Drafting

Lawmaking involves turning good ideas into written proposals for a bill. This provides an opportunity to solicit comments on a draft in an effort to improve it collaboratively. Designed well, processes that invite the public to participate in drafting help raise new issues for legislators and ensure that drafts more effectively reflect the concerns of the people who will be impacted by them. Here, engagement opportunities allow residents to collaboratively write, comment on, and document draft legislations or regulations. For example, WikiLegis enables Brazilians to edit draft legislative text in a manner analogous to collaboratively working in a Google Doc. At this stage, giving the public insight into the drafting process through online participation gives lawmakers the potential to enhance transparency.

• Web-based annotation platforms
These are tech tools that enable people to mark up web pages and other online documents in much the same way as hard copy documents. People can suggest edits to and make comments about content with the content owner holding final approval for accepting or rejecting changes. Some annotation platforms have settings that allow you to seek public comments and display these while keeping a selected subset of comments (e.g. from invited experts) private and only visible to that group.
• Blockchain-based petitions
These are online petitions that lower the potential for fraud by utilizing a technology called a blockchain that securely stores information. First, the blockchain establishes the identity of signatories (often with reference to a unique identification number issued by government for taxation purposes or similar). Then the blockchain creates an immutable and verifiable record of signatures where each signature is directly attached to the identity of the signatory.