Jusletter IT

During the execution of two European Commission funded research projects (+Spaces and NOMAD), the Greek legislative procedure was used as a case study to approximate major issues that are directly connected with citizens’ participation in policy through Social Networks. Of course, policy making is not just a privilege of the central Government or the Legislative power in EU Member States. Many applications of moderated or non-moderated discussions in Social Networks can be also found in the local administration environment. This paper focuses on the exploiting of the possibilities offered by the social media to governmental officials and more explicitly to parliamentarians in order to listen to the citizens in a more direct and efficient way.

In the following schema, the basic framework of the legislative process in Greece is presented, starting from the Government initiative, or more precisely from the initiative of a Minister. Evidently, there are two main stages: the legislative drafting until the draft law is submitted to the Parliament, and the debate on the proposed piece of legislation until the final vote in the plenary and the approval of the law. All the possible users and actors in this procedure are highlighted on the left. This framework is applied to any individual policy cycle.

Figure 1: Legislative procedure in Greece

This schematic diagram also shows a time frame within which the citizens (individually or through organizations and representatives) may interact with the law makers during the legislative procedure. First, this is possible in the phase when a ministry is putting a draft bill for the first time online for public consultation. This phase is already covered by appropriate sites, like the www.opengov.gr initiative, which uses mainly a moderated blog approach, where comments can be placed and categorized in the various articles of the draft law. A second phase that was addressed for the use of social networking in the legislative procedure is the relatively narrow time frame of 15 days after a draft law was submitted to the Committees of the Hellenic Parliament. Finally, the third phase of citizen participation is after the law has been voted. This third and longer period with no specific end can be used by citizens and interest groups to express their opinion on the new legislation, somehow assisting the parliamentarians in controlling the governmental work, and preparing or starting a new policy cycle.

The European e-Government Action Plan for the period 2011-2015 defines as a strategic priority the empowerment of citizens, businesses and other organizations through the use of new technological tools. Such empowerment would aim at giving them access to better services, designed around their needs and in collaboration with them, while, at the same time, allowing their effective involvement in the policy making process.

In this context, policy makers face a task of unprecedented complexity and difficulty, as traditional policy making approaches used so far seem incapable of capturing the society’s increasingly complex and interconnected nature¹ and do not manage to involve in the overall process all important stakeholders, whose interests are affected by decisions on policies, as well as individuals in spite of their working environment, financial condition, social presence and consequently their well-being being dependent on the policies formulated.

In parallel, thanks to the last evolutions in the Web and especially in the Social Networks, we have witnessed a historical transition to a new era of collaboration, interaction, sharing and networked intelligence. The advent of social networks provides new avenues for influence² and eventually opens up new perspectives for policy makers by using crowdsourcing to enlarge and enhance policy-advisory processes, policy making, and policy feedback³.

A new age of engagement has thus emerged, leveraging social media for policy making as they facilitate the requisite level of collaboration both globally and locally to solve complex issues that would otherwise be impossible to address⁴.

Taking into account the last Digital Agenda 2020 and Policy Making 3.0, the participatory and evidence-based model used by Digital Futures⁵, stakeholders and policy makers form a social network to co-design policies on the basis of the metaphor of «collective brain» (or emergent collective intelligence) with two distinct factors:

• The scientific evidence stemming from the collective wisdom of stakeholders and policy makers. This is the collective «rational» contribution of the participants to the policy (or the «left brain» of the social network). Evidence is often elicited from data and numerical models of the real world (e.g., statistics, data mining).
• The sentiment stemming from the collective aspirations of stakeholders and policy makers, identifiable or even measurable through the social network. This can be considered the «emotional» contribution of the network participants to the policy (or the «right brain» of the social network).

The Digital Futures’ model for participatory and evidence based policy making scales up the metaphor of the «left and right brains» to the social network to make current policy making processes more participatory, transparent and agile.

The EC FP7 project +Spaces (Policy Simulation in Virtual Spaces⁶) uses existing social media spaces as the societal «sandbox» for modelling real world behaviour. One of the project’s principal drivers was to engage citizens from different online communities by utilizing these virtual spaces for assisting policy makers in reaching out and gaining insight from the citizens about their opinions and potential acceptance of new policies. The +Spaces platform creates and deploys applications in virtual spaces (Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Open Wonderland), which provide information about the policy with a clear description of the policy topic, pre-defined roles, selected keywords, standard questions and moderated statements, guiding the public to react to it in various ways. Feedback from the civil society is obtained through well defined and structured Polls and Debates, as well as through Role Playing Simulation, in which the citizens are invited to take upon themselves a role different than their own, and express thoughts and opinions from the point of view of the respective role, thus reaching new insights and a better understanding of various aspects of the policy. The following table is to present the added value for different stages of the legislative procedures in the policy making cycle, the +Spaces tools used and the actors involved:

