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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 

Policy Hacking
Citizen-based Policy-Making and Media Reform
ARNE HINT z, Cardiﬀ University, United Kingdom

MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 
Policy hacking is a media reform strategy that focuses on the citizen-based and self-organized development of policy alternatives. Rather than merely advocating for policy change, it focuses on analyzing existing and writing new laws and regu- lations. Two diﬀerent types of policy hacking are introduced here: (a) civil society- based policy reform initiatives that identify policy gaps and regulatory challenges, and assemble new legal or regulatory packages, and (b) policy hackathons that seek to understand and upgrade policies.
Bringing together policy amateurs from both activism and the wider public, policy hacking oﬀers new avenues for citizen engagement, crowdsourcing expertise, and the opening-up of traditionally closed political processes. Successful instances of policy hacking are often connected with traditional action repertoires and con- ditions, including protest and public pressure, the appropriate framing of issues, and the existence of policy windows.

Civil society–based advocacy has been a key factor for media reform. From local citizen initiatives to national campaign organizations and transnational civil society networks, nonstate actors have exerted pressure on policy-makers to respect communication rights, curb media concentration, legalize citizen and community media, reduce copyright restrictions, maintain an open Internet, and implement many other demands and concerns. Scholars have
 
analyzed strategies and practices of advocacy, and disciplines such as policy and social movement studies have developed a signiﬁcant body of theory that can explain motivations, tactics, necessary conditions, successes, and failures. They have observed how advocates use information, norms, and public pressure to convince policy-makers of a certain course of action, or try to alter their interests and align them with reform agendas. The role of advo- cacy has thereby been to provide input for a policy process that is controlled by established policy actors, typically in government and international insti- tutions.
Some civil society advocates have moved beyond normative interventions and the exercise of public pressure and have instead developed regulatory pro- posals, written legal text, and taken advantage of openings in policy debates that allow for open, collective, and crowd-sourced development of policies. Expanding, and potentially surpassing classic forms of advocacy, they have thus taken a more active role in the policy-making process and have tried to take law-making into their own hands.
In this chapter I explore these practices and new forms of interactions between advocates and the policy process. I will trace and investigate media reform initiatives that seek to change policy by developing new regulatory frameworks, rather than exerting normative and argumentative pressure, and that engage with media policy change through citizen- and grassroots-based do-it-yourself policy-making. I call this practice policy hacking, and discuss its backgrounds, characteristics, and possible implications for policy, advocacy, and, more broadly, democracy.
In the ﬁrst section of this chapter, I present theoretical and conceptual foun- dations, and discuss the context of multiactor and multilevel global governance from which policy hacking emerges. In the second section, I explore several cases of local and international policy hacking. In the ﬁnal section, I analyze key characteristics and implications of policy hacking. I investigate common- alities with technological development, review potential changes to how we understand policy change and civil society’s role, explore the international dimension of policy hacking, and ask whether this form of media reform activ- ism allows for more direct democratic interventions or whether it may actually have problematic implications for democracy.
Despite using the wording of hacking and code, this chapter does not pri- marily concern the use of technology for policy-making, and it is not exclu- sively about information and communications technology (ICT) policy. Rather, it describes and analyzes a particular set of practices that we ﬁnd in contemporary policy activism and that shows similarities with typical tech development practices of assembling, upgrading, and tinkering.
 
