1. CROWDLAW | PREFACE

The goal of this paper is to help the Assembly of the Community of Madrid, the legislature governing one of the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain, and the 179 Ayuntamientos (“City Councils”) within the Madrid region to (1) develop the capacity design and (2) use public engagement to improve the quality, effectiveness and legitimacy of the lawmaking process.¹

This is a draft version of the report (dated October 12, 2017) and will be updated in November.

The project was undertaken at the request of the leaders of Podemos — one of Spain’s largest political parties with a track record for campaigning using open and participatory practices — who solicited the advice of the Governance Innovation Clinic at Yale Law School and the Governance Lab at New York University. Podemos as a political party was born of a two-month long Citizens’ Assembly (Vistalegre I), “an unprecedented exercise in direct democracy,” in which over 100,000 people took part online and offline in developing the party platform.² ³ Supplemented by additional online platforms from Plaza Podemos to Impulsa to garner crowdsourced support, ideas, and funding over the past three years, Podemos has demonstrated the value and potential for online public engagement to help build a movement that has forever changed the face of Spain’s political system. Yet despite the success of crowdsourced campaigning, online engagement in governing has often been less successful.

Having pioneered the use of campaigning tools in Spanish politics, Podemos now hopes to cement the rise of “citizen politics” in Spain and thus is seeking advice in connection with legal and technological strategies for the Community of Madrid’s regional and 179 municipal governments (the Assembly and City Councils, respectively) to engage the public in lawmaking (“crowdlaw”). Under the guidance of Professor Beth Simone Noveck (Clinic Professor and Director of The GovLab), and with the support of independent advisors from Harvard University and GIGAPP, the team has developed this report in an effort to:

1. Articulate the value of crowdlaw for democracy.
2. Identify and analyze crowdlaw practices from around the world that might help guide further design and development of crowdlaw practices in Spain. These global case studies include both best practices and insights about what to avoid.
3. Draw on knowledge of current practices to offer a series of recommendations for the design of crowdlaw at each stage of the legislative process.
4. Research existing legal frameworks and, by combining knowledge of these laws with insights drawn from the case studies, design model legislation for public engagement.
5. Craft a research agenda on crowdlaw, laying out the questions that need to be studied and the mechanisms for doing so in order to understand empirically the impact of crowdlaw on legislative institutions, the public and political culture.

During the Clinic’s semester-long engagement Spring 2017, followed by The GovLab’s continued work during Summer 2017, we drew upon: learnings from three conferences on crowdlaw run by GovLab in 2015–16,⁴ interviews with parliamentarians and platform creators conducted between 2015–2017, surveys of parliamentarians conducted at the ParlAmericas conference in Costa Rica in April 2017,⁵ and extensive bench research on participatory democracy, public engagement, and online public participation. This research has led to a theoretical foundation, an initial taxonomy to use in analyzing crowdlaw practices and software platforms and, above all, the early formation of a community of researchers and practitioners interested in promoting and study the infusion of lawmaking with more participatory democracy.

-Gabriella Capone and Beth Noveck