Figure 2: The functionalities of the +Spaces tools in the legislative process

The lessons learnt from the +Spaces pilots implemented for the Hellenic Parliament were:

• Through the +Spaces platform it was possible to address several public groups on different stages of the policy making process
• +Spaces was able to support policy makers» presence in Social Networks
• Advanced role-playing simulation creating fresh ideas for policy makers
• Data analysis with graphs, sentiment clusters, highlights and citizens» reputation scores provides a clear and short overview of the policy discussion
• Policy makers were enabled to post simple questions in polls, brief policy descriptions and a couple of statements for debates to get feedback from citizens
• 3D & 2D role-playing or 3D debates are something new with a touch of innovation, looking like a brainstorming game or a place where fresh ideas are born
• The +Spaces platform could be used as a policy marketing tool

The EC FP7 project NOMAD (Policy formulation & validation through non-moderated crowdsourcing⁷), on the other hand, will provide policy makers with fully automated solutions for content search, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena. Thereby, the policy makers could monitor social media discourses and listen to the citizens, gather feedback to the draft policy making agenda as well as the draft policies, obtain inputs to the policy making process by collecting opinions, arguments, and sentiments, visualize and analyse the non-moderated «wisdom of crowds’⁸, while collaborating, if possible, with the citizens at a later stage.

The NOMAD tools will be capable of crawling the social media for opinions, classifying them as supporting or opposing the suggested policy and its justification, and presenting the evaluated opinions via the analysis and visualization interface. This interface will support the quantitative and qualitative analysis, comparison, and identification of congruence of the proposed policy and the current buzz in the social media, covering most of their major types (e.g., Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, news sites, forums).

Thus, the policy maker could examine the citizens» arguments, positions, comments, opinions and stakes, and transfer them into a clear and concrete report. NOMAD will provide policy arguments and the citizens» opinions plus their demographics (gender/age, geographical location, profession), as well as surveys of the concepts that most prominently appear in social media. Such information can prove invaluable for refining the policy agenda. Additionally, NOMAD will provide a quantitative and qualitative support tool to extract the citizens» opinions, comments and suggestions, allowing an assessment of the policy in total.

Figure 3: Schematic view of the NOMAD concept

The NOMAD project started in 2012, with identifying the user requirements. The initial outcomes are the following:

• Policy makers deem it important to get access to the current policy related discussions in the social media
• Currently, it is difficult to receive all reactions to draft policies properly displayed for an effective use
• Feedback to the discourses in the policy making arena, and particularly in Parliament, was to be obtained in real time, based on citizens» reactions in the social media
• However, policy makers would not be able to initiate a communicative intercourse with the citizens by only using the «wisdom of crowds» from the social media

Real-life experience has proved there are many unsolved challenges in policy making, which restrain policy makers from providing sustainable and inclusive decisions and citizens from getting engaged in policy discussions. Public policy issues are not always appealing, and citizens fail to understand the relevance of the issues and to see «what’s in it for me», which would be reflected in a decline in the voters» turnout and a lack of trust in politicians that is shown by opinion polls. While the Internet has long promised an opportunity for widespread involvement, e-participation initiatives often struggle to generate active and regular participation⁹, and there is a huge gap between the technological advancements and the everyday active participation of citizens in the policy-making processes. Previous research projects (like, e.g., LEX-IS or VoiceS) and their pilots were mostly dedicated to closed groups of users (up to 200 in most cases) but failed to involve the public at large.

The lack of comprehensible and down-to-earth visualizations for easing out the complexity in policy decisions, the under-performance of existing policy models in conjunction with simulation mechanisms, and the insufficient use of the huge amounts of data that are available on the web, are among the important issues that need to be tackled in order to take the leap forward in policy making. Therefore, ICT tools still have untapped potential and remain a «novelty» for the majority of government systems, despite their already acknowledged benefits in their application by governments related to the quality and speed of policy making, as well as to evidence-based policy decision making¹⁰.

Having in mind the observed difficulties in not only getting citizens engaged but also sustainably conserving their readiness to participate in policy making discourses, non-moderated crowdsourcing seems to be a realistic alternative or supplement to the more formalized policy related discourses that need to be initiated and moderated, in some way, by some actor of the government system. In the social media in general, the discussions, of course, will never be as clearly structured as they can, and should, be in the fora specifically dedicated to policy discourse, or even in environments established to support formalized consultation procedures on draft legislation. Thus, such focused crowdsourcing raises a particular challenge to the technical tools applied, and this is just the challenge accepted by the NOMAD project.