COMMUNICATION POLICY, AD V OCA CY, AND HA CKING 

The study of media and communication policy addresses the regulatory rules and norms that shape the media landscape, and explores how they are created, based on which values and interests, and how they shift. It encompasses the analysis of existing legislation, but also the process of policy-making as political negotiation between a variety of actors and interests. It highlights interactions between social forces, the conditions and environments of interaction, and prevalent societal norms and ideologies that underlie and advance speciﬁc policy trends (see Freedman 2008).
National policy increasingly intersects with developments taking place at other levels and is subject to both normative and material inﬂuences by a vari- ety of actors. Both the local and the national have “become embedded within more expansive sets of interregional relations and networks of power” (Held and McGrew 2003, 3) and policy-making is thus located at “diﬀerent and sometimes overlapping levels—from the local to the supra-national and global” (Raboy and Padovani 2010, 16). Policy debates such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) have experimented with new forms of multistakeholder processes that include nonstate actors such as civil society and the business sector. The vertical, central- ized, and state-based modes of traditional regulation have thus been comple- mented by collaborative horizontal arrangements, leading to “a complex ecology of interdependent structures” with “a vast array of formal and informal mecha- nisms working across a multiplicity of sites” (Raboy 2002, 6–7).
Civil society advocates have been able to use this complex environment for interventions in the “consensus mobilization” dynamics of policy debate (Kha- gram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002, 11). They deﬁne problems, set agendas, exert public pressure, hold institutions accountable, sometimes participate in multi- stakeholder policy development, and maintain signiﬁcant leverage by lending or withdrawing legitimacy to policy goals, decisions, and processes. The mix of strategies applied by advocates to inﬂuence policymaking includes, for exam- ple, the ability to create successful conceptual frames to articulate the charac- teristics of an issue to policy-makers, potential allies, and the wider public. Framing an issue makes it comprehensible to the audience, attracts attention, and makes it ﬁt with predominant perspectives in an institutional venue (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Further, advocates have created networks and collabora- tions across movements, both domestically and transnationally, and alliances both within and outside the institutional arena that help shift predominant institutional ideologies as well as public opinion. Policy scholars have observed that interventions are greatly enhanced by the existence of a “policy window,” that is, a favorable institutional, political, and sometimes ideological setting that
 
provides a temporary opening for aﬀecting policy change (Kingdon 1984). International conferences can provide such a window of opportunity, as can unforeseen revelations, catastrophes, economic crises, and political change. A crisis in the social, economic, or ideological system can cause disunity among political elites and create a dynamic in which established social orders become receptive to change. “Policy monopolies”—stable conﬁgurations of policy actors—may be weakened or broken up as political constellations change and the balance of power shifts (Meyer 2005).
Strategies and action repertoires like these have been applied and observed, and favorable conditions have been exploited, across diﬀerent policy ﬁelds and disciplines. However, this perspective on policy interventions has also been criticized as too limited to encompass the full range of responses by activists and civil society groups to policy windows and policy challenges. Two (related) sets of limitations concern (a) the range actors involved in this form of advocacy, and (b) the range of tactics and approaches. As for the former, classic advocacy has typically centered around the activities of large, professionalized nongovern- mental organizations (NGOs) which are better resourced than smaller activist groups, enjoy easier access to policy institutions that are often highly selective in inviting civil society actors to policy debates and are tightly constraining those actors’ inﬂuence on policy results (Wilkinson 2002). Social movement scholar- ship has been criticized for its strong focus on these forms of “organised civil society” (de Jong, Shaw, and Stammers 2005), and networked governance arrangements that include such actors in multistakeholder policy processes have been described as “neo-corporatism” (Messner and Nuscheler 2003; McLaugh- lin and Pickard 2005). Even at the UN WSIS summit, which was celebrated as highly inclusive and innovative, opportunities of participation for less formal- ized sections of civil society were limited, thereby excluding many experimental, grassroots- and activist-oriented practices of infrastructure development that form important parts of “information society” (Hintz 2009). New informal connections, loose collaborations, and temporary alliances among engaged individuals—which have been termed “connective action” (Bennett and Seger- berg 2012) and “organised networks” (Lovink and Rossiter 2005)—have had little opportunity to be involved in the process, even though they are increas- ingly recognized as complementing “organised civil society.”
Secondly, classic advocacy neglects the many forms of preﬁgurative action
that exist in media activism and technological development. Technical com- munities have long engaged in latent and invisible “policy-making” by practi- cally setting technical standards and developing new protocols and infrastructure that allow some actions and disallow others (see Braman 2006; DeNardis 2009). Media activists, equally, have focused on the creation of an alternative infrastructure that bypasses regulatory obstacles, rather than lobbying against those obstacles. Instead of campaigning for privacy rights and against online
 
