Transparent and Inclusive Policy Making (EE0048)

• Estonia Shifts from Online Consultation to Co-Creation (August 1, 2020)

Information technology supporting transparent and inclusive policy-making
Commitment Start and End Date
July 2018 – June 2020
Lead implementing agency/actor The Government Office
Other Actors Involved State actors involved All ministries, constitutional institutions and national associations of local governments
CSOs, private sector, multilaterals, working groups Network of Estonian Nonprofit Organizations, Estonian Cooperation Assembly, e-Governance Academy, etc.
Commitment description
What is the public problem that the commitment will address? The e-Consultation Information System (EIS) was introduced in 2011 to coordinate draft legislation between ministries and manage documents of the European Union. Back then, it was a unique information system combining three earlier ones that was also open for the public, enabling searching for information and commenting of draft legislations.
By now, the system is technically outdated and the expectations of the users, both officials and stakeholders, have increased. The stakeholders are interested in an open platform that would allow them to participate in the earlier stages of policy-making (not just in the final stage of coordinating or commenting documents) and observe the process history and forming of decisions. Although EIS has been developed further, e.g. by adding a notification function to share information regarding initiatives earlier than previously, the new functions are not used sufficiently and do not help in meeting the goal of allowing early access to the public. Additionally, instead of being user-friendly, the environment is slow and complex.
Another channel for participation in addition to EIS is osale.ee, which is also technologically outdated and insufficiently used.
What is the commitment? The Government Office in cooperation with other agencies, and stakeholders will define requirements for creating a new information system that would at least cover the functions of the current e-Consultation system and osale.ee.
How will the commitment contribute to solve the public problem? Defining the requirements together with stakeholders is a precondition for a new environment that would support transparent and inclusive policy-making and meet the needs of different users.
Which OGP values is this commitment relevant to? Transparency
Civic participation
Additional information Efforts to promote EIS as a main channel for participation will be continued while developing the new information system.
In addition to updating EIS, the Ministry of Justice has initiated the pre-analysis process necessary for developing a collaboration environment for policy makers. It is important that the possible new developments be seamlessly compatible.
Milestone Activity Start Date: End Date:
Assessing current situation and needs of the citizens, stakeholders and state agencies, including analysis of user experiences. July 2018 December 2018
Considering alternatives and describing the functions and interfacing of the new environment. January 2018 June 2019
Preparing terms of reference, including describing the requirements of the information system and making a prototype. January 2018 June 2020

1. Information technology supporting transparent and inclusive policy-making

Language of the commitment as it appears in the action plan [1]:

“The Government Office in cooperation with other agencies, and stakeholders will define requirements for creating a new information system that would at least cover the functions of the current e-Consultation system and osale.ee.”

Milestones:

1.1 Assessing current situation and needs of the citizens, stakeholders and state agencies, including analysis of user experiences

1.2 Considering alternatives and describing the functions and interfacing of the new environment

1.3 Preparing terms of reference, including describing the requirements of the information system and making a prototype

Start Date: April 2018

End Date: December 2019

Context and Objectives

This commitment continues the previous action plans’ work on increasing the transparency of public decision-making processes. According to the problem statement in the 2018-2020 action plan, CSOs often learn about the government’s plans too late in the policy cycle and lack information on when and how they can participate in policy-making processes. [2] The government’s e-participation platform Osale.ee has been in use since 2007 but users consider it to be outdated and unable to facilitate meaningful participation. [3] In 2011, the government adopted the Information System of Draft Acts (eelnõude infosüsteem or EIS) for inter-institutional coordination of draft legislation and other policy documents. Although the system is accessible to the public and allows any user to register and submit comments, users find the technical platform and user interface too difficult to use. [4] According to CSOs, the main gap that needs to be addressed is citizens’ lack of access to complete information on the process whereby proposals become an actual policy, and limited understanding of where and how the public can have a say. [5] Furthermore, information on the policy-making process in the executive branch is currently detached from the subsequent proceedings in the Parliament, making it difficult for the public to track the status of a policy initiative that interests them. [6]

The government has attempted to address the problem in previous OGP action plans by adding new functions to EIS and providing information on public participation opportunities across government websites in a standard format (see Commitment 2.2 in the 2016-2018 action plan [7]). However, the new action plan and the IRM End-of-Term Report [8] note that EIS’s new functionalities are barely used in practice and fail to provide the public with early access to policy processes. According to Kai Klandorf from NENO, government agencies sometimes add information about ongoing policy processes to EIS more than a year into the process, as recently happened with the new civil society development strategy. [9]

