White House publishes Open Data Policy memorandum on GitHub, enabling eParticipation

Among the interesting features of the White House’s new Open Data Policy is that the memorandum that provides policy guidance to agencies in complying with the policy (M-13-13) was published on GitHub, using GitHub’s “Pages” service — see the White House’s Project Open Data GitHub page.

Publishing the memorandum on GitHub allows citizens to propose revisions to the policy, through GitHub’s “commit” and “pull request” functions.

The White House’s publishing choice thus enables citizen participation in the process of crafting the government’s open data policy.

Nick Judd at TechPresident reports that developers have already begun to submit revisions to the policy on GitHub.

GitHub’s Ben Balter comments on this use of GitHub to enable citizen participation in policy making: The Revolution Will Be Forked.

HT Alan deLevie

Legal Informatics Proposals for TransparencyCamp 2013

Some legal informatics proposals have been submitted for TransparencyCamp 2013, to be held 4-5 May 2013, in Washington, DC, USA:

• Ben Balter: Open Sourcing Government
• Hudson Hollister: Creating a Legislative Agenda for Open Data
• Tom MacWright: The Story of the DC Code
• James McKinney: Open Government Data Standards
• David Moore: OpenGovernment.org : For state and city government engagement
• Stephen Schultze: PACER, RECAP, OpenPACER.org

The Twitter hashtag for TransparencyCamp 2013 appears to be #tcamp13

Peña Gangadharan: Toward a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Rulemaking

Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan of the New America Foundation has published Toward a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Policymaking, Communication, Culture, and Critique, 6, 1-19 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

In contrast to communitarian and pluralist approaches to participation, the following article develops a deliberative model of participation in rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This deliberative model is distinguished by its concern for the emergence of publics and for the speaking and listening capacities of policymakers and publics alike. The model focuses both on spaces for collective discussion as well as translation between sites of discussion. Embracing a complex view of civil society, and stressing the principle of inclusion, a deliberative model corresponds to a form of legitimacy that extends beyond the boundaries of conventional administrative procedure.

Coglianese: Enhancing Public Access to Online Rulemaking Information

Professor Dr. Cary Coglianese of University of Pennsylvania Law School has published Enhancing Public Access to Online Rulemaking Information, Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law, Vol. 2, pp. 1-66 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

One of the most significant powers exercised by federal agencies is their power to make rules. Given the importance of agency rulemaking, the process by which agencies develop rules has long been subject to procedural requirements aiming to advance democratic values of openness and public participation. With the advent of the digital age, government agencies have engaged in increasing efforts to make rulemaking information available online as well as to elicit public participation via electronic means of communication. How successful are these efforts? How might they be improved? In this article, I investigate agencies’ efforts to make rulemaking information available online. Drawing on a review of current agency uses of the Internet, a systematic survey of regulatory agencies’ websites, and interviews with managers at a variety of federal regulatory agencies, I identify both existing “best practices” as well as opportunities for continued improvement. The findings of this research suggest that there exist both considerable differences in how well different agencies are making rulemaking information available online as well as significant opportunities for the diffusion of best-practice innovations that some agencies have adopted. This research also provides a basis for seven recommendations that I offer for enhancing both the accessibility and quality of rulemaking through online technology. A commitment to well-accepted democratic principles applicable to regulatory agencies should lead federal web designers to strive to create websites that are as accessible to ordinary citizens, including individuals with limited English proficiency, vision impairments, and low-bandwidth connections, as they are to the sophisticated repeat players in Washington policymaking circles.

The article focuses on erulemaking systems other than Regulations.gov and RegulationRoom.

Three Efforts to Crowdsource Amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in Honor of Aaron Swartz: Lofgren-Wyden, EFF, and ForktheLaw

At least three separate efforts to crowdsource amendments to the U.S. federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) appear to have recently been launched:

• Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden have been using Reddit as a platform to crowdsource revisions to the statute; they call their amendments Aaron’s Law;
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been crowdsourcing revisions to the statute on its Website (e.g., here and here);
• Nadim Kobeissi is crowdsourcing revisions to the statute at a new site called Fork the Law.

[UPDATE: Daniel Schuman kindly just told me of a fourth effort: Professor Orin Kerr has been crowdsourcing revisions to the statute at Volokh Conspiracy. In addition, Meredith L. Patterson just told me that Fork the Law is run by a group, of which she and Nadim Kobeissi are members; the Fork the Law personnel are listed here.]

At least the first three of these efforts are being undertaken expressly in honor of Aaron Swartz, who, before his death, was prosecuted for alleged violations of the CFAA, among other statutes.

What’s notable to me about these efforts is their variety:

• variety of leaders (official legislators, public interest lawyers, a programmer, a law professor)
• variety of ideological perspectives (from moderate Democratic to libertarian)
• variety of intended audiences (including a broad general Internet audience, civil libertarians, programmers, the legal community)
• variety of platforms (a general social news site, a collaborative legal blog, the Website of a public interest law firm, a purpose-built site)
• and a variety of tools with which public attitudes and comments are posted, aggregated, processed, and then re-published for further public input.

The potential value of distributed and parallel crowdsourced drafting efforts is also apparent. Holding these different drafting efforts, targeted at different audiences with different types of knowledge and experience, in public on the open Web allows each of these drafting communities to learn from the others and adjust its draft accordingly, while maintaining its distinctive perspective. In particular, each drafting community can benefit from both legal and policy expertise expressed in other communities. So certain of the potential information advantages of working on the open Web — notably increased quantity, quality, and diversity of input — seem very likely to be realized through these CFAA crowdsourcing efforts.

