Wiki-Based Participatory Legislation Tools
Introduction
- The Economist on citizen lawmaking, http://www.economist.com/node/21534760
"Successful examples of legislation by the masses are rare. Most people don't know how to write laws. Tim Bonnemann, the founder of Intellitics, an American firm specialising in public-participation tools, says a better method is to canvas views widely but use a small team to write a draft. The hard part is not the technology (a simple online discussion forum is adequate) but creating a fair and transparent process that assures people their voices have been heard.
Another problem is that even a public consultation, let alone public law-writing, takes a lot of time and money to do well, especially when large groups are involved. Tom Steinberg, the director of MySociety, a British e-democracy organisation, says most attempts in collaborative lawmaking, whether run by governments or do-gooders, are one-offs that never gather enough steam and public interest.
A third problem is that government websites of this sort are often clunky, and poor at drawing in the public debate that thrives elsewhere online. Professional lobbyists willing to plough through the process therefore often have a big advantage. America's site for rewriting government rules, regulations.gov, displays the comments on a draft bill as a list of the commenters' names. These may run into the hundreds and the visitor must click on each name separately to see what was said. That makes getting the overall picture dauntingly tedious. Even Estonia, a world leader in e-government, had lacklustre results when it launched osale.ee, a portal for public comments on bills, in 2007. In the first two years, according to a study by Meelis Kitsing of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the most comments any bill got was 27 (one-third got none). In contrast the Brazilian parliament's cheerful and friendly e-Democracia site is often cited as a rare success story: it channels comments straight to the parliamentary agency that advises MPs.
Non-governmental sites, on the other hand, may be easier to use, but officials are wont to ignore them. Two students who founded a site called Lexpop earlier this year think they may have got around this problem: a Massachusetts state legislator, Tom Sannicandro, has agreed in advance to propose a bill on “net neutrality” that the site's users will draft. (Drafting hasn't yet begun, though, and some doubt that anything coherent will emerge).
The big difficulty for such projects in advanced democracies is that they have to break into lawmaking systems that often function tolerably well."
Discussion
Challenges for Wiki-Based Consultations
Tim Bonneman:
"Here’s a list of shortcomings or challenges I observed back in 2007/2008 when I was reviewing the examples listed yesterday.
With regard to Politicopia (January 2007):
One challenge I see with a pure wiki approach in this context is the fact that in order for participants to contribute they must make edits. And while that is ok when collaboratively writing a document, it does not scale well when it comes to any type of polling or voting.
Secondly, the unstructured nature of the data makes filtering, aggregation, or visualization — in short, anything that helps with the consumption of large amounts of data — very difficult.
With regard to Virtual Petition (January 2008):
Here are some of the issues I see with a pure wiki approach:
- Unstructured, flat text — Almost impossible to slice and dice data in meaningful ways (generally true for most wikis, as far as I can tell): Which arguments or ideas are viewed more often than others? Which are considered relevant? What’s the level of agreement for each item?
- Little to no process support — Workflow, business logic etc. are practically non-existent on most wikis (and while oftentimes that is exactly the reason why they are so useful, in this case it’s a considerable weakness)
- Scalability issues — Ever try to run a vote on a wiki with 1,000+ participants? Now try that while the content of the item you’re voting on is in flux.
Fairly limited (or at least very loosely structured) social networking capabilities — Who are my friends? What do they think? How can they help me filter information or peer activities?" (http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2011/03/09/challenges-for-wiki-based-consultations/)
Status
"Note that several of these sites are either inactive and spam-ridden (Campaigns Wiki), defunct (More Perfect) or have changed considerably over the last few years (Politicopia). If you’re that interested, Archive.org’s most awesome Wayback Machine may still remember what things looked like back in the day."
Directory
- Wikivote in Russia
- Politicopia
- More Perfect, Utah
- Future Melbourne Wiki , Australia
- Campaigns Wikia