Manybills.us + Commons for Europe + Law Is Code

Description

Open Government, Transparency and Visualization: Lessons Learned in Visualizing US Congressional Legislation

Time: 11:30-12:00

Manybills.us is a publicly accessible, web based visualization of US Congressional Legislation that combines machine learning and visualization to make long complex documents more approachable. In this session we will discuss the goals, design and implementation of the visualization. We also reflect on our experience releasing the tool to the public and what we learned about visualization and its potential implications for transparency and citizen engagement.

Commons for Europe: Orchestrating Collaboration with Coders and Citizens

Time: 12:00-12:30

Commons for Europe brings the successful Code for America to Helsinki, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, UK-NESTA and Manchester. Set up as a fellowship program the project allows cities to make use of the capacity and skills of data technologists, and shows them how citizens are best able to contribute to new city services. Miriam Reitenbach and Ivonne Jansen-Dings from Waag Society in Amsterdam elaborate on the idea and implementation of the Commons for Europe program. We will show best practices and tools that can help bring together programmers and city authorities to create a new ecosystem which results in a range of new digital applications for citizens.

Law Is Code: parliament amendments as commits

Time: 12:30-13:00

Let’s reverse Lessig’s metaphor and pretend that Law is Code! Do we make the law more understandable if we use developper’s tools? Can we discover political facts out of these tools? Governments submit initial drafts, then debugged by Parliaments which vote amendments just like developers propose patches. Our project, realized with people from Sciences po university, aims to transform all these steps to open legislative data, in order to track the evolution of a law through a version-control system (such as Git) where each amendment will be an individual commit.

Session Host

Joonas Pekkanen

Contributors

Yannick Assogba, Research Developer at IBM Research , http://clome.info, @tafsiri

Ivonne Jansen-Dings and Miriam Reitenbach from Waag Society, twitter: @commons4europe

Tangui Morlier, Cofounder of Regards Citoyens, Twitter:@RegardsCitoyens, contact (at) regardscitoyens.org

Bios

Yannick Assogba: Yannick Assogba is a Research Developer at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. He is interested in the design of novel data visualizations and visual interfaces. He joined IBM in 2009 after graduating with a Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab. His graduate work included developing tools for enabling and motivating cooperation via code sharing within physically distributed, network-mediated developer communities. As well as lightweight personal informatics and data visualization to support online identity and social communication. Prior to the Media Lab, He worked within an artistic context at OBX Labs, in the area of dynamic typography and its integration with real time human performance. He also holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Concordia University, Montreal. http://manybills.us, http://research.ibm.com/visual

Commons for Europe:

Ivonne Jansen-Dings: Working as an open data project manager at the knowledge institute Waag Society in Amsterdam (www.waag.org), Ivonne has collaborated on many projects and challenges involving Open Data, like Apps for the Netherlands (www.appsvoornederland.nl), Arts Holland (http://dev.artsholland.com) and Open Cities (www.opencities.net). Currently she is running the second iteration of the Apps for Amsterdam competition, bringing civil servants, developers, startups and academia together to create apps using the cities open data.
Miriam Reitenbach: Miriam is an experienced usability researcher for the knowledge institute Waag Society in Amsterdam (www.waag.org). Last year the ‘users as designers’ guidebook was published (http://waag.org/en/node/229), showing the research and development method of Waag Society, emphasizing the involvement of the end user in the design process. Miriam has been actively involved in a wide range of project on healthcare, creative learning and open data.

 

Regards Citoyens: Regards Citoyens is a french association formed of multiple diverses citizens over France working together to promote, reuse and create Open Data in order to help citizens understand better our democratic institutions. Regards Citoyens actively promotes public Open Data in France since 2009. In addition to popularizing Open Data principles in France, the members of this association create web projects using public data with Free and Open Source Software in order to provide tools for a better dialogue between citizens and representatives and a better understanding of the French democratic institutions. Their most known initiative is a parliamentary monitoring website: www.NosDéputés.fr

Details

Location: INSPIRE Meeting Room

Date & Time: Wed 19th, 11:30-13:00

Target Group:

Topic Stream: Open Democracy and Citizen Movements

Session Etherpad page: