Project Overview - Ruang-Opini/ruang-opini GitHub Wiki

Indonesia has so many regulations and policies, coming from various categories, types, region levels, and so on. They are created in order to manage how people live in society. The legislature, for sure, is the party that has the right to create Undang-Undang. The policies which apply on the regional level are created by the district head itself.

There are 5 stages in forming laws and regulations (peraturan perundang-undangan) which include the stages of planning, preparation, discussion, ratification or stipulation, and promulgation. Each stage must be based on the principle of openness, which is transparent and open so that all levels of society have the widest opportunity to provide input in forming laws and regulations. The principle of openness is a consequence of the understanding of people's sovereignty adopted by the Indonesian state. This encourages community involvement in the administration of the state, one of which is the formation of laws (Undang-Undang).

Public participation in forming laws actually has been regulated in Pasal 96 UU 12/2011 and its derivative rules. Therefore, the government has an obligation to announce to the public about the “progenies” as a plan of forming a new policy. This aims to gather the public's suggestions toward the new policy. The public could contribute in the planning stage by suggesting directly or sending letters to legislators before the discussion of “progenies” happened. When the discussion first stage happens, the public is involved again in giving input to the legislature.

However, lately, for about the past 3 years, there are so many protest actions toward either policy drafts or poor law enforcement. Hashtags like #GejayanMemanggil, #TolakRUUKUHP, #TolakOmnibusLaw, and so many more have successfully claimed their place on Twitter trending for a few days. The public expressed their disappointment, either through the action on roads or through words by tweeting. They also pointed out several “problematic” points in policy drafts.

This kind of act gained a lot of attention all over the country, even abroad. Public thoughts: the forming of policies lacks public participation. The openness and the transparency now becoming a big question. This leads the public to have trust issues with the government.

From this concern, we initiated our first Android application: Ruang Opini. The goal is to become a discussion place for the public with policy-focused. The discussion than would be processed by sentiment analysis to show the result of public opinions toward specific government policies. We also have provided the document references so the public could use them to acknowledge themselves to the policies that exist. But, as the initial data of processing, we process the sentiment toward Twitter data first to get policy trending, percentage of user responses which is positive or negative toward certain trending and get the percentage of buzzers on that trending. We choose Twitter as our initial data because Twitter is well-known as a platform that is good enough for discussion. Moreover, it's big data that stores a lot of users’ tweets for every second. So, getting public opinion toward certain policies could be done.

For future development, we hope we could then provide the public with what we call a planning stage earlier since the public has no idea they could actually contribute to forming a policy. This is mainly because of the lack of notice from the government. We also hope the app would help the government to evaluate the policy or the implementation for better execution.