I am always interested in Finnish initiatives (they are often very innovative), since acquiring a soft spot for Finland when I was working in the northern part of that country on a European project. I thoroughly recommend a presentation that I came across recently, which explains a crowdsourced lawmaking project in the shape of an “Open Ministry”.

You can listen to the audio presentation here, originally given at a lunchtime lecture at the Open Data Institute in London, and I recommend you download the (great) slides here to accompany the audio recording.

Aleksi Rossi gives a clear overview of the project, and includes a particular example of copyright law reform, as well as explaining how the initiative may be extended to other countries such as Slovakia and Italy – where it is to be used to remove some of the surfeit of laws (see this post). It is also engaging with European institutions.

From a linguistic point of view, he describes some technology that performs semantic similarity analysis – which is used to try to gather together similar ideas from the crowd. The technology is being made available as Open Source.

Enjoy!