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.