When comparing, from the point of view of policy making support, the options of non-moderated crowdsourcing, on the one hand, and moderated discourse, in the other hand, and their feasibility, one will have to differentiate between the various stages of the policy cycle:

• At the initial stage of political agenda setting, it will be necessary to identify societal requests for new policies and policy changes as early as possible, and within a scope as broad as possible. Thus, any kind of moderation might already narrow the scope of debate, so that this seems to be the stage of the policy cycle most appropriate to be supported by non-moderated crowdsourcing. The free flow of public discourse within civil society, as mirrored in the social media, is to be analyzed, and all subjects of pertinence to the policy making agenda, along with the yet rough opinions of the members of civil society on what directions to follow in these issues, are to be extracted.
• Once the political agenda, in a mid-term range, has been set, it is up to the main actors of the political system, i.e. the political parties that have the task to aggregate societal positions, but in some cases also the major interest groups, to prepare concrete policy proposals to tackle the issues put on the agenda. At this stage, moderated debates already make more sense, because there is already a limited number of alternative policy options to be put to a debate that has to be formally initiated by the actors of the political system. Nonetheless, there still may be some risk that some fundamental option has not yet been identified, so that the crowdsourcing approach will be a valuable supplement to moderated debate, in particular as long as the political system has not been successful in engaging larger numbers of the members of civil society in such moderated debates. One major argument against formalized public consultation at the policy formulating stage comes from the experience that such a procedure might be used by small groups of activists, i.e. citizens showing an engagement far above the ordinary for a particular issue, to dominate the debate, and strain the outcome. Such effect indeed may be balanced by a complementary crowdsourcing approach.
• Once the basic policy decision, i.e. the political (usually not yet normative) decision on the objectives to be followed and the means to be applied for that purpose, has been made, the policy regularly is transposed into a draft normative act, mostly a draft bill, which in the majority of cases is done by the legislative experts in the competent government agencies. Such draft bills in most normative systems are put to a formal consultation procedure, which would anyway include the main stakeholders but sometimes also the general public. Commenting on draft bills would require some expertise in legislative drafting techniques as well as in the substantive matter to be regulated. Thus, this usually would be a stage of well-structured expert debate, with the general public continuing to reflect on the general policy directions, which reflections however would be of decreasing influence, for the basic directions already having been defined. Non-moderated crowdsourcing therefore will play a minor role at this stage.
• The latter in principle would also apply to the stage of parliamentary decision-making. At this stage, the finishing is done on the draft legal acts, but because it is done in a transparent way civil society will reflect on it more intensively again. Thus, even though a major change in the policy direction is unlikely to happen at this late and final stage in the legislative process, there is a vivid interest by the political decision-makers in learning about these public reactions, which would challenge their communicative capacity to be displayed in the parliamentary arena. Non-moderated crowdsourcing, therefore, is an important option again, in this concluding phase of law-making, because it would give the MPs important hints about how to explain the decision made to the public (or, from the point of view of parliamentary opposition, how to argue against it).
• Finally, the adopted and promulgated law is to be implemented. This process will not only be monitored by the MPs but also, in an informal way, by civil society. Establishing feedback cycles therefore is an important means to enable the actors of the political system to analyze the impact of legal measures and distinguish between possible lackings in the implementation of the regulations adopted and lackings in the regulations themselves. Identifying lackings of the latter kind will prompt a new policy cycle. Since this monitoring requires a wide and open focus on a policy field, crowdsourcing seems to be an appropriate approach again.

Summarizing, one may assume the more thematic openness is required in a discussion, the more useful seems to be a non-moderated crowdsourcing approach. The more, on the other hand, the scope of a discussion is narrowed down to a limited set of alternatives, and the better structured a discourse needs to be, the more efficient seems to be an approach based on the concept of moderated debate. Since the policy making and law making process comprises stages of both kinds, one may conclude that a combination of non-moderated crowdsourcing data analysis with well-defined moderated debate is the key towards better embedding this process in civil society policy discourses, and thereby contributing to more substantively legitimizing legislation.

 

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Dimitris Koryzis, Head of department, Hellenic Parliament, European Programs Implementation Service.

 

Fotis Fitsilis, Hellenic Parliament, Scientific Service.

 

Günther Schefbeck, Head of department, Austrian Parliamentary Administration, department «Parliamentary Documentation, Archives, and Statistics».

 

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