France has implemented several democratic innovations in recent years. People’s feedback was crowdsourced for the Digital Republic Law, open data is published actively on open data platform, and new legislation to enable more transparent and inclusive society is in making. In her talk in Helsinki, Finland, Amélie Banzet, head of the Open Government Programme in Etalab in the French prime minister’s office, described the recent developments in democratic innovations in France.
Amélie Banzet, head of the Open Government Programme in Etalab, the French prime minister’s ‘digital taskforce’ and the government’s innovation lab, visited Helsinki on Monday 26.11.2018 to give a presentation on ‘Three levers to promote digital democracy: legal way, people way, hacker way’. Etalab is operating the French national open data platform and carrying out “radically innovative projects to improve public policy through their digital culture, tools and data”.
Banzét presented how the French innovative projects in improving public policy in the time of digitalization look like. Considering data and open innovation, Etalab operates on three levels of action: 1. the legal way that includes the digital republic law, defining the policy and legal framework for making open data out of all data by default and becoming accountable of the algorithms involved, 2. the people way for building an ecosystem for increased democracy through citizen participation in public decision-making, and 3. the hacker way for sharing the tools among the concerned actors and studying how the proper use of dedicated tools can lead to changes.
The continuous aim with Etalab is to build an inter-ministerial community linked with its ecosystem. Etalab is involved in the open government forum that is co-created with voluntary citizen participants. Its goal is to ensure that ministries continue the work with the ecosystems they have created together with the citizens. Etalab is building an international network through e.g. Paris Peace Forum, Open Government in francophone countries and OGP Global Summits. Etalab is working with e.g. civil organizations and giving access to civic tech tools for administration. A general interest entrepreneur programme is dedicated for opening the administration to digital talent, or prominent developers. One of the achievements of the digitalization is OpenFisca, an open source platform to code the French law into digital form.
More about Etalab and digital democracy:
amelie.banzet@modernization.gouv.fr
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