HT Alex Howard, Eric Mill, and Stephen Schultze

Sunlight Foundation Releases Docket Wrench: Tool for Analyzing Comments to Proposed Regulations

Sunlight Foundation today released Docket Wrench, an online system that analyzes and summarizes public comments to proposed U.S. federal regulations, according to Nicko Margolies’s post, Docket Wrench: Exposing Trends in Regulatory Comments.

Here is an excerpt of the announcement:

Today the Sunlight Foundation unveils Docket Wrench, an online research tool to dig into regulatory comments and uncover patterns among millions of documents. Docket Wrench offers a window into the rulemaking process where special interests and individuals can wield their influence without the level of scrutiny traditional lobbying activities receive.

Before an agency finalizes a proposed rule that Congress and the president have mandated that they enforce, there is a period of public commenting where the agency solicits feedback from those affected by the rule. The commenters can vary from company or industry representatives to citizens concerned about laws that impact their environment, schools, finances and much more. These comments and related documents are grouped into “dockets” where you can follow the actions related to each rule. Every rulemaking docket has its own page on Docket Wrench where you can get a graphical overview of the docket, drill down into the rules and notices it contains and read the comments on those rules. We’ve pulled all this information together into one spot so you can more easily research trends and extract interesting stories from the data. [...]

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

According to Tom Lee of Sunlight Foundation, Docket Wrench was developed by Andrew Pendleton and Amy Cesal.

HT @tjl

Farina et al.: Knowledge in the People: Rethinking ‘Value’ in Public Rulemaking Participation

Professor Dr. Cynthia R. Farina and colleagues at the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI) have posted Knowledge in the People: Rethinking ‘Value’ in Public Rulemaking Participation.

Here is the abstract:

A companion piece to Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation that Counts, this Essay continues to examine the nature and value of broader public participation in rulemaking. Here, we argue that rulemaking is a “community of practice,” with distinctive forms of argumentation and methods of reasoning that both reflect and embody craft knowledge. Rulemaking newcomers are outside this community of practice: Even when they are reasonably informed about the legal and policy aspects of the agency’s proposal, their participation differs in kind and form from that of sophisticated commenters. From observing the actual behavior of rulemaking newcomers in the Regulation Room project, we suggest that new public participation is often, if not predominantly, experiential in nature and narrative in form. We argue that it is unrealistic to expect that rulemaking newcomers can be significantly inculcated into the norms and methods of the existing rulemaking community of practice. Yet, the potential policymaking value of the on-the-ground, situated knowledge they can bring to the discussion justifies efforts to expand our understanding of the kinds of comments that should “count” in the process. We take some first steps in that direction in this Essay.

Thanks to Professor Farina for notifying us of the paper.

Wyner on Psychology and Policy Modeling

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has posted Psychological Studies of Policy Reasoning, at his blog, Language, Logic, Law, Software.

Excerpts:

The New York Times had an article on the difficulties that the public has to understand complex policy proposals – I’m Right (For Some Reason). The points in the article relate directly to the research I’ve been doing at Liverpool on the IMPACT Project, for we decompose a policy proposal into its constituent parts for examination and improved understanding. See our tool live: Structured Consultation Tool
[...]
Breaking down policy proposals into component parts for further investigation and understanding is exactly what we’ve been doing in the IMPACT Project.

Wyner, Bench-Capon, et al.: A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation

Dr. Adam Wyner, Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon, and colleagues, all of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, will present a paper entitled A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation, at JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-19 December 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here is the abstract:

Domain models have proven useful as the basis for the construction and evaluation of arguments to support deliberation about policy proposals. Using a model provides the means to systematically examine and understand the fine-grained objections that individuals might have about the policy. While in previous approaches, a justification for a policy proposal is presented for critique by the user, here, we reuse the domain model to invert the roles of the citizen and the government: a policy proposal is elicited from the citizen, and a software agent automatically and systematically critiques it relative to the model and the government’s point of view. Such an approach engages citizens in a critical dialogue about the policy actions, which may lead to a better understanding of the implications of their proposals and that of the government. A web-based tool that interactively leads users through the critique is presented.

This paper was produced as part of Project IMPACT.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Legal Informatics Papers/Posters at ICEGOV 2012

Here are the legal informatics papers and posters (that I’ve been able to identify) to be presented at ICEGOV 2012: International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, being held 22-25 October 2012 at the University at Albany Center for Technology in Government, in Albany, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #icegov

[If you know of other legal informatics papers being given at the conference, please let us know about them in the comments to this post. For abstracts and full text, please contact the authors]:

• Vasiliy Burov, Evgeny Patarakin, Boris Yarmakhov: A Crowdsourcing Model for Public Consultations on Draft Laws
• Adriana Simeao Ferreira, Daniel Goncalves de Melo, Leondeniz Freitas: The Importance of Electronic Accessibility in Brazilian Juridical Electronic Process
• Josiah Heidt, Jackeline Solivan: Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0
• Kincho Law, Gloria Lau: REGNET: Regulatory Information Management, Compliance and Analysis
• Fabro Steibel: Designing Online Deliberation Using Web 2.0 Technologies: Drafting a Bill of Law on Internet Regulation in Brazil
• Siddharth Taduri, Gloria Lau, Kincho Law, Jay Kesan: A Patent System Ontology for Facilitating Retrieval of Patent Related Information