Archive for category open access
The Regulation Room: Public Participation Online
Posted by Steve in Blogosphere, lamp, open access on April 5, 2010
We here at MFIA clearly do a lot of work holding agency’s accountable on the back end – that is, we target information that will reveal how the government has acted by filing FOIA requests and litigating denials. But I think it’s also important to remember that there’s a lot people can do to hold agency’s accountable before they take action. That’s what a group at Cornell Law School and the DOT have in mind with their new site Regulation Room.
This article on NextGov.com (a great site for information on government and technology) provides the background on the initiative; I recommend reading it. The Cornell Law-led Regulation Room attempts to use technology to increase public participation in notice-and-comment rulemaking. (Regulations.gov is the government’s central hub for online participation). E-rulemaking has also received substantial academic attention – if you’re interested, Beth Noveck, an ISP Fellow and the Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director for the White House Open Government Initiative, has written numerous articles on the subject, focusing in particular on the importance of structuring technology in order to encourage collaboration and participation.
The Regulation Room makes at least three important contributions to the E-rulemaking process: (1) it digests the proposed rule, providing natural language summaries of a rule’s most salient features; (2) it provides a space for deliberation on the rule’s components via commenting, allowing users to react to each other and the moderators; and (3) the moderators cull the comments, combining them into an effective summary that is sent to the agency.
I have two main questions about the site as designed:
Public or Private? As the NextGov.com article says, “Regulation Room stresses it is not a government site and CeRI owns all comments and e-mail addresses collected for authentication purposes.” At the same time, the article notes that DOT is “allow[ing]” Cornell Law to launch the site. It certainly helps that the DOT is on board (so they can provide more information to Cornell), but is it necessary? Presumably, any private group could set up a similar site, post a proposed rule, solicit comments, and then combine the comments into a summary that is then sent to the agency. The question then is should this site be run by the agency or private actors. Or is this hybrid model perhaps best? An agency-run site could probably have the most significant impact on agency action, insofar as the agency-run site would be more fully incorporated into the decision-making process. The hybrid model, however, might still command the attention of the agency, while allowing people to organize and gather their suggestions without taxing agency personnel.
Blog format? Both the article and the site’s own About page call the Regulation Room a “blog,” and the article notes the advantages of the “blog format.” The Regulation Room mirrors a blog in certain respects (at its most basic level, the site offers some main text and then invites comments from the public, which is certainly blog-like). But that’s where the comparison ends for me. The layout is not nearly as intuitive as a typical blog (you have to click on two non-obvious links before you can view actual comments, and then the user faces multiple scrolling windows and multiple panels that appear and disappear as she moves her mouse across the screen). I actually think that the site would be better if it were more like a traditional blog – at least then, I would know exactly where to go for the text and the comments. Regardless, the underlying point is Noveck’s: technological design matters. Anything that makes it harder to post a comment increases the costs to the would-be public participant. Unfortunately, as it currently is, I think the Regulation Room’s format may inhibit some from participating.
These are just a couple of observations, none of which dampen my overall enthusiasm for the project and what it stands for. Agencies should be thinking about ways to build a digital relationship with the public, and Cornell Law and DOT are at the forefront of the experimentation. Time will tell whether projects like this can compete for the public’s attention alongside the vast amounts of other information and entertainment online.
Gaining Access to ICE’s Varick Detention Center
Posted by Steve in Blogosphere, first amendment, lamp, open access on February 13, 2010
Just wanted to flag a MFIA victory – journalist Jacqueline Stevens, who writes for the Nation, will be given a tour of the Varick Detention Center in NYC next week (ICE had denied her previous requests for access). Approval came a day after the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to ICE on behalf of the Nation, the Nation Institute, and Ms. Stevens, requesting that Ms. Stevens be granted access to the center in accordance with ICE’s own regulations and First Amendment access principles. We here at the MFIA practicum helped gather the information and write the letter, so we’re all very excited about the recent developments.
This is an important step in better understanding what goes on in detention centers around the country. Check out more details here on Ms. Stevens’ blog.
FOI Fee Fraud?
Posted by Adri in lamp, open access on February 4, 2010
The Globe has an interesting article up about the prohibitive costs of government records requests.
According to the story, one Boston reporter was given
an estimate of $6,600 by a large state agency in response to his requests to review the e-mails of several senior officials. The agency justified the price as the cost of finding the documents, printing them, and reviewing them for personal information that might be exempt from the public records law.
What’s the real purpose for these fees? Is it to recoup the cost of redaction, search, and print? It seems like it would be pretty easy to get around the print / redaction fees, at the very least, by providing the records in electronic format — if I were to be pushing for a legislative fix of an open records law, it would be to mandate electronic format whenever the record is available in digital form (as an email most certainly is) and requested in that format. Well, that and actual enforcement mechanisms.
