Fact Card is a series of posts summarising crowdsourcing and public decision making initiatives relevant to our project. Please post a comment or email us with any clarification.

What?
Avoin Ministeriö (‘Open Ministry’) started on 1 March 2012 in accordance with the new Citizens’ Initiative Act. Avoin Ministeriö is a crowd sourcing platform for citizens. Anyone can post their ideas as suggestions for new acts and comment on other users’ ideas with their own name.

How does it work?

• Avoin Ministeriö facilitates the crowd sourcing process and provides collaboration tools enabling citizens to develop their ideas into actual law proposals
• Registered users can submit proposals which are debated and refined as the discussion goes further. The ideas and comments submitted to the service are under a Creative Commons license
• Registered members can also vote for (or against) the proposals
• The best ideas are refined into initiatives which are evaluated by volunteer experts
• Law proposals are submitted to the Parliament after the required 50,000 signatures have been collected online

Who’s involved?
Citizens and volunteers behind Avoin Ministeriö (Avoin Ministeriö is a non-government related service)

What’s new?
The first online portal in Finnish to take advantage of the Citizens’ Initiative Act

Status:
Active. The first phase of the website includes basic functions. More functions and tools are being developed by volunteers. Some 130 initiatives were posted during the first 2 months. No initiatives have been passed forward to the parliament yet since electronic signature (coming soon) has not been enabled and signatures in favor of acts cannot be verified.

Website:
http://www.avoinministerio.fi