Policy Argumentation Network

Computer-Supported Argumentation in Policy-Making

Berlin Workshop on "Online-Konsultationen und ihre praktische Einbindung in Gesetzgebungsverfahren"

As announced last week, the IMPACT project will organise a workshop in Berlin to discuss practical implications of online consultations and to explore the use of the IMPACT tools for argument analysis and visualisation together with practitioners. Please find detailed information about the event below.

We cordially invite all members of the Policy Argumentation Network to participate in the workshop! Please note that the workshop is intended to be held in German language.

Kind regards,
Steffen Albrecht

Date:     8 February 2012
Time:    1:30pm – 5:30pm
Venue:  NRW Landesvertretung Berlin, Hiroshimastr. 12,10785 Berlin

Outline Agenda:

  • The workshop presents up-to-date procedures and technologies to support policy-making processes with a focus on online consultations and computer-supported policy argumentation.
  • Participants test and evaluate tools for argumentation analysis currently under development in the EU-project “IMPACT” and discuss their application in policy-making.
  • The workshop offers opportunities to share experiences about the practice of policy-making and available support.

Who should attend?

  • Policy-makers, policy analysts and members of public administration who are involved in policy-making and/or consultation initiatives, also from business and civil society organisations.
  • There is no registration fee, but please register informally by sending e-mail to Steffen Albrecht (albrecht@zebralog.de) before 4 February 2012.
  • Following the workshop, participants have the opportunity to attend the evening debate at the MEDIENFORUM.BERLIN on „Open Data, Open Government - Neue Regeln, neue (Medien-) Politik?“, held also at the Landesvertretung NRW.

Further information:

 

Invitation: Two workshops to link research and practice

The IMPACT partners would like to draw your attention on two workshops on online citizen engagement. Both aim to link research and practice and present the latest developments in the project to practitioners in government and policy analysis. We invite all members of the PA network to participate in these events and to get a more vivid and detailed impression of the tools developed in the project than is possible here on this online platform.

At both events, your feedback on our work is welcome and highly appreciated.

1st event: Sheffield, 27th January 2012

2nd event: Berlin, 8th February 2012

 

Detailed information: (see below for information on the Berlin event)

1st event: Sheffield, 27th January 2012

FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modeling projects: How to make the cutting edge R&D accessible for real use, in a shorter period of time.

Date: 27th January 2012

Time: 10am - 4pm

Venue: Showroom Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX.  The venue is a 2 minute walk from the railway station in the city centre.

Where helpful, we will use examples which will focus on sustainability/environmental policy for this event, but the tools presented are clearly widely adaptable.

Aims:

  • To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
  • To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
  • To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

Attendees:

Those involved in the EU Framework Programme initiatives, those charged with spreading best practice and the policy makers and practitioners who would value advance knowledge of what will be available for them to use in the coming years.

Outline Agenda:

  1. Introduction and background to the event.
    Baudouin de Sonis, Chief Executive of EU e-Forum, Brussels.

  2. Presentations of what some current EU FP7 projects in the field of eGovernance and Policy Modelling are doing.  These will include:

    The IMPACT Project – new tools using copyright laws as an exemplar
    Professor Ann Macintosh, Professor of Digital Governance, Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship (The University of Leeds)
    www.policy-impact.eu

    The CATCH Project–new tools in a carbon-reduction context
    Dr Steve Cassidy, MRCMH, Edinburgh
    www.carbonaware.eu

    The FUPOL project- new tools in a sustainable development context
    South Yorkshire – EASY Connects
    www.fupol.eu

    Plus, other projects to confirm.

  3. Policy making and the real world.  Presentations of two new Interreg IVC projects with South Yorkshire partners covering sharing of current best practice in environmental policy making, set in a wider vision for Sheffield.

    “Slicker Cities: Doing the right thing”
    Edward Murphy, Technical Director, Mott MacDonald
    Policies required to enable Sheffield to become an exemplar in tackling climate change.

    RE-GREEN Project, in context of Sheffield sustainable development policy.
    Adrian Hacket, Building for Future, Sheffield

    RENERGY Project
    Ian Bloomfield, Durham County Council

  4. What Next?

    Presentation of event to take place in China in July to share best practice in governance and establish strong future collaborations.
    Dr Shaun Topham, President EU e-Forum and EU-China e-Forum

    Discussion covering opportunities for realising any synergies emerging between the various initiatives represented or for new initiatives.
    Dr Bridgette Wessels, ICOSS, University of Sheffield

Further information to follow as the programme takes shape and further suggestions are welcome. Please circulate this to anyone you think may be interested.

There is no registration fee. To reserve a place - please email: Dominic Tyerman. Let him have any dietary requests if needed.

 

2nd event: Berlin, 8th February 2012

Procedures and Tools to Support the Policy Making Process - Verfahren und Technologien zur Unterstützung des Gesetzgebungsprozesses

Date: 8th February 2012

Time: 13:30 - 17:30

Venue: tbd (Berlin-Tiergarten)

Attendees:

Decision makers and policy analysts from politics or public administration on all levels of government, from industry and civil society as well as e-participation practitioners.