In order to address this problem, this commitment aims to prepare a new online tool that would aggregate the currently dispersed pieces of information into one user-friendly system. This system would enable citizens to track the status of policy initiatives throughout the policy cycle and participate in different stages of policy development. In addition to improving transparency, the system also aims to increase the efficiency of policymakers’ work flows and encourage policymakers to assess the impacts of policies before adopting them. [10] To this end, the government plans to engage government agencies and civil society in analyzing user needs and defining the requirements for the new system.

According to stakeholders’ assessment, the commitment clearly addresses the current gaps in government transparency and public participation. [11] Firstly, it aims to create a single access point for citizens and policymakers to the full cycle of policy development, reducing the burden of having to consult a number of different websites and information systems to acquire an overview of ongoing policy processes. Secondly, the government will prioritize the creation of an easy-to-use interface, aiming to engage experts and users to the system development from the outset. [12] This focus on usability has the potential to fix the shortcomings of the existing EIS that both CSOs and public officials have criticized. The government also foresees creating online participation opportunities for citizens in different phases of policy development, which citizens could access through that single window.

The description of the commitment in the action plan does not give a detailed overview of the exact methods that will be used for user engagement in the information system development. However, interviews with the Government Office [13] and the CSOs involved in the commitment’s implementation [14] suggest that the government has designed a participatory process that starts from involving different types of stakeholders and users through thematic working groups. The scope of this work not only involves discussing the desired functionalities of the new system but rethinking the policy development process more deeply from the perspective of different stakeholders. [15] Since several government information systems that contain information about different parts of the policy development (EIS, Osale.ee, State Gazette) need updating, and the Ministry of Justice is planning a new online legislative drafting tool for policymakers, this commitment aims to link all these developments together to ensure the systems’ compatibility, interoperability and integration. [16] As evidence of an integrated approach, the government has given the responsibility for coordinating the first phase of the development process and stakeholder consultations to its inter-departmental innovation team. [17] As planned, this commitment therefore constitutes a notable shift towards a citizen-centric and whole-of-government approach to policy making that has been previously lacking.

The commitment includes verifiable milestones that are reasonable given the complexity of information system development. Although the intended outputs of the two-year action plan (requirements and a first prototype of the new system) only constitute the first steps in the process, the commitment has the potential to transform policy-making practice towards a whole-of-government approach, provided that the activity is continued in the next action plans.

Next steps

If implemented in practice, the planned steps constitute a good basis for reaching the intended goals. However, in order to unlock the transformative potential of this commitment, the following recommendations could be considered:

• First, it is important that the activity is continued in the next action plan(s) with a clear statement of the desired impact on government openness and the time perspective in which this impact would be achieved. The commitment wording in the next action plan should clearly describe the activities and milestones for the two-year action plan but also provide an outlook on the next steps that would be taken in future action plans. This gives the public a better understanding of the contribution of each milestone and action plan to the final outcome (change in government practices), which may require more than one action plan cycle to achieve.
• In order to reduce the risks of adoption failure, it is important to engage different groups of users into all phases of the system design to shape the system according to their expectations. This may be challenging – for example, CSOs expect the system to be able to send customized notifications based on the user’s interests, show who gave input to policy and how the government responded, [18] and allow comments. [19] Hence, the government is encouraged to dedicate ample time and human resources to facilitating feedback collection from different types of users. The Estonian Chamber of Disabled People recommends information system developers also consult with the Estonian Blind Union to ensure the system’s usability for visually impaired people. [20] They also suggest government institutions provide summaries of policy documents in plain language to enable the participation of people with hearing disabilities for whom Estonian is a “foreign” language.
• The application of agile development practices and an iterative approach to system development could be a good way of integrating user feedback into the core of the process. Working through a number of quick cycles of prototyping and feedback can help speed up the learning process and reduce the risk of failing to meet user needs.
• The government should also prioritize the system’s integration with the platforms that citizens commonly use. Teele Pehk, former director of the Estonian Cooperation Assembly, suggests that integration with the Eesti.ee single window for citizens should be key. [21]
• Even though a well-designed technological solution may do a lot for transparency and engagement, the barriers to citizen participation are often not technological. It is therefore important that the government continues developing policymakers’ skills regarding public engagement. The training program conducted under Commitment 2 in this action plan is a useful step in this direction. In addition, the government could consider providing funding to increase the volume of ministries’ public engagement projects and CSOs’ capacity-building initiatives, such as those funded under the previous action plan. [22]

