1.
Crowdsourced Law and Citizens
Initiatives in Finland
19.2.2015
Joonas Pekkanen

2.
Some Challenges in the Current Model
• Citizens feel disenfranchised, lack of influence
• Elections every 4 years are not enough for people who
want to take part actively
• Elected representatives lack expertise in increasingly
complex issues
• Issues are too big (climate change, global equality, etc)
and exceed 4 year government term
• The power of lobbyists, industry and economic drivers is
emphasised
• Internet has changed all aspects of life (how we work,
communicate, meet people, follow news, etc) … except
the way we make decision together
2

3.
The Finnish Citizens Initiative
3
• Enshrined in the Constitution in 2012 - the latest basic right
of Finnish citizens
• The politicians’ monopoly to set their own agenda has been
broken
• Now 50 000 citizens can force any issue on the
parliamentary agenda
• Proposals can be either in law proposal format (§§§) or
general suggestions for law-makers
• Similar to the MP initiatives
• The format determined how the initiative is processed
• Initiatives can concern anything within the scope of
parliamentary legislation powers excluding international
treaties and direct budget issues

4.
Launching & Supporting an Initiative
4
• No pre-censorship / moderation of the proposals before
launching
• At least 2 people with voting right (18 yrs) needed to
launch an initiative
• Support is collected online in Ministry of Justice’s website
(kansalaisaloite.fi), open source software
• Online bank id’s or mobile verification is needed for
launching and signing
• Open Ministry helps in formulating law proposals and
designing campaigns

5.
How the Initiatives are Processed
5
• Initiatives are processed identically to government bills
• initial plenary discussion => committee hearings and
report => plenary session
• In theory if not processed in time before parliament is
disbanded, the initiative lapses
• The committee arranges one open session, but rest of
the sessions (expert hearings) are behind closed doors
• The expert statements become public when the
committee publishes its report
• Citizens initiatives have been criticised for being
inadequately prepared - although the committees could
have improved them together with the initiators

6.
What Initiatives Have been Done?
6
• More than 320 initiatives have been launched
• 9 initiatives have reached the required 50k threshold, issues
concerning:
• Fur-farming
• Same-sex marriages
• Copyright reform
• Swedish language
• Energy certificates
• Abortion
• Birthing hospitals
• Drunk driving
• Child molestation
• 6 have been given to the current parliament (3 wait for the next
parliament to start work)

7.
Example: Copyright Reform Campaign
7
Law team Volunteers
Street team
Partners
Core team
Open and collaborative law proposal editing, 1141 people supported draft
Each has own Facebook group and/or mailing list
Each arrange their own workshops

8.
Example: “I do 2013” Campaign
8
Law team
Policy /
lobby team
Regional
team
Media team
Core team
Semi-open law proposal editing
Each has own Facebook group and/or mailing list
Each arrange their own work

9.
Example: “Energy Renovation 2015” Campaign
9
General Facebook
group
Events team
Law team
Expert team
Policy /
lobby team
Partner
team
Volunteer
team
Media team
Social
media team
Core team
Active reqcruitment to all groups
Each has own Facebook group and/or mailing list
Each arrange their own workshops

10.
Paul Baran (1964)
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11.
Types of Campaign Organizations
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12.
Characteristics
12
• Participants are not known to each other beforehand
• Share a common value base
• Requires the activity of one or few key people (fire
starters) in the beginning
• who are capable of exciting a few key people to join
the “core”
• who are capable and willing to distribute their power
early enough
• Self-organise using free online tools and social media
• Facebook groups, google forms, google documents,
etc.

13.
D-CENT - How to Improve Current Tools?
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• How to make the work for the fire starters as frictionless
as possible
• Make it easy to test if an idea has tractions
• Make it easy to create the core group
• How to make it easy to scale up the organisation
• Make it easy to facilitate and link between self-organising sub-
groups
• Make it easy to make decision as a large open ended groups
• Make it easy to keep track of various co-edited documents
• Make it easy to manage, delegate and contribute to tasks

14.
14

15.
Version Control for Laws and Crowdsourced
Fixing
15
• Current laws, amendments to them and any new laws
should be available to everyone in a version control
system (similar to git in software development)
• The origins of any individual clause could be tracked
• For example, which lobby group suggested it in the
drafting phase
• Anyone should be able to comment, ask for clarifications
or suggest changes to any clause
• What processes needed to fix the laws that have received
crowdsourced “patches” i.e. how should civil servants
manage manage “pull requests” from the public

16.
Open Ministry
16
• Non-profit civil society organisation without party-political
links
• Un-funded, volunteer-based
• Founded in 2012 to advocate well functioning citizens
initiative process and to help individual CI campaigns
• Aims to make sure that lessons learned from earlier
campaigns are put to use in future campaigns
• Has been involved in 6 of the 9 initiatives that have reached
the 50k threshold
• Takes part in various projects to improve citizen
participation, transparency and accountability including
taking part in public discussion

17.
Thank you
web: dcentproject.eu
twitter: @dcentproject
facebook: facebook.com/dcentproject
joonas.pekkanen@forumvirium.fi