However, data breaches and concerns about the amount of data that government is collecting makes some people wonder: When is it too much?

“As we think through the big questions about what kind of data a state should collect, how it should use it, and how to disclose it, these nuances become not some theoretical issue but a matter of life and death to some people,” says Alexander Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for open government. “There are people in government databases where the disclosure of their [physical] location is the difference between a life-changing day and Wednesday.

Open data supporters point out that much of this data has been considered a public record all along and tout the value of its use in analytics. But having personal data aggregated in a single place that is accessible online—as opposed to, say, having to go to an office and physically look up each record—makes some people uneasy.

Privacy breaches, wholesale

“We’ve seen a real change in how people perceive privacy,” says Michael Morisy, executive director at MuckRock, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, nonprofit that helps media and citizens file public records requests. “It’s been driven by a long-standing concept in transparency: practical obscurity.” Even if something was technically a public record, effort needed to be expended to get one’s hands on it. That amount of work might be worth it about, say, someone running for office, but on the whole, private citizens didn’t have to worry. Things are different now, says Morisy. “With Google, and so much data being available at the click of a mouse or the tap of a phone, what was once practically obscure is now instantly available.”

People are sometimes also surprised to find out that public records can contain their personally identifiable information (PII), such as addresses, phone numbers, and even Social Security numbers. That may be on purpose or because someone failed to redact the data properly.

That’s had consequences. Over the years, there have been a number of incidents in which PII from public records, including addresses, was used to harass and sometimes even kill people. For example, in 1989, Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by a stalker who learned her address from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Other examples of harassment via driver’s license numbers include thieves who tracked down the address of owners of expensive cars and activists who sent anti-abortion literature to women who had visited health clinics that performed abortions.

In response, in 1994, Congress enacted the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act to restrict the sale of such data. More recently, the state of Idaho passed a law protecting the identity of hunters who shot wolves, because the hunters were being harassed by wolf supporters. Similarly, the state of New York allowed concealed pistol permit holders to make their name and address private after a newspaper published an online interactive map showing the names and addresses of all handgun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties….(More)”.

Proliferation of Open Government Initiatives and Systems


Book edited by Ayse Kok: “As is true in most aspects of daily life, the expansion of government in the modern era has included a move to a technologically-based system. A method of evaluation for such online governing systems is necessary for effective political management worldwide.

Proliferation of Open Government Initiatives and Systems is an essential scholarly publication that analyzes open government data initiatives to evaluate the impact and value of such structures. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics including collaborative governance, civic responsibility, and public financial management, this publication is geared toward academicians and researchers seeking current, relevant research on the evaluation of open government data initiatives….(More)”.

Open government and citizen participation: an empirical analysis of citizen expectancy towards open government data


, and  in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Citizens are at the heart of open government, and their participation represents a fundamental principle of the latter. Despite their essential role and the great potential benefits open government holds for the public, challenges of use among citizens persist. Previous empirical research has scarcely addressed these issues from a citizen perspective. This study investigates the determinants of open government data use by citizens in Germany. Our results indicate that ease of use, usefulness, as well as transparency, participation and collaboration expectancies significantly determine citizens’ intention to use open government data, which in turn positively affects their word-of-mouth intention. Overall, the findings not only contribute to our understanding of citizen behavior in the context of open government research, especially shedding light on the key aspects of citizens’ usage intention, but also provide implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Points for practitioners

Citizen-based use of open government data (OGD) has multiple facets that practitioners should be aware of. Public administration needs to take account of the important role of accessibility and usability in providing OGD services, with the objective of meeting the major challenge of enabling equal access for all populations via appropriate channels and customization. The content-related preparation of OGD services should seek to enhance transparency, participation and collaboration, raising and shaping respective expectations among citizens. Finally, practitioners should pay particular attention to the opportunities and risks associated with word-of-mouth communication in the context of OGD….(More)”