surveillance, many of them develop communication platforms (e.g., e-mail services and social media) that respect user privacy, and instead of advocating for community media legalization, many of them broadcast their own unli- censed (“pirate”) radio. This preﬁgurative approach challenges the classic divi- sion of repertoires of action, as suggested by social movement scholars, into “insider” and “outsider” strategies (see Banaszak 2005; Tarrow 2005), where insiders interact cooperatively with power-holders through advocacy and lob- bying while outsiders question the legitimacy of power-holders and address them through protest and disruptive action. Preﬁgurative action, in contrast, interacts with the policy environment neither inside nor outside institutional or governmental processes, but beyond those processes by creating alternatives to hegemonic structures and procedures and by adopting a tactical repertoire of circumvention (Hintz and Milan 2010; Milan 2013).
Hacking as it is commonly understood—as changing, manipulating, revis- ing, or upgrading a technological system, such as a computer or wider com- munication infrastructure—plays a role in the beyond approach as it means to bypass restrictions and enable new uses. However, the more established deﬁni- tions of hacking allow for a broader perspective. According to the requests for comments (RFCs) that have accompanied the development of the Internet, a computer hacker is “a person who delights in having an intimate understand- ing of the internal workings of a system, computers, and computer networks in particular” (Network Working Group 1993). Based on curiosity, a “positive lust to know” (Sterling 1992) and a search for innovation, a hacker thus seeks to understand a complex system and to experiment with its components, often with the aim of changing or modifying its structure. This system can be broader than a narrowly conﬁned computer system. The trend of civic hacking, for example, has applied the notion of hacking and its practice of making, creat- ing, and tinkering as a method to change social, cultural, and political aspects of one’s environment. Beyond the realm of technological applications, science- and bio-hacking have encompassed amateur scientiﬁc experiments, and life sciences have opened up to do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches that exhibit simi- larities with hacker ethics (Delfanti 2013). The development of alternative licenses such as the Creative Commons license has applied this DIY practice to the legal realm (Coleman 2009), and activist practices such as culture jamming and the manipulation of meanings (e.g., of advertising) have been discussed as a form of hacking of our cultural, social, and political environment (Harold 2004). Whether the main concern is the enclosure of scientiﬁc knowledge, restrictions through proprietary software, or copyright limitations to cultural practices, questions of control and participation are at the center of hacking. Hacking thus becomes a way of discussing questions of openness and enclo- sure, and of exploring new ways for enhancing participation, public interven- tion and grassroots-based development—not just in the realm of ICT systems
 
but in the wider reaches of society. In the following section, I take a brief journey through several localities, countries, and regions to explore whether these characteristics of hacking can be applied to the policy ﬁeld.

FR OM L OCAL TO TRANSNATIONAL POLICY 
The ﬁrst stop of our journey is the city of Hamburg in Northern Germany. As activists, in 2010, tried to investigate a scandal over public spending for a new opera house, they realized that necessary data was unobtainable and was instead stored in a data room to which only selected local government members and parliamentarians had access. Unhappy with the result, they brought together a coalition of local and national NGOs, including Transparency International, Mehr Demokratie (an initiative for participatory and direct democracy) and the Chaos Computer Club (a group of hackers and technology experts). Together, they created the Hamburg Transparency Law Initiative with the goal to have all public data, such as the contracts and ﬁnancial commitments regarding the opera house, publicized and made accessible to citizens without the need for speciﬁc requests and without the possibility to keep information secret—a radi- cal open data law for the city.
Rather than starting an advocacy campaign to put pressure on the city coun- cil to create and pass a transparency law, the members of the initiative decided to write the law themselves. Without signiﬁcant legal knowledge, they approached an experienced lawyer who suggested drafting the law for a fee. However, they envisaged the policy project as a participatory process that involved citizens. So they drafted the core of a law, published it on a wiki page, and invited other civil society organizations and members of the public to comment and develop it. The ﬁnal product was handed over to the local gov- ernment and all political parties. After a series of negotiations and revisions, the local parliament unanimously adopted the law in June 2012 (Lentfer 2013). Thus the initiative generated signiﬁcant policy change not by merely demanding it but by developing its core components themselves, and in an open and participatory process. A key part of this endeavor was a review of best practices in other German states (Länder) and other European countries. Com- ponents of information laws in, for example, Berlin and Slovakia were used for the Hamburg proposal. The new law did not emerge from scratch but was based on existing experiences and incorporated established legal language. Since the successful conclusion of their campaign, the group has advised orga- nizations and coalitions in other states and in Austria. Several of these have managed to draft laws for their speciﬁc localities, often using components from
the Hamburg law, and to have them adopted by government (Lentfer 2013).
From the local space of a city council, we move to the national level, stop- ping ﬁrst in a country with, actually, far less inhabitants than the city of Ham-
 
