[ecrea] Call for participation: Open Legislative Data in Paris II- Time Has Come for Law Tracking

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION


Wednesday, May 28th, 2014


Sciences Po

Paris

Open Legislative Data in Paris II

Time Has Come for Law Tracking



Organized by The Law Factory (Regards Citoyens and Sciences Po)

Open Legislative Data is a term mixing Open Data (the idea that public 
data should be made freely available to anyone for re-use and 
redistribution) & Legislative Studies (the academic study of parliaments 
and legislators).



The Law Factory is a French group composed of hacktivists (Regards 
Citoyens) and academics (Centre d’études européennes & Médialab Sciences 
Po). In July 2012, we organized a first conference in Paris about 
Parliamentary informatics.



Following the same tradition we will organize in May 2014, a second 
conference mainly focused on law tracking. The aim is to:

    Discuss, present and compare the latest developments regarding law 
tracking, i.e. the visualization and analysis of the legislative 
procedure through computer analysis.
    Reassemble two groups that rarely communicate: the academic world 
of legislative studies and individuals and organizations from across the 
open data and parliamentary informatics spectrum.

Tell me more

Two years ago, we organized in Paris an international conference, which 
gathered more than 100 participants fromacademics and practitioners to 
activists and technical experts. More about this conference can be found 
on our website:

http://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/conference/follow-up/

The next conference Open Legislative Data In Paris II will focus on 
process tracking of legislation. The many changes which affect bills 
during the parliamentary legislative procedure is still, to a large 
extent, a black box. We know that things happen in parliaments, that 
bills are amended and in some cases fully altered, but we still don’t 
know exactly to which extent and why.

Three reasons may explain why the black box is still there. Firstly, the 
legislative process is complex. Thousands of amendments, several stages 
of readings (committee & floor) and, in many cases, the shuttle between 
2 chambers of the parliament: everything seems to be done to get you 
lost. Secondly, the data produced throughout the legislative process is 
hardly accessible: some information is easy to find (like plenary 
amendments), some is only partially there (like committee debates) and 
some is just hidden (like lobbies inputs). Finally, process tracking of 
legislation has not really been, so far, the focus of people interested 
in parliament'sbusiness. Legislative studies scholars have been more 
interested in studying votes over legislation than actual contents of 
legislation. Hacktivists have been first and foremost known for 
monitoring MPs individual activities - such individual focus being not 
well fitted for understanding law-making, a collective process if there 
is one.

Few has been done with new technologies to understand how parliaments 
(re)write bills. There are good reasons to believe that time has come to 
do so: programmers have now the capacity to deal with gigantic corpora 
of data, parliaments have been more and more pushed to open their data, 
parliamentary monitoring websites have prepared citizens to understand 
and analyze legislative “serious” activities, and, last but not least, 
assessing the actual role of parliaments in law production is a 
prerequisite for understanding the quality of any democracy. We know 
that in modern democracies, law is not fully written in parliament and 
that the executive branch benefits from privileged tools for initiating 
(in Europe) or vetoing (in America)legislation. Yet, there is lack of 
systematic knowledge about what remains to parliaments, in which cases 
and in which policy fields.

Yes, the time has come to open the black box of parliaments’ legislative 
activities.

What kind of topics will becovered?

We welcome proposals on any aspects of law tracking in parliaments 
linked to the use of computer science, be it in order to present 
existing projects, to explore new tools, to discuss their effects, to 
analyze legislatures through open parliamentary data…

Special attention will be given to the following areas:

    The technical challenges of tracking bills in parliaments. How do 
we deal with missing data? Should committees and floor amendments be 
treated the same? How do we connect the versions of the bills with the 
mountains of amendments? What should be done with the so numerous failed 
amendments?
    The esthetical challenges of tracking bills in parliaments. Which 
kind of visualization is optimal for making sense of a process as 
manifold as law making? Where should the focus be placed? How can 
digital design help?
    The ethical challenges of tracking bills in parliaments. Does the 
treatment of big corpora of legislative data really tell us something 
about the quality of a given democracy? Is it possible, for instance, to 
specify patterns of lobbying through law tracking?

All the presentations will be held in English

How do I get involved?

We welcome different kind of presentations from individual or groups, 
from academics or hacktivists… or both!

You can participate in two ways:

    Lightning presentations (5 minutes)
    Talks (10-15 minutes)

You’ll find an on-line application form here: 
http://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/submit-a-proposal/

Application must be sent before March 15th 2014!

We’ve also got a dedicated mailing list for discussions around the 
conference which you can write to: (TheLawFactory /at/ ml.regardscitoyens.org). 
If you’d like to join the discussion, sign up by sending an empty e-mail 
to (TheLawFactory-subscribe /at/ ml.regardscitoyens.org).

Can I ask for a grant?

Yes! The Ile-de-France Region is the main sponsor for the conference. We 
offer limited funding for international participants in order to cover 
part of their travel and accommodation fees.

Application must be sent before March 15th 2014. Answers will be 
provided by April 30th2014.

 Can I sponsor the event?

Yes please! We are still actively seeking sponsorship for lunches, 
coffee, travel and accommodation for international participants and so 
on. If you think you might be interested, please contact Angela Tacea at 
(picri /at/ regardscitoyens.org)  to find out more about the sponsorship 
opportunities available.

 Where do I find more?

http://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/

http://www.regardscitoyens.org/

http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/

http://www.cee.sciences-po.fr/
http://www.iledefrance.fr/



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