Uudised

Online platform received 1595 proposals to change Estonian legislation

laine uudised-laine
4. Feb 2013

Thursday was the last day for posting and commenting proposals for change of legislation on the online platform People’s Assembly (www.rahvakogu.ee) that was launched in the beginning of the year.

The website has received 1595 proposals, 1787 people have logged in and the site has attracted 57 031 unique visits from more than 500 cities in over 70 countries.

The online platform People's Assembly (Rahvakogu) was launched just over three weeks ago for crowd-sourcing ideas and proposals to amend Estonia’s electoral laws, political party law, and other issues related to the future of democracy in Estonia. 

Of the five questions that are the focus of the assembly the electoral system has received most proposals and comments (517), financing of political parties has received 217 proposals to be followed by the role of civic society (176), internal democracy of political parties (107) and politicization of public offices (60).

From now on analysts will group the over thousand proposals and comments into bundles of different possible scenarios and provide them with impact analysis.

On 6th April 2013 at the “deliberation day” the most preferred scenarios will be selected at a public meeting of around 500 people representing all demographic and social categories of Estonian population.

The proposals selected at the “deliberation day” will then be presented to the parliament, Riigikogu, by the President of the Republic.  

„Even the risk of the 500-member meeting being a disappointment isn’t a good reason enough not at least to try it,“ says Urmo Kübar, the head of NGO alliance NENO. He is convinced that „people’s disappointment in politics is severe already.“

The People’s Assembly is organized by volunteers from various non-governmental organizations, such as Estonian Cooperation Assembly, the Praxis Centre for Policy Studies, an NGO alliance NENO, the e-Governance Academy, the Open Estonia Foundation, as well as political parties, IT and communications specialists, and others.

The code of Rahvakogu.ee is based on the platform Citizens.is of Iceland created by Robert Bjarnason and Gunnar Grimsson. We are grateful to them for sharing the code and giving valuable advice.