But there’s no way that printing costs by themselves amount to over $6 thou; on its face, this looks more like brazen disregard for the purpose of the open records law. Perhaps another solution would be to require an itemized receipt – if. there’s some inefficiency driving up the costs of FOI, the requestor – and the public at large – should know about it
The article also brings up a point of general concern in the open records world, which is the increasing shift of the burden of the search onto the requestor. More and more, agencies are demanding that requestors “perfect” their requests by identifying the databases in which the records they seek are stored, or specifying the format (memorandum, report, correspondence) in which particular information is held. While the cost of searching government logs is not to be disregarded, we do have these things called computer keyword searches … and the solution certainly is not to create the circuitous situation in which the agency denies a request because of the lack of specific information in the public sphere.
Networking and Information Sharing
Posted by Betsy in lamp, open access on February 3, 2010
Hello from Betsy, new ISP fellow and blogger.
Perhaps this is old news, but I found this fascinating. A new Boston University study shows that the people with the largest social networks are not necessarily the best idea spreaders. Instead, the best ideas spreaders are those at strategically placed nodes, even if they are less well connected: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24748/?ref=rss&a=f.
This seems to suggest that people at nodes accessing diverse networks may be better equipped to spread information than those well connected within a single network. Does this redefine the ‘key players’ for information-sharing, or how best to target advertising? Does it suggest yet another reason to value diversity in networks? Food for thought.
what we do and why terrorism matters
Posted by Nabiha in first amendment, lamp, open access on October 12, 2009
Our projects include a lot of national security-oriented topics, including Guantanamo, fusion centers, and the like. One might wonder — hell, we’ve wondered — how this intersects with our core mission to support newsgatherers. In an Information Society Project Ideas Lunch last week, Jack Balkin hit the nail on the head: the current onslaught of secrecy, under the guise of national security, is just the most recent incarnation of the desire to suppress open information. Our projects will fluctuate to respond to the realities of the day. Right now, it just so happens that terrorism is a popular excuse for keeping information under wraps, and as such, inaccessible to the newsgatherers who want to write about it.
On that note, I was thrilled to find this report on the Centre for the Freedom of the Media website. The Speaking of Terror report, drafted for the Council of Europe, outlines anti-terror laws have stifled freedom of expression and media operation in Europe. Anyone know of anything similar written about the United States? I’d love to read it.
Can Judicial Openness Initiatives Disqualify Judges from Access Cases?
Posted by patrick in Newspapers, cases, first amendment, lamp, open access, secret dockets on October 10, 2009
The Supreme Court has refused to indulge a stay sought by the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corporation which would have kept 12,000 pages of court records and depositions in a long-running CT clergy abuse case from public view.
The judgment sought to be stayed, Rosado v. Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp., raises some fascinating access issues, including an institutional-reform question which I haven’t seen elsewhere. Does a judge’s participation on an open access task force mandate recusal by creating an appearance of impropriety in deciding open access questions?
Here, the Connecticut Supreme Court held that the trial judge’s failure to recuse himself in Rosado, despite his involvement with the Judicial Branch’s Public Access Task Force, did not amount to abuse of discretion:
“A trial judge has no affirmative duty to step down from a case merely on the basis of membership on a task force unless the agenda of the task force is inconsistent with the judge’s duty to judge impartially. Case law confirms that service on a commission concerned with improving the legal system and the administration of justice, without more, is not a basis for disqualification, even if the subject matter generally relates to the area of the law at issue in the case at hand.”
Good call, CT. An adverse ruling on this issue would certainly chill bench-led openness efforts. In this case, the precedent appears extensive and clear, but Justice Sullivan’s spirited dissent demonstrates how the “appearance of impropriety” standard can be stretched to embrace reform initiatives. Several features of the task force’s design were extremely important to the majority ruling, including instructions to consider privacy interests as well as disclosure interests. Take note, other states seeking to institute openness initiatives, lest you design a task force which might jeopardize judges’ ability to hear access cases.
The next steps, as the New York Times reports, will be unsealing hearings in the Connecticut Superior Court. We will follow those with interest.
General shout-out to the Sunlight Foundation
Posted by Margot in first amendment, lamp, open access on October 8, 2009
The Sunlight Foundation is committed to exactly the kind of transparency principles that journalism traditionally serves. Their projects include: compiling a list of people seeking tax breaks on imports from Congress; building a completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents; running the numbers on sources of Congressional wealth; opening bills to online, public review.
“The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency.”