icegov2012 proceedings

Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0
ABSTRACT
Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government’s most important
policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and
participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant
barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of
interested citizens. RegulationRoom, an experimental opengovernment
partnership between academic researchers and
government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system
that uses multiple methods to alert and effectively engage new
voices in rulemaking.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2. [User Interfaces] – User-Centered Design; J.1
ADMINISTRATIVE DATA PROCESSING – Government;
H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and
Organization Interfaces—Asynchronous Interaction
General Terms
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Theory, Legal Aspects
Keywords
E-Rulemaking, Open Government, Web 2.0, Government-
Academic Partnerships
1. INTRODUCTION
Here we present RegulationRoom, (http://regulationroom.org/), an
experimental online public participation platform, which is the
U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Open Government
Flagship Initiative. RegulationRoom is unique in being a
systematic effort to discover how to use information and
communication technologies (ICTs) to alert and engage citizens
effectively in the formation of complex government policy. We
focus on rulemaking, the process federal agencies use to make
new health, safety, environmental, and other regulations.
The project is a unique collaboration between academic
researchers of the Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI) and the
government. CeRI owns, designs, operates, and controls
RegulationRoom, but also works closely with USDOT to identify
suitable “live” rulemakings for the site [2]. Agency officials work
with CeRI before the public comment period opens, and help
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Josiah Heidt and Jackeline Solivan
Law School
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York USA
jbh249@cornell.edu, jks38@cornell.edu
504
evaluate success after it closes. This collaboration allows us to
field test design and operational strategies for eliciting and
supporting participation by individuals who have not previously
commented in a federal rulemaking. CeRI involves researchers
from communications, computing, conflict resolution, information
science, law, legal informatics, and political science. This type of
interdisciplinary approach has been recognized as important to
designing successful online participation systems. [7, 8].
Researchers agree that first generation e-rulemaking systems have
not produced significantly broader, meaningful public
participation. [1, 8]. RegulationRoom is a second-generation erulemaking
system that uses Web 2.0, ICTs, and human
facilitative moderation to support effective public participation.
2. OUR GOAL
After examining the unsuccessful history of conventional
rulemaking and first-generation e-rulemaking systems
(Rulemaking 1.0), we hypothesized that a successful public
participation system must address three barriers to citizen
engagement. The first barrier is lack of awareness that
rulemakings of interest are going on. The second barrier is
information overload from voluminous and complex rulemaking
materials. Rulemaking documents are generally 50–100 pages
long and are written at a graduate-school level of English. The
third barrier is unfamiliarity with how to effectively participate in
the rulemaking process. Many individuals do not know that
participation in this process is not like voting. Effective
participation requires informed participation and includes giving
reasons, alternatives, data, or otherwise substantiated claims.
Our goal with RegulationRoom is to address and remediate these
three barriers in order to create high quality, efficient, and
effective e-government participation. RegulationRoom employs
Web 2.0 technology and other ICTs, a combination of social and
conventional media, purposeful site design and presentation of
information, and human facilitative moderation.
3. OUR PROJECT
3.1 Combating Lack of Awareness
USDOT conducts several hundred rulemakings annually, most of
which affect only limited industry groups who already participate
effectively in the rulemaking process. Rulemakings hosted on
RegulationRoom are carefully selected because they directly
affect individuals or groups unlikely to meaningfully engage in
the conventional process.
Once a rule is chosen, the process of remediating public
unawareness begins long before the comment period opens. First,
we create a communications outreach plan: After defining the
kinds of stakeholders we want to alert, we try to discover where,
and how, these target groups get information. We identify