Crowdsourced limited liability housing company law
The Ministry of Justice in the Finland government crowdsourced information for a law reform in 2014-2015. The law was the Limited Liability Housing Companies Act. The law regulates the housing company management in most apartment buildings in Finland. The law is an impactful policy, as it touches the lives of about three million people in Finland.
Crowdsourcing is a method for problem-solving and knowledge search in a form of open calls online. The call gives the online crowds information about the open task and needed information.
When crowdsourcing is deployed in policymaking, the crowd is asked to contribute to a policymaking process, whether the policy is a local rule or national law. One of the most iconic cases of crowdsourced policymaking happened in Iceland, when the Icelandic government crowdsourced the crowd’s feedback for the country’s constitution reform.
Goals and background
The Ministry of Justice wanted to crowdsource knowledge from citizens to evaluate the needs for a law reform and to map the problems in its implementation. Before crowdsourcing, the ministry had conducted an extensive online survey of the population affected by the law. About 6,000 Finns participated in the survey.
Based on the survey results, the civil servants identified the most common issues in the apartment buildings: disagreements in the housing companies, lack of communication in the housing companies, and lack of information among residents, for instance, about upcoming renovations. These issues were used as categories in the crowdsourcing process.
Process description
The first crowdsourcing sequence began in May 2014 and ended in June, lasting five weeks. Crowdsourcing took place on an online platform, running on customized IdeaScale software. The platform was open for anybody to participate in. Participants were invited to share their ideas, knowledge, and questions about the law.
The prompts for the participants included background information about the law. Participants could comment on others’ submissions and show their support by using thumbs-up and thumbs-down modalities. They could choose to stay anonymous, use nick name, or their real names. The content was publicly accessible without registering on the site. To participate the user had to register by using an e-mail address.
The civil servants in the Ministry of Justice responded to the participants’ questions on the crowdsourcing platform with expert representatives from stakeholder associations. The civil servants reviewed the crowdsourced input and summarized the findings in a report published in the Fall of 2014.
The Ministry found that there may not be a need for a full reform but there was a need for clearer instructions on how to implement the law. The civil servants crafted a policy recommendation about effective communication in housing companies. In May 2015, the ministry launched the second crowdsourcing stage for input for a policy recommendation about effective communication in housing companies. The input was integrated into the recommendation, and the policy was put in action.
Altogether, 566 people participated in the crowdsourcing process. More about the crowdsourcing process here.
Impact on democracy
Crowdsourcing increases transparency in policymaking, when the policymaking process becomes more accessible to regular citizens. Crowdsourcing contributes to participatory democracy, when a large crowd of citizen can participate in law-making. Transparency and participation can contribute to citizens’ knowledge about the law.
Collective deliberation on the crowdsourcing platform can help the participants understand others’ perspectives and decrease polarization. Research shows that although not designed for deliberation, deliberation happens in crowdsourced policymaking.
Lessons learned
- Break the crowdsourcing process into several sequences. That will provide several access points to the crowd to participate in.
- The first part can focus on mapping the issues with the policy. The second part can focus on solutions.
- Limit the duration of the crowdsourcing process to 6-8 weeks. After that, similar content starts to repeat.
- Spread the word about the project widely through networks and stakeholder groups and associations.
- Send feedback summary to the participants after each crowdsourcing moment based on the synthesized crowd input.
Challenges and solutions
- Increasing the number of participants. There were 500 participants in crowdsourcing. The number could be increased by broader communication about the strategy and combining offline events with online participation.
- Streamlining the analysis and synthesis of the crowdsourced input. If there are thousands of comments and ideas, it takes resources and time to process the input.
Next steps
Based on this crowdsourced policymaking process, we are developing a new crowdsourced policymaking process at the Ministry of Justice.
Related work
Aitamurto, T. and Saldivar, J. (2018) Motivating Participation in Crowdsourced Policymaking: The Interplay of Epistemic and Interactive Aspects. Proceedings of ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1 (2) Article 18. Computer-Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing. CSCW ’18.
Aitamurto, T. and Landemore, H. (2015) Five Design Principles for Crowdsourced Policymaking: Assessing the Case of Crowdsourced Off-Road Traffic Law in Finland. Journal of Social Media for Organizations 2(1), 1–19.
Contact
– Jyrki Jauhiainen, Ministry of Justice, Finland
– Tanja Aitamurto, University of Illinois at Chicago