CrowdLaw: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs

By Beth Simone Noveck

This is an excerpt from an entry on CrowdLaw published in the Living Edition of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs on April 2, 2021. Read the full article here.

Definition

CrowdLaw is the practice of using technology to engage the public in lawmaking, including the crafting of regulations, policies, and legislation. Parliaments, city councils, and public institutions are increasing their use of crowdlaw practices to obtain diverse sources of information, insight, and expertise at each stage of the lawmaking cycle to improve the quality as well as the legitimacy of the resulting laws and policies.

Introduction

CrowdLaw processes use a variety of different methods and tools, each generally designed for a specific stage of policymaking, including problem identification, solution identification, drafting and evaluation. We look at examples at each stage.

vTaiwan: Identifying Problems Collaboratively and Consensually

The arc of the lawmaking process begins with defining which problems to tackle. Getting diverse input both from those with lived experience and from those with credentialed expertise helps lawmakers learn about how the public experiences problems. This is especially important for those who are most disadvantaged and may otherwise lack ways of informing the lawmaking process. Many countries already have a well-established petitioning process for ordinary people to articulate problems. Brought online, however, problem definition is an opportunity for the public to contribute expertise and information at scale and increase the likelihood of developing solutions that actually work. Engagement opportunities in this stage allow residents to identify issues of concern and to prioritize them. For example, in Taiwan hundreds of thousands are participating in a process that translates broad issues into specific and actionable problems using the vTaiwan process. At this stage, online participation gives lawmakers the potential to improve the quantity and quality of the information used in the legislative process (The Governance Lab, 2020c).

For three weeks in April 2014, students, academics, and everyday citizens protested the passage of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement aimed at liberalizing Taiwan’s trade with China. The government negotiated the Agreement behind closed doors giving rise to protests now known as the Sunflower Movement. In response, the country’s volunteer civic technology community designed a process now known as vTaiwan for opening up the lawmaking process.

vTaiwan is a four-stage online and offline process for moving from issue to legislative enactment while building consensus among diverse stakeholders. It has been used to craft 26 pieces of legislation relating to the digital economy, including the regulation of Uber, telemedicine, and online alcohol sales, collaboratively between the government and the public. vTaiwan runs using a series of free open source tools (meaning they can be freely modified and customized, as needed) and includes face-to-face convening. The process begins when someone proposes an issue and a relevant government agency agrees to steward the consultation process. Since 2017, each Taiwanese Ministry is obliged to appoint a Participation Officer responsible for managing consultations on vTaiwan (Tang, 2019).

As Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang writes about the project: “vTaiwan’s scope is not limited to Taiwan or any particular government; it’s an experiment to prototype a model for consensus generation among large groups in general.” Moreover, she described it as “an experiment for a new way of working together, to unconditionally trust when collaborating, to be more open and transparent, and to gain the potential to be trusted.” Since the platform’s launch in 2015, over 80% of vTaiwan deliberations have led to decisive government action (Hsiao, Lin, Tang, Narayanan, & Sarahe, 2018).

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For more information about the projects discussed in this article, please visit congress.crowd.law.