burg—Iceland. The ﬁnancial collapse of the Icelandic economy in late 2008 oﬀered the backdrop for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) to emerge. Set up by local social and media activists, including tech developers and Internet experts, and supported by international civil society organiza- tions, its goal was to change no less than the development model of the country which until then, had thrived as a safe haven for banks and ﬁnancial services. Instead of the secrecy and the suppression of information that accompanied the old model that had become disastrous for Iceland’s economy, society, and democracy, IMMI aimed at transforming Iceland into a transparency haven and a favorable environment for media and investigative journalism.
As in Hamburg, the strategy was not merely to demand but to develop new policy. IMMI created a bundle of legal and regulatory proposals, with the aim to “protect and strengthen modern freedom of expression” (IMMI 2012). These included the development of a new Freedom of Information Act to enhance access for journalists and the public to government-held information and to end the previous culture of secrecy, and measures to limit libel tourism, prior restraint, and strategic law suits that serve to block legitimate information. The group also initiated a new law on source protection, making it illegal for media organizations to expose the identity of sources for articles, books, and other formats, if the source or the author requested anonymity. IMMI has developed policy proposals on whistleblower and intermediary protection, it has made proposals on safeguarding net neutrality, and IMMI activists have engaged with debates on the European Data Retention Directive and, more broadly, surveil- lance (Gudmundsson 2011). IMMI was adopted in principle by the Icelandic Parliament in 2010, and many of its components have been implemented since then. The IMMI package, if fully implemented, would provide a legal environ- ment that protects not just national but potentially international publishers. All information originating from (or routed through) Iceland would be governed by the new set of laws and therefore be more diﬃcult to suppress. Blogs, web- sites, and all kinds of online publications would thereby fall under Icelandic jurisdiction and be less vulnerable to censorship (Bollier 2010).
The practice of cherry-picking laws and regulations from other jurisdictions,
which we have seen in Hamburg, was implemented more excessively in Iceland. IMMI created a puzzle of tried-and-tested components, including, for example, parts of the Belgian source protection law, the Norwegian Freedom of Informa- tion Act, Swedish laws on print regulation and electronic commerce, the EU Privacy Directive, the New York Libel Terrorism Act, or the Constitution of Georgia (IMMI 2012). It was supported by a wide-open window of opportunity, as the economic breakdown had aﬀected large parts of the population and the secrecy of banks was widely debated and criticized. A signiﬁcant section of the public was in favor of a radically new model, parts of the old political class were delegitimized, thus traditional policy monopolies were broken, new social actors
 
