icegov2012 proceedings

Russian Federation legislative proposals have taken place,
including work on proposals for education, a very controversial
fisheries bill, and Social Services Laws. These projects have
attracted up to 6000 collaborators each, and represent very
successful initiatives in citizen participation in legislative process.
3.1 Collaborative Improvement of the
Russian Law on Education
A recent case of the described strategy is the Russian Law on
Education improvement implemented at
http://edu.crowdexpert.ru/ The project is supervised by the
Russian Ministry of Education with the support of Wikivote! and
the Public Opinion Foundation. The Web site contains a complete
text of the draft law, which chapters and items were split in small
segments. The project participants can create their own segment
versions and vote for segments created by other participants. The
site contains an additional section “The Law novels” with items
which the new law brings into practice. The section “Critical
questions” contains sharp issues of Russian education which the
new law is supposed to solve. Initially the section contained
questions posed by the Ministry of Education employees. The
participants could post and vote for suggestions on the issues
which they consider important and which require solution by the
Law. This section was very important for evaluating expectations
of the society. Totally more than 5700 Russian citizens joined the
project. They created more than 2 000 comments, 170 solutions of
critical questions and 400 versions of the Law items. The
collaboration process was maintained and supported by project
facilitators. Besides it was backed up by experts in legislation who
monitored the consistency of the suggestions with the law. The
collaborative process is a long term activity and consists of
several steps. First the Ministry of Education put together the first
draft of the Law. It was decomposed into segments and introduced
to the network community for evaluation and improvement.
Project designers drafted the second version of the draft law based
on the improvements and suggestions. The process has been
repeated and the third version of the law was drafted. The
mechanism reminds of relationships between a consumer
community and a software product testers. Developers create the
first document version and introduce it to the community,
consisting of different groups of the document consumers. Its
participants test items of the document and suggest their
improvements and edits. The most supported versions are
reviewed by the developer and included onto the new document
release which is enacted till the new release. The developer
publishes the new release and makes explanations of the changes
that have been made. Similarities between participants and testers
in the Law on Education case could be traced even in titles and
wordings of documents. We did not set any limitations on the size
of the community, and social status, age or position of our
participants. Still the project format allowed participants to selfogranize,
make decisions and defend them.
3.2 Collaborative Improvement of the
Russian Law on Fisheries
In July 18 – September 19 2011 we organized public consultations
on the new Russian Bill on Fisheries (http://r.zakon-fom.ru/). It
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attracted more than 5 300 Russian Citizens, who made more than
2 000 comments and created about 300 versions of the Law items.
The text of the bill was not large, so we did not have to break it
into very detailed pieces. Some bill chapters were represented as
final blocks and participants could build their own versions, which
made navigation and orientation it the participant’s personal
workspace much easier. On the other hand the bill attracted a lot
of public attention and some participants acted destructively. The
project administration had to take additional security measures
and premoderate new items versions and comments. The project
was supported by the Russian agency on Fisheries, which experts
drafted the first version of the bill and monitored the participants
suggestions. The experts made the second draft of the bill on
Fisheries based on the public consultations on the bill made on the
project Web site. After the edits were made, the new draft was
posted on the Web site and the project participants reviewed and
revised the draft items. The second draft attracted less attention of
the community and received much less comments and
suggestions.
We also observed formation of groups, that supported only one
suggestion and voted against all the other versions. We concluded
that some participants join the project just to support a suggestion
proposed by a particular group and important for a part of
stakeholders, such as social groups, businessmen or the Ministry
officials. This type of group behavior does not affect the version
rating, as it depends on the level of community support given to
the version. If a participant does not create their own version but
just votes for and against other participants’ versions, their
influence on the final result will be insignificant.
4. CONCLUSION
Described collaboration strategy, its methods and instruments can
become the basis for new e-Work solutions aiming at creating
structured documents. As an example the work of technical
writers drafting product documentation can be totally transformed
after involving in the process the product consumers. Another area
of the public selection technology implication is education.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work reported here was supported by The Ministry of
Education and Science of the Russian Federation.
6. REFERENCES
[1] M. Lips и A. Rapson, «Exploring Public Recordkeeping
Behaviors in Wiki-Supported Public Consultation Activities
in the New Zealand Public Sector», in Proceedings of the
2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences, Washington, DC, USA, 2010, с. 1–10.
[2] G. Anadiotis, K. Kafentzis, I. Pavlopoulos, и A. Westerski,
«Building consensus via a semantic web collaborative
space», in Proceedings of the 21st international conference
companion on World Wide Web, New York, NY, USA,
2012, с. 1097–1106.