1. Information technology supporting transparent and inclusive policy-making

Aim of the commitment

This commitment sought to increase citizens’ access to information on public decision-making processes and enable citizen participation in the early stages of the policy cycle. To this end, the government committed to developing a new online workspace that would enable citizens to track the status of policy initiatives across the policy cycle and participate in different stages of policy making. [1] The new system would address three main problems: fragmentation of information on the policy-making process between various institutions and information systems, government institutions’ tendency to share information about new policy initiatives too late to enable meaningful public participation, and the technical and functional shortcomings of existing e-participation platforms such as Osale.ee or the Information System of Draft Acts.

Did it open government?

Major

By the end of the action plan period, the government’s inter-institutional task force [2] conducted six multi-stakeholder test groups, each involving five to six governmental and non-governmental users, to gather input for the online policy drafting and co-creation workspace. [3] This engagement involved identifying bottlenecks in the policy-drafting process and mapping user requirements for the prototype. [4] The task force then delivered a long-term vision, description of requirements, and an initial low-fidelity prototype of the new policy-drafting workspace, thus fully meeting this action plan’s objectives. [5] The government launch of this prototype with limited functionalities was scheduled for the end of 2020. [6] In reality, the last developments of the initial product are still being made in the first months of 2021. The task force aims to start testing the system with first users in March 2021. [7]

Due to the ambition of this commitment to integrate various types of policy initiatives and various parts of the public policy-making process into one transparent and collaborative process, the government has divided the commitment into smaller steps to be completed in the framework of several consecutive OGP action plans. In the fifth action plan, the government plans to launch the first module of the online workspace – a limited-access working space for policy drafting and co-creation. [8] Since public officials currently often store different versions of policy drafts on their own computer and collect stakeholder input via email, public officials expect a joint co-creation environment to meet an important practical need. [9] Once the first module is in place, the sixth action plan will focus on developing the system’s public interface with information and participation opportunities for the broader public. [10]

Because of this step-by-step approach, ultimate changes in the government’s policy-making practice can only be assessed after the completion of the next action plans. Given the current fragmentation of different steps of the policy cycle and gaps in public access to information on the government’s work, creating a single window for policy making and participation could radically improve access to information and civic participation. Despite the early stage of implementation, the first results indicate that the government is dedicated to following through with the commitment and has already made major efforts to put advancing public access to information and civic participation first.

As mentioned above, the task force worked both on developing a long-term vision and the first technical measures during the fourth action plan period. [11] During the commitment’s implementation, the task force engaged public officials and non-governmental stakeholders, such as the Chamber of Commerce, Network of Estonian Nonprofit Organizations (NENO), e-Governance Academy and Estonian Cooperation Assembly, to discuss the needs, develop the requirements and test the prototype of the workspace. [12] The resulting long-term vision foresees two main functions for the workspace: 1) a ‘closed’ working environment where policymakers and selected stakeholders can co-create policy drafts, and 2) a public interface that enables citizens to participate in public consultations and track the status of policy initiatives from first preparations in government up to eventual adoption and publication. The government plans to continue the development process using an agile development methodology, [13] engaging users in continuous testing and improvement of the system. [14]

The task force also began soliciting stakeholders’ views on how the policy-making process should be redesigned for greater integration between various stages and institutions. [15] The task force plans to continue these discussions at a more concrete level in spring 2021, when it is possible to demonstrate the first usable prototype of the workspace co-creation functionalities. [16]

According to NENO, civil society organizations (CSOs) are satisfied with the first results and quality of public engagement in the commitment implementation. [17] The commitment has strong potential to change government practices if different institutions are willing to continue the collaboration that started in the fourth action plan period. In interviews with the IRM researcher, representatives from the Ministry of Justice and the Government Office also emphasized this commitment’s contribution to fostering public officials’ understanding of policy making as a process of co-creation. This focus is reflected in the choice of the system’s name – the State Co-creation Environment (Riigi koosloome keskkond) – selected as a result of a public idea competition. [18] The steps taken so far have therefore laid the groundwork for major improvements in public access to information and participation in the policy-making process.