were swept into politics and helped facilitate the adoption of the new laws in Parliament.
While the previous two examples were inspired by the possibilities of new digital media, similar practices exist in relation to a more traditional broadcast environment. The Argentinian Coalition for Democratic Broadcasting emerged in 2004 as a civil society coalition to campaign for a new national audiovisual media law and to replace the old law which stemmed from the times of the military dictatorship. Bringing together unions, universities, human rights groups, and community media, the coalition developed a set of key demands to serve as core pieces of a new policy framework, and a coalition member and university professor was charged by the government to draft a law based on this input. The ﬁrst draft was discussed at twenty-eight open hearings, comments by civil society groups were included in the document, and a dem- onstration of twenty thousand people brought the ﬁnal text to Parliament where it was adopted, making it a true “law of the people” (Loreti 2011).
The resulting Law 26.522 on Audio-Visual Communication Services, adopted in 2009, broke radically with established policy traditions. In particu- lar, the law recognizes three sectors of broadcasting—state, commercial, and not-for-proﬁt—and guarantees a 33 percent share of the radio frequency spec- trum for each sector, making it “one of the best references of regulatory frame- works to curtail media concentration and promote and guarantee diversity and pluralism,” according to World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC 2010). Applying similar strategies as the initiatives in the previous two cases, the coalition did not write the new policy framework from scratch but drew heavily on existing legal frameworks and policy documents, both from international institutions (for example, the UNESCO Media Develop- ment Indicators and the UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression) and from civil society organizations (such as a model legal framework developed by AMARC called Principles on Democratic Regulation of Community Broad- casting [2008]). Just as the new law in Hamburg has inspired initiatives else- where, the Argentinian law has become a model law for the region. Groups and coalitions elsewhere have tried to replicate this model in their countries, thus inﬂuencing legislative development across the region (see Klinger 2011).
Neighboring Uruguay has hosted similar policy innovations, created through similar processes. A new law that legalized community broadcasting was based on a draft submitted by civil society groups. Its adoption was inﬂuenced by signiﬁcant pressure from a broad civil society coalition of media, labor, educa- tors, and human rights organizations, and by AMARC’s advocacy work. As in Argentina, community media advocates crossed the lines between inside and outside the policy-making realm: AMARC expert Gustavo Gomez became (temporarily) the National Director of Telecommunication (Light 2011), while the new regulatory advisory body COFECOM in Argentina elected Nestor Busso, a representative of community radios, as its president (Mauersberger
 
2011). The policy development processes in both countries interacted with each other as Argentine activists integrated parts of the earlier Uruguayan reform into their proposal for a new comprehensive law and Uruguayan activists, in turn, used that law as a model for further reforms.
Regional coalitions have sometimes applied the same practices as national groups. When the issue of net neutrality came onto the European agenda, a network of advocacy groups picked up the idea of developing a model law. The net neutrality debate had a slow start in Europe, with the European Commis- sion initially rejecting the need for policy interventions, but gained momentum in 2011 when the Council of Europe drafted a declaration in support of Internet freedoms, including net neutrality (Council of Europe 2011). In 2012 the Dutch parliament passed a law in favor of net neutrality, while telecom operators like the German Telekom announced they would start managing certain types of online traﬃc. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Germany in Decem- ber 2012, members of digital rights groups, including organizations such as the Dutch Bits of Freedom and the French La Quadrature du Net, came together to discuss what to do. Several options were debated, including a Europe-wide coordinated public campaign, but what materialized in the aftermath of the congress was an attempt to draft a model law and promote its adoption by European governments. By June 2013, the loose network developed a compre- hensive inventory of (actual and proposed) legislation and soft law on net neu- trality in countries such as Norway, Chile, Netherlands, Slovenia, Korea, Peru, and Finland as well as a set of principles for a model net neutrality law through an open process and the use of wiki pages and etherpads.  Utilizing the legal precedents and normative principles adapted from other countries, the idea was to draft a new regulation and to advocate for its implementation in each EU member state.
In July 2013, the new Dynamic Coalition on Net Neutrality that emerged
within the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) picked up the project and moved it from the European to the global level. By the end of the year, it developed a “policy blueprint” which served as a model legal framework and was adaptable to diﬀerent jurisdictions (Belli and van Bergen 2013). The European activists meanwhile redirected their eﬀorts from policy development back to classic advocacy as the EU Commission presented its own proposed net neutrality law (EDRI 2013; Baker 2013).

POLICY HA CKATHONS 
While the aspect of hacking in the examples presented is rather indirect and ﬁgu- rative (more on that below), more direct connections between technological practices and policy exist in the form of policy-related hackathons. As hack- athons—meetings of computer programmers and others involved in technologi-
 
