The European Erasmus Mundo program is sponsoring a joint international doctoral degree in law and technology, including scholarships to provide some financial support to students admitted to the program.
The Call for Papers for the 2012 Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2012) conference has been published. COMMA 2012 will take place in Vienna, September 10-12, 2012. The deadline for submissions is March 26, 2012.
The source code of the Zeno system is now available on GitHub. The code was previously available on the Berlios system but needed to be moved, since Berlios is being shut down at the end of 2011.
I just learned from Alexander Howard on Google+ that the White House has officially launched its We the People online petitioning system.
This Special Issue of ‘Information Systems Management’ solicits original high quality papers about European research on electronic citizen participation and engagement in public policy making’. Topics of interest in this area include, but are not limited to:
JURIX Workshop on Modelling Policy-making (MPM 2011) September 18th, 2011 Vienna, Austria
In conjunction with
The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011)
December 12 or 13 (TBA), 2011
As the European Union develops, issues about governance, legitimacy, and transparency become more pressing. Increasingly, national governments and the EU Commission realise the need to promote deliberative, distributive democracy, where citizens participate in the policy cycle, which has several phases: 1) agenda setting, 2) policy analysis, 3) lawmaking, 4) administration and implementation, and 5) monitoring. As governments need to become more efficient and effective with the resouces available, modern information and communications technology (ICT) are being drawn on to address some of these issues. One of the key problems is policy content analysis and modelling, particularly the gap between policy proposals and formulations, expressed in quantitative and narrative forms, and formal models that can be used to systematically represent and reason with the information contained in the proposals and formulations.
The workshop invites submissions of original research about the application of ICT to the early phases of the policy cycle, namely those before the legislation is fixed by the legislators: agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking. The research should seek to address the gap noted above. The workshop focusses particularly on using and integrating a range of subcomponents – information extraction, processing, representation, modelling, simulation, reasoning, and argument – to provide policy making tools to the public and public administrators.
Legal professionals, government administrators, political scientists, and computer scientists.
Submit position papers of between 2-5 pages in length in PDF format and using the IOS Press style files and authors’ guidelines at: IOS Press Author Instructions
Submit papers to: MPM 2011 on EasyChair
Publication: A call for selected extended versions of the papers will be issued for a special issue of AI and Law on Modelling Policy-making.
Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK) Neil Benn (University of Leeds, UK)
The Echo project is developing an open source e-participation platform for supporting “cross-language” policy dialogues on the Web, based on the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) model of argument. A beta version of the Echo system is online and open to the public and includes example argument maps and pilot projects. The goals and approach of the project are similar in some ways to those of our IMPACT project.
An Open Government Partnership was announced in July by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota. The aim of the partnership is to “secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.”
Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress
Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Georgetown University Law Center; University of California Irvine, School of Law
July 25, 2011
Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 74, pp. 1-30, 2011
UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2011-31
This essay explores how application of deliberative democracy and conflict resolution theories expose how the town hall meetings conducted on debates about recent American healthcare reform were poorly managed. The article suggests that for truly deliberative democracy to work, theory and practice must take account of three forms of discourse: rational-principled, bargaining-trading (utilitarian) and affective, emotional and value-based discourses. The article explores deliberative democracy and conflict resolution theory (e.g., Habermas, Hampshire), contrasts these to more nuanced analyses of what is possible in political deliberation processes (Elster, Sen, and Fishkin, among others) and describes how the town hall meetings were poorly executed in practice. Suggestions are offered for both theoretical issues (how are professional process experts, e.g. facilitators of consensus building fora to be justified in democratic theory) and practical variations on process themes, in the hopes that well structured and variable processes might still be designed and utilized for facilitating productive participation in the polity and more “consensus-seeking,” and better and more flexible policy outcomes, even in highly contested political issues.
Betz, G., & Cacean, S. (2011). The moral controversy about Climate Engineering – an argument map.
Retrieved from http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/1000022371
