CIPPIC and vLex want to correct power imbalance when it comes to policy making
OTTAWA – Canada’s CIPPIC and international legal technology firm, vLex want to reduce the barriers to effective public participation in communications policy and will do so by developing a free and fully public communications law and policy research platform, the two organizations announced today.
This initiative “aims to increase access and contextual understanding of regulatory, policy and legal submissions and documentation, allowing Canadian citizens to become more informed and more influential in a policy-making process that is often dominated by multi-billion dollar telecom and broadcasting giants,” reads the press release.
Built on Iceberg, vLex’s artifical-intelligence-powered technology and CIPPIC (the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, operated from the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law through its Centre for Law, Technology and Society) will train and deliver tools which “analyze thousands of documents comprising millions of pages generated across hundreds of regulatory, legislative, judicial and policy proceedings,” reads the release.
“All with the goal of arming the public with the capability to participate effectively and at a level previously available only to the largest commercial entities.”
The Canadian communications business is huge and have commensurate regulatory teams. The general public, and the understaffed and underfunded consumer groups which try to represent them, really can’t compete. They don’t have the resources to properly digest all of the research and submissions which go into the various Regulatory and governmental public proceedings to decide upon policy in Canada.
“There are few more striking examples of David and Goliath battles than Canadian communications policy debates. Individual members of the public, along with academics and often precariously-funded public interest organizations compete with multi-billion dollar telecom, internet, and international broadcasting giants to craft arguments and present evidence in a bid to shape government policy and communications regulation,” says the press release.
CIPPIC and vLex Canada seek to reduce the barriers to effective public participation in communications policy making through the use of artificial intelligence, a globally-proven legal intelligence platform and expert legal knowledge, they say. They also hope this project can be a foundation to support similar efforts in other policy arenas.
VLex already develops and delivers tools which enable millions of lawyers, law students, as well as court and government employees around the world to quickly access and work with the legal information resource contained within databases comprising over 120 million documents. “Through this initiative, vLex will deploy its Iceberg legal intelligence platform as well as an advanced research platform as the foundation of a free and fully public communications law and policy research tool,” adds the release.
This partnership is funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario and will see CIPPIC apply its expertise to an information collection and governance initiative that will transform hundreds of thousands of pages of policy submissions, CRTC and court decisions, legislative resources, and more into “inputs” suitable for advanced data mining, explains the release. Once ingested into the vLex Iceberg platform, vLex and third-party AI technologies will further refine and organize the data in ways that will uncover the insights previously only accessible through deploying armies of industry lawyers.
“Our objective in this project is to support CIPPIC’s ability to extend its expertise in distilling complex policy issues into frameworks that can accelerate their advocacy efforts and multiply their effectiveness,” said Colin Lachance, general manager of vLex North America. “This is so much more than merely building a single research tool, as we are supplying CIPPIC with the platform and training to allow them to easily generate new public interest apps, and to extend the framework into other policy domains.”
“The impetus for this collaboration with vLex was the government’s Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislation Review and the recognition that meaningful participation from the public is extremely challenging,” said David Fewer, general counsel of CIPPIC. “With over 2,000 submissions in just this one review, it’s not a simple task for the public, politicians or even the media to figure out who is saying what, and consequently it’s extraordinarily difficult to undertake thoughtful consideration of the issues and to communicate or consider the impact on the public of policy change.”
CIPPIC and vLex are now building a multi-stage plan with the first public beta version of the research tool planned for early in 2020, reads the release, aiming for a permanent research tool available within a year. Work is already completed on designing an information architecture suitable to the communications domain, and law students at CIPPIC are immersed in the data collection and tagging efforts.
(Ed note: This sounds like a darn good idea.)