cal development aimed at solving speciﬁc technological problems and developing software applications—have become ever more frequent and widespread, they have increasingly targeted social and political concerns. Events such as Hack the Government have developed open data and transparency tools for government, while the Education Hack Day served to develop solutions for education prob- lems, and Random Hacks of Kindness is devoted to disaster management and crisis response. Policy hackathons bring together interested people (often, but not always, with tech skills) to analyze and, ideally, improve policies. The open source development company Mozilla, for example, has organized several hack- athons to analyze and improve the privacy policies of websites. The Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Legal Hackathon (BLIP) brought together advocates, lawyers, and technologists in April 2012 to “explore how technology can improve the law and society, and, conversely, how law can improve technology.” In addi- tion to presentations and debates, BLIP encouraged participants to tackle issues of IP policy and propose policy reform through collaborative online tools. On the other side of the Atlantic, a broad network of civil society groups including the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRI), the Electronic Frontier Founda- tion, and Transparency International have teamed up with leading Internet companies like Google and Facebook to hold an annual EU Hackathon in Brus- sels. The series has included events such as “Hack4YourRights” in 2013 which brought together thirty participants to work on “data sets from network analysis, corporate Transparency Reports and freedom of information (FOI) requests [and] create apps and visualizations that shed light on the state of government surveillance in their country.”
Policy hackathons are distinct from the case studies described earlier as they
constitute temporary events rather than sustained campaigns, typically focus on policy analysis rather than policy change and the development of alternative legislative proposals, and are often hosted or cohosted by companies, rather than exclusively by civil society coalitions. However, they share an approach that focuses on policy texts and artefacts, and aims to manipulate policy. All the cases highlighted imply the claim that citizens, civil society activists, and technological developers can be policy experts and are willing and able to take policy development into their own hands.

CHARA CTERISTICS AND IMPLICATIONS 
The examples described in the previous sections share a speciﬁc approach to advocacy that focuses on analyzing and rewriting existing policies and develop- ing new laws. In some of the cases, this practice is combined with traditional campaigning and even public protest (such as the mass demonstration in Argentina), but at its center lies an attempt at citizen-based policy develop- ment and law-making. This is signiﬁcant as it surpasses civil society’s traditional role as advocator and provider of information and values, and puts media
 
reform initiatives instead in the driving seat of the policy process. It is based on the preﬁgurative modes of action which we ﬁnd in media activism and techno- logical development: the creation of alternative standards and infrastructures. Moreover, it is often based on temporary and informal alliances and thereby relates to newer organizational forms of connective action and organized net- works.
The cases of citizen-based policy-making which were presented here display several connections with the practice of hacking. First, the focus on DIY self- production is wide-spread in tech activism. Second, the speciﬁc practice of assembling policy precedents from around the world, repackaging them, experimenting with legal “code,” and manipulating, improving, and upgrading it bears strong similarities with technological development. Most of the initia- tives highlighted here started from an inventory of existing laws and regula- tions in other countries, picked out the components that seemed useful for the particular local situation, and reassembled them to a new legislative or regula- tory package. Third, while technical tools do not always play the central role that they do in policy hackathons, the use of wikis and other open platforms to crowd-source policy expertise and contributions has been consistent and wide- spread. Fourth, the initiatives and coalitions presented here connect legal and technical communities and combine legal and technical expertise. Those two sets of expertise are closely related as attempts at “tinkering” with technology and with the law require similar skills and forms of reasoning (Coleman 2009). These forms of policy hacking may allow us to review key questions of policy studies, such as policy diﬀusion and transfer. Traditionally, the spread of poli- cies from one jurisdiction to another, and the transfer of rules and regulations across boundaries, are analyzed in the context of governmental actions and institutional processes. However, in the cases presented here, we can see that civil society groups have advanced the movement and distribution of policies. They have cherry-picked regulations from other countries, and their own legal “products” have become models that came to inﬂuence legislative development elsewhere. In Hamburg, Iceland, Argentina, and elsewhere, these groups have followed up their domestic policy development by advising civil society cam- paigns and policy-makers in other countries (or, in the Hamburg case, other states) and have, in some cases, triggered policy change elsewhere. They have thus provided examples for policy transfer and diﬀusion that is citizen-led, not
government-led.
Grassroots policy development of the kind described here oﬀers an enhanced role for citizens and civil society in political processes. It may compromise established processes of representative democracy as it questions the role of elected oﬃcials and intervenes into their prescribed area of authority. However, it opens up new channels for participatory engagement by citizens and for direct forms of democracy. Involving loose networks, informal coalitions, and concerned individuals, it relates to more recent ideas of digital democracy and
 