Announcement:

Please save the date for this workshop to be held in Berlin, with hands-on experience of the IMPACT prototype tools.

The workshop is held in German language. Workshop participants might also be interested in two events that are locally and thematically, though not organisationally, related: The MEDIENFORUM Berlin on „Open Data, Open Government - Neue Regeln, neue (Medien-) Politik?“ (evening of 8th February) and the conference on "Bürgerschaftliche Mitverantwortung bei Planungs- und Entscheidungsprozessen" (7th February).

Further information on this event will follow soon in the next week.

 

Argumentation in Green Paper consultations – a case study

This post is to provide some background on the context of policy argumentation - what are the situations in which policy analysts might seek support, and how could such support be provided? In the IMPACT project, we have chosen Green Papers and the subsequent consultations as starting point for discussing the design and impact of tools to support policy argumentation. The consultation on the European Commission’s Green Paper on “Copyright in the Knowledge Economy” is described here briefly and may serve as a common reference for our discussion.

Background

With its “Interactive Policy Making” initiative started in 2001, the European Commission has adopted a systematic approach to consulting interested parties in the process of policy making. Often, these consultations are based upon Green Papers outlining the current state of affairs, the goals to be reached by the new legislation, and some policy alternatives.

The Green Paper “Copyright in the Knowledge Economy” was formulated in 2008 in the context of the EU’s attempt to modernise and harmonise copyright legislation. It’s aim was to stimulate debate on a specific aspect of the implementation of copyright laws in the Member States, namely the lack of harmonisation of the exceptions and limitations to copyright protection.

The consultation and its results

The consultation on the Green Paper was open from 16 July to 30 November 2008 and invited “all stakeholders” to comment on the questions submitted or “any other issues that are addressed or touched upon” in the Green Paper by e-mail. The consultation yielded over 370 responses from a wide variety of stakeholders.

Analysis of the responses vis-à-vis the Commission’s summary report reveals that in some cases, important nuances evident in the responses are eliminated in the summary provided by the Commission, and much fundamental criticism contained in stakeholders' contributions seems to be glossed over. Whereas the consultation allows stakeholders to make their voice heard, there is no way for them to engage in truly deliberative argumentation.

These observations are admittedly highly descriptive and non-representative. However, more thorough studies have shown similar results: Hüller (2008) finds in another case study that the EC’s summaries are biased towards the statements of well established actors, whereas individuals' and civil society actors' statements play only a marginal role and are rendered wrongly. Furthermore, the results are corrupted by not allowing for debate about controversial statements. Experts interviewed by Winkler and Kozeluh (2005) comment that a systematic methodology for interpretation and presentation of results would be necessary to use online consultations more effectively. Furthermore, Fazi and Smith (2006) note that concrete feedback, especially on why certain proposals were discarded, is crucially missing in the way EU consultations are conducted.

Discussion

It can be assumed that technical support would be valuable in order to improve consultations particularly with regard to three aspects:

  • Firstly, with a view to the wide variety of responses in terms of form, style, substantive content, and argumentation, argumentation support systems would be valuable to make the most relevant differences explicit and readily recognisable.
  • Secondly, assuming that the exclusion of certain arguments is mainly due to the practical necessities of condensing, structuring and aggregating the responses, providing policy makers with alternative – and more powerful – ways of achieving these accomplishments might be an important first step to bring the voices of individuals and civil society actors back into the policy making process.
  • Finally, offering such tools not only to policy makers, but also to stakeholders engaging in consultations would allow for more interactive and deliberative communication between stakeholders and policy makers in the process of opinion formation.

Notes

Please note that a more detailed analysis of the case is included in our Requirements Analysis Report which is published on the project’s website (pp.19ff.). Data from this consultation (the content of the Green Paper and of the responses) is used for testing and demonstration of the tools developed in the IMPACT project.

Argumentation, policy-making and technology

There is widespread belief that the Internet and other digital technologies have the potential to broaden and deepen the democratic process, making it more transparent, inclusive and accessible and, as such, we are seeing the emergence of participative democracy across Europe. These technological developments are giving policy makers the potential to listen to citizens as they have not been able to do before.

In recent years, software tools to support the use of arguments have been transferred from their origin in training, business and legal reasoning to the policy domain. Tools to formulate, analyze and visualise arguments have great potential especially in policy debates, where they help organizers as well as participants to gain a better picture of the state of the debate and make their views heard more effectively. However, it is still a matter of research how best to use the power of such tools in actual policy practice.

The Policy Argumentation Network pursues two objectives. Firstly, to make accessible the state of the art of computer-supported argumentation in policy-making by connecting experts from the domains of policy-making, argumentation theory and argument visualisation, secondly, to enable discussion and participation in the design of our new tools to support the use of arguments in policy-making.

We welcome you as part of this network and invite you to share your expertise and experience!