Crowdlaw

This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In the crowdsourcing experiment, the public was invited to contribute to the law-reform process by sharing their knowledge and ideas for a better policy. This article introduces a normative design framework of five principles for crowdsourced policymaking: inclusiveness, accountability, transparency, modularity, and synthesis. Inclusiveness, accountability,
and transparency are overarching principles for crowdsourced policymaking. Modularity and synthesis support these overarching principles and are instrumental in achieving the main goals of crowdsourced policymaking,
namely, an efficient search for knowledge and democratic deliberation among the participants. These principles apply to both the design of the process and the medium that the process takes place in, i.e., the technology
facilitating crowdsourcing. This article analyzes the design of the crowdsourced off-road traffic law experiment in Finland using the five principles described above and provides a future research agenda for examining design aspects in crowdsourced policymaking.

While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism and a learning context. Economic value is created when crowdsourcing makes knowledge search in policymaking more efficient and enables government to produce policies that better address citizens’ needs and societal issues. We show how these tenets of value creation are manifest in crowdsourced policymaking by drawing on instances of crowdsourced lawmaking, and we also discuss the contingencies and challenges preventing value creation.

This article examines the demographic characteristics, motivations,
and expectations of participants in a crowdsourced off-road traffic
law reform in Finland. We found that the participants were mainly
educated, full-time working professional males with a strong
interest in off-road traffic. Though a minority, the women
participating in the process produced more ideas than the men.
The crowd was motivated by a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic
factors. Intrinsic motivations included fulfilling civic duty, affecting
the law for sociotropic reasons, to deliberate with and learn from
peers. Extrinsic motivations included changing the law for
financial gain or other benefits. Participation in crowdsourced
policy-making was an act of grassroots advocacy, whether to
pursue one’s own interest or more altruistic goals, such as
protecting nature. The motivations driving the participation were
in part similar to those observed in traditional democratic
processes, such as elections as well as other online collaborations
such as crowdsourced journalism and citizen science. The crowds’
behavior was, however, paradoxical. They participated despite the
fact that they did not expect that their contributions would affect
the law.

The Ministry of the Environment and the Committee for the Future in the Finnish Parliament initiated a crowdsourced off-road traffic law reform in Finland in 2013. About 700 Finns participated in the law-reform process online by sharing their ideas, knowledge and perspectives about off-road traffic. The participants shared about 500 ideas, 4,000 comments and 19,000 votes in the crowdsourcing process.

CrowdLaw surge en los últimos años como una propuesta basada en la aplicación de una serie de métodos y herramientas que utilizan como base las nuevas tecnologías para generar una interacción entre los ciudadanos y las instituciones públicas en los procesos de toma de decisiones políticas. Se plantea como hipótesis que esta particular propuesta de participación ciudadana en la toma de decisiones políticas tiene el potencial de satisfacer las condiciones que propone la democracia deliberativa para legitimar las decisiones políticas. Sin embargo, su éxito en dichos términos solo podrá suceder si viene acompañado de un proceso de derrumbamiento de la brecha y la desigualdad digital, como se produce en el caso del acceso al Internet.

This research draws on the CrowdLaw concept and the affordances framework to inquire how Senador Virtual, a technological innovation in the Chilean Senate, could contribute to creating more democratic processes and outcomes, and consequently, whether the platform promoted or enabled more equality in decision-making processes and better citizen engagement. Based on a mixed-methods approach of statistical analysis, interviews, and a digital ethnography, we studied the 16-year-old web platform. Our research shows that the platform gave rise to five latent democratic affordances which are not always fully leveraged. Of these, three had already been discussed within the CrowdLaw literature: (1) capture a variety of viewpoints; (2) generate insights that illuminate the lawmaking process; and (3) serve as a device for communication between citizens and senators. Notwithstanding, we also found two additional affordances not normally attributed to CrowdLaw: (4) create a civilized public forum; and (5) foster civility among the users that engage with it. We suggest that in order for these affordances to be fully leveraged, the CrowdLaw process must be designed to complement traditional lawmaking processes, including a reliable methodology for processing citizen input. Only when the above is accomplished, will this technological facilitator produce actual democratic outcomes.