liquid democracy. Moving beyond the classic focus on political parties and representative democratic processes, these democratic forms enable broader participatory processes, allow for interactive and ﬂexible decision-making, enhance active citizenship, and make the public sphere more inclusive (with varying success, see Hindman 2008).
However, even if policy hacking opens new avenues for participation and intervention, it contains several potentially problematic aspects that lie in its connection with the debates and action repertoires of civic and technological hacking and of digital democracy. Civic hacking has been hailed as welcome involvement of experts and creative youth to solve important problems in government, public service, community life, and disaster response, but it has also been criticized as cheap outsourcing of state functions and as questionable public relations exercises (Baraniuk 2013). Tools and practices of digital democ- racy have often empowered elites and small groups of experts rather than the broader citizenry (Hindman 2008). Perhaps most signiﬁcantly, the goals of hacking (both technological and civic) are typically to improve, ﬁx, and solve a discrete problem, rather than the recognition of power imbalances, battles between diﬀerent interests, and the political dimension of policy debates. A hack is “an elegant solution to a technological problem” (Levy, quoted in Meikle 2002, 164). With critics like Evgeny Morozov, however, we may ques- tion the reductionist “solutionism” of an approach that focuses on solving dis- crete problems, rather than understanding (and tackling) the deeper roots and broader contexts of an issue (Morozov 2013). The cases of policy hacking pre- sented here largely follow this route as they focus on improving policy and ﬁxing speciﬁc issues within a given and largely unquestioned political context. As civil society advocacy in the ﬁeld of media and communication policy adopts policy-hacking practices, it exploits promising new paths for media reform, but it prioritizes a problem-solving approach over a more fundamental political and social struggle.

CONCL USION 
Policy hacking is a media reform approach that focuses on citizen-based DIY creation of concrete policy alternatives. It involves identifying policy gaps and regulatory challenges, analyzing existing policies that may address those, and reassembling these components toward a new legal or regulatory package. Its practice displays similarities with technological development and hacking. The examples presented in this chapter have demonstrated that it can be a viable and successful strategy for media and communications reform.
However, policy hacking is not entirely distinct from other established advo- cacy strategies and experiences. Text work and proposals of policy language have long been part of advocates’ repertoires of action. From national policy reform to lobbying at a UN summit such as WSIS, civil society activists have
 
invested signiﬁcant time and eﬀort into changing the wording of legislative and regulatory documents, and have developed alternative declarations (see Hintz 2009). The initiatives presented in this chapter have moved signiﬁcantly beyond these practices by developing complete legislative proposals, but they are based on a similar approach. Also, policy hacking has been embedded in a broader range of traditional action repertoires, including protest and public pressure (as in Argentina), placing champions inside the relevant institutional setting (as in Iceland), and sophisticated framing exercises that communicated the need for policy change to government members, regulators, and parliamen- tarians.
In all cases, the existence of policy windows was crucial to the success of policy hacking and the adoption and implementation of DIY policy. In Iceland and Argentina, policy change was possible in response to economic crises, the failure of established economic models, and a legitimacy crisis of the political class; and in Hamburg, a public spending scandal (as well as the steep rise of the Pirate Party in the polls) helped convince political leaders that change was necessary. However, both examples have also shown that windows of opportu- nity can close again and conditions for policy change can deteriorate quickly. Policy hacking is thus a useful and promising strategy in speciﬁc historical moments; but as all advocacy strategies, it is context speciﬁc.
If we understand reform as a democratic practice, policy hacking provides an interesting perspective as it oﬀers new avenues for citizen engagement, mecha- nisms for crowd-sourcing expertise, and the opening up of traditionally closed political processes, particularly for the less organized and less institutionalized parts of civil society. Its grassroots orientation, however, does not necessarily challenge established conﬁgurations of political power, as its problem-solving approach and its focus on improving and ﬁxing speciﬁc issues distinguishes it from wider social struggles.
Considering these diﬀerent concerns, from the need for policy windows to democratic eﬀects, policy hacking may be limited as a stand-alone strategy. Yet as part of a broader strategic and tactical mix, it can play a signiﬁcant role in future eﬀorts to aﬀect both democratic change and media reform.