Call for Papers: Jurix Workshop on Modelling Policy-making

JURIX Workshop on Modelling Policy-making (MPM 2011)

September 18th, 2011 

Vienna, Austria

in conjunction with

The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011) 

December 12 or 13 (TBA), 2011

Context

As the European Union develops, issues about governance, legitimacy, and transparency become more pressing. Increasingly, national governments and the EU Commission realise the need to promote deliberative, distributive democracy, where citizens participate in the policy cycle, which has several phases: 1) agenda setting, 2) policy analysis, 3) lawmaking, 4) administration and implementation, and 5) monitoring. As governments need to become more efficient and effective with the resouces available, modern information and communications technology (ICT) are being drawn on to address some of these issues. One of the key problems is policy content analysis and modelling, particularly the gap between policy proposals and formulations, expressed in quantitative and narrative forms, and formal models that can be used to systematically represent and reason with the information contained in the proposals and formulations.

Submission Focus

The workshop invites submissions of original research about the application of ICT to the early phases of the policy cycle, namely those before the legislation is fixed by the legislators: agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking. The research should seek to address the gap noted above. The workshop focusses particularly on using and integrating a range of subcomponents – information extraction, processing, representation, modelling, simulation, reasoning, and argument – to provide policy making tools to the public and public administrators.

Intended Audience

Legal professionals, government administrators, political scientists, and computer scientists.

Areas of Interest

• information extraction from natural language text
• policy ontologies
• formal logical representations of policies
• transformations from policy language to executable policy rules
• argumentation about policy proposals
• web-based tools that support participatory policy-making
• tools for increasing public understanding of arguments behind policy decisions
• visualising policies and arguments about policies
• computational models of policies and arguments about policies
• integration tools
• multi-agent policy simulations

Important Dates

• Submission: Monday, October 24
• Review Notification: Monday, November 7
• Final Version: Monday, November 28
• Workshop Date: in the week of December 12

Author Guidelines

Submit position papers of between 2-5 pages in length in PDF format and using the IOS Press style files and authors’ guidelines at: IOS Press Author Instructions
Submit papers to: MPM 2011 on EasyChair
Publication: A call for selected extended versions of the papers will be issued for a special issue of AI and Law on Modelling Policy-making.

Program Committee Cochairs

• Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK) 
• Neil Benn (University of Leeds, UK)

Program Committee (Preliminary)

• Katie Atkinson
• Trevor Bench-Capon
• Bruce Edmonds
• Tom van Engers
• Euripidis Loukis
• Tom Gordon
• Ann Macintosh
• Maria Wimmer
• Radboud Winkels