Here are my cleaned-up notes from a workshop on electronic rulemaking at the dg.o conference happening now. (still disjointed, but no doubt more interesting posted here than alone on my laptop)

I’m interested in the event because of the relevance of structuring deliberative processes online, developing listening tools to make governmental staff jobs easier, and because I’d like to see what sort of executive branch IT coordination and development projects are underway already, in both government and academia.

Rulemaking, the promulgation of regulations by federal agencies under congressional authorization, has the binding effect of law. Despite its fundamental legal role, agencies’ handling of the public comments on federal regulations are non-standard to a fault, with some agencies counting handwritten comments as two comments when tallying interest. This non-standardized handling of public comments leads to mistrust of administrators regulatory abilities, which hampers implementing regulations, compliance, and overall public trust.

Most rules have something like ten to fifty comments, some get up to 700,000 comments. There is a very strong parallel between public commentary and interest in rulewriting and congressional advocacy email campaigns. Just as very few rules get the majority of public comments submitted, very few people write more than one comment, and very few congressional bills get the majority of calls and emails.

It seems that federal agencies should have greater abillity to take advantage of outside email and text processing systems, as the attendees of this workshop are designing. See here for an example.

Many arguments for rulemaking’s public role are going unmade: public commentary often leads to changed approved rules, has an effect on congressional oversight staff, and affects what sort of challenges are even admissible in court later. Without critical public comment on pending rules, some legal challenges are less likely to be admissible.

Like congressional staff, agency employees “drink from a firehose” of public input on some regulations, and duplication detection enhanced with advanced natural language processing and structured data tools can save significant time in processing public input.

Comments significantly increased under the Bush administration, although the pattern of most comments coming on a few contentious rules still holds.

OSHA once told national parks rangers to stand inside kiosks to avoid snowmobile pollutants (if true, wow.)

Rubrics for what count as a comment differ from agency to agency.

“Spiral of Silence” = tendency of underrepresented groups to abstain from vocalizing concerns, especially online. Arrow’s impossibility theorem: inherent difficulty in consensus forming through representative voting.