Lex-is

Enabling Participation of the Youth in the Public Debate of Legislation among Parliaments, Citizens and Businesses in the European Union

Rationale

As eGovernment projects and practices mature and practical results are being widely diffused, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play an important role in helping to address new challenges in the involvement of citizens in decision-making, in an effort to cope with the increasing complexity of the legislative processes – thus improving legislation formulation and debate processes.
Such a need is also identified in the European Commission’s “i2010 eGovernment Action Plan” where a stress is put on the request for strengthening citizen participation and democratic decision-making in Europe. Today, more than 50% of EU citizens are internet users and all the National Parliaments of Member States have established a web presence.
However, the legislation process is usually not supported efficiently, as semantically-rich, workflow-aware and participation-oriented systems are needed for such a task, going beyond the currently available content management technologies of Parliaments’ web sites.

LEX-IS Objectives

The main objective of the LEX-IS Project is to improve the legislative process in National Parliaments through enhancing public participation in the preparatory stages (legislative drafting and public debate of draft law) with the use of state-of-the-art ICT-tools and methodologies. This will be achieved through the following goals:
- Applying already developed tools for managing the complex legislative frameworks and legal structures (draft legislation, existing legislation, amendments and changes).
- Developing and modeling legal ontologies and metadata schemas for the semantic annotation of legal elements (directives, laws, decrees), so that all involved parties can easily locate the necessary information with the use of internet-based retrieval tools, and so as to enhance legal impact for the public through argument visualization.
- Modeling of the drafting and public consultation process through a role-activity-document ontology followed during the preparatory legislative phases (legislation preparation, debate, draft legislation formation), with the use of workflow management technologies.
- Providing means for the actual participation of citizens, businesses and non-governmental organizations in the preparation and debate phases (public consultation and commenting of draft laws), following the regulations of each Parliament.

In this context, the LEX-IS Project aims to contribute towards:
- Engaging NGOs, citizens, businesses and especially the younger citizens online while bridging the growing gap between citizens and the state, represented by National Parliaments.
- Promoting eParticipation awareness and active occupation of citizens with national affairs, without requiring any specific expertise in complex ICT technologies.
- Gathering informed evidence that has been structured in a clear and unambiguous fashion, in order to provide input to the Parliaments and make them view policy issues from the public perspective. Parliamentarians can analyze this information to review public support of each case and perhaps revise or change its justification to make the policy more amenable to public support.
- Engaging new participants, whether individuals or organizations (NGOs), who can actively experience the merits of e-participation.

Impact and European dimension of LEX-IS

Electronic participation opens up the possibility of cyber-democracy that enables online deliberations in virtual democratic communities. Towards this direction, LEX-IS attracts the public interest and endorses the active involvement of all stakeholders in policy making, going beyond mere participation and discussion, in the generation and diffusion of knowledge. The parties involved (Citizens, Businesses, Younger Citizens, NGOs) are given enough scope to defend their own interests, exercise their right to be engaged in the decisions that touch their lives and express the small, but valuable, piece of information, experience, knowledge and competence about the problem or issue under consideration they may possess. Since the interaction is online, it is easier for experts and decision-makers to join; their presence indicating that all views should be considered and lead to real consequences.
LEX-IS also ensures transparency and openness of the policy process, without discriminating against any minority, since all citizens, as well as young people, more or less attuned to the issues of the poor, minorities or those left out of the policy process are included in the innovative participation model supported by the project. Deliberation in LEX-IS may also bring a new legitimization and basis for political decision making, since better legislation that will express citizens’ opinions, make rational decisions in the public interest and ensure equal and equitable processes and outcomes is envisaged to be the project’s major impact.
In other words, the main concept of LEX-IS is to enable the general public to comment and actively participate in the legal drafting of parliaments through advanced technologies such as ontologies, modeling of the participation process and existing technologies. In that way, we try to bridge the gap between the state and the citizen, using ICT technologies involving the most active group in Europe; since LEX-IS application focuses at the youth, we also aim at engaging the future voting and decision-making population in democratic processes at national and European Parliament levels.
The European dimension of LEX-IS is also strengthened by the participation of the Model European Parliament, an organization that enables young people to exemplify the parliamentary processes, use modern ICT and simulate the operation of European Parliament.

LEX-IS Consortium

Participants include ICT companies with proven experience in information systems and platforms for legislation support, academic institutes and research centers with proven research track record in eGovernment and eParticipation, as well as National Parliaments from EU Member States. Relative experience of the Consortium lies on:
- eParticipation and eGovernment IST projects (WEB.DEP, DEMO_net, GENESIS)
- Modelling of legal information for eGovernment and eBusiness / semantic annotation with the use of ontologies and metadata schemas
- Legislation modeling / content management systems and platforms for managing legal frameworks at a National Level

LEX-IS trials are going to be executed within the operational framework and with selected, real processes of three European institutions:
- The Austrian Parliament, having a specific programme supporting e-Participation of younger citizens
- The Lithuanian Parliament, active within local e-participation initiatives, under the cooperation with the Technical University of Kaunas
- The Model European Parliament (MEP), an organisation that drives the “European Parliament of the Youth” in 25 European Countries, with the active participation of more than 1,000 students every year that follow the processes and real issues of the European Parliament.