Presentation by Joonas Pekkanen at the Open Data for Open Society conference Riga, 19th of February 2015.

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
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• 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
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• 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
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• 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