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.

Legal Informatics Papers @ HICSS 2013

At least two legal informatics papers will be presented this week at HICSS 46 (a.k.a. HICSS 2013): Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, being held 7-10 January 2013 in Maui, Hawaii:

• Keith Walker and Douglas Oard: Extending Argument Maps To Provide Decision Support For Rulemaking
• Petra Asprion and Gerhard Knolmayer: Assimilation of Compliance Software in Highly Regulated Industries: An Empirical Multitheoretical Investigation

I’ve requested abstracts from the authors and if the authors allow posting of their abstracts I will post what I receive.

Meanwhile, for abstracts or full text of the papers please contact the authors.

Click here for the complete conference program.

The Twitter hashtags for the conference appear to be #hicss46 and #hicss.

If you know of other legal informatics papers to be presented at HICSS, please mention them in the comments.

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.

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

Farina, Vallbé, Newhart, and Heidt on Regulation Room: Field-testing an Online Public Participation Platform During U.S. Federal Agency Rulemakings

Professor Cynthia R. Farina, Dr. Joan-Josep Vallbé, Mary J. Newhart, MS, and Josiah Heidt, JD, all of Cornell University, will present a paper entitled Regulation Room: Field-testing an online public participation platform during U.S. Federal Agency rulemakings, at ECEG 2012: The 12th European Conference on e-Government, being held 14-15 June 2012 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Here is the 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 have prevented effective engagement by many groups of stakeholders and interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to alert and effective engage new voices in rulemaking. Initial results give cause for optimism but also caution that successfully using new technologies to increase participation in complex government policy decisions is more difficult and resource-intensive than many proponents expect.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

Thanks to Dr. Vallbé for allowing me to post the abstract.

Heidt and Solivan: Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0

Josiah Heidt, JD, and Jackeline Solivan, JD, both of the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative, presented a poster entitled Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0, at dg.o 2012: 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, held 4-7 June 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Here is the 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. Regulation Room, an experimental open government 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.

For the full text of the poster, please contact the authors.

Thanks to Mr. Heidt for allowing me to post the abstract.

Legal Informatics / Legal Communication Papers @ ICA 2012

The following legal informatics or legal communication papers are being presented at ICA 2012: The Conference of the International Communication Association, being held 24-28 May 2012, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. (Click here for the full conference program. The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ica12. If you know of other legal communication or legal informatics papers presented at the conference, please feel free to mention them in the comments):

• Sanna Ala-Kortesmaa, U of Tampere: The Effects of Relational Tensions on Optimal Listening in Legal Communication Relationships
• Cheryl Ann Bishop, Quinnipiac U: Access to Information in the European Court of Human Rights
• Laura W. Black and Anna Marie Wiederhold, Ohio U: “I Agree With All of That, But…” Examining Expressions of Difference in Citizen Discussion Groups
• Emily A. Dolan, Syracuse U: Exploring Privacy on Online Social Networks in Civil Cases
• Dmitry Epstein, Cornell U; Rebecca B. Vernon, Cornell eRulemaking Initiative: Not by Technology Alone: The “Analog” Aspects of Online Public Engagement in Rulemaking
• Jessica Fridy and Karen Tracy, U of Colorado: Majority Rule or a Minority Right? Discursive Orientations Toward Democratic Ideals in a U.S. Public Hearing
• Howard Giles, Douglas Bonilla, Daniel Linz, and Michelle L. Gomez,U of California, Santa Barbara: Police Stops of and Interactions With Latino and White (Non-Latino) Drivers: Extensive Policing and Communication Accommodation
• Jeffrey A. Gottfried, U of Pennsylvania, Eran N. Ben-Porath, Social Science Research Solutions, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, U of Pennsylvania: Do Judges Perceive Value in Voter Guides for Judicial Elections?
• Karina Horsti, New York U; Saara Pellander, U of Helsinki: Family in Migration Debates: Polarised Discourses in Finnish Media and Parliament
• Robert Huesca, Trinity U; Roopali Mukherjee, CUNY – Queens College; Eren McGinnis, Dos Vatos Productions: Precious Knowledge: A Film and Discussion
• Shazia Iftkhar, U of Michigan: “The Republic is Lived With the Face Uncovered”: Framing the Legal Ban on the ‘Burqa’ in France
• Oyvind Ihlen and Kjersti Thorbjornsrud, U of Oslo: Tears vs. Rules and Regulations: Media Strategies and Framing of Immigration Issues
• Melissa A. Johnson, North Carolina State U: Battleground Arizona: Visual Fidelity in Network News Coverage of Arizona’s Immigration Law
• Michael K Park, U of Southern California: Juror Misconduct 2.0: The Right to an Impartial Jury in the Age of Social Networking
• Jennifer M. Proffitt and Margot A. Susca, Florida State U: Follow the Money: The Entertainment Software Association Attack on Video Game Regulation
• Ryan Rogers, U of North Carolina: The Violence of a Generation: Supreme Court Ruling on Regulating Violent Video Games for Minors
• Leah Sprain, Colorado State U: Speaking as “Experts” and “Citizens” in Public Meetings
• T.T. Sreekumar and Shobha Vadrevu, National U of Singapore: “If I Can, I Legislate. If I Can’t, I Gazette”: Political Twitterati and Democracy in Singapore
• Inger Lisbeth Stole, U of Illinois: The 1930s: Consumers Reactions to Advertising and Demands for Federal Regulation
• Chad Tew and Amy Jorgensen, U of Southern Indiana: Accused and Confused: An Analysis of YouTube Reaction Videos to Copyright Violations
• Mercedes Vigon, Florida International U: Not Business as Usual: Spanish–Language TV Coverage of Arizona’s Immigration Law, April-May 2010

For full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Park, Vallbé, Cardie, et al. on Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

Joonsuk Park of the Cornell University Department of Computer Science, Dr. Joan-Josep Vallbé of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, Professor Dr. Claire Cardie of the Cornell University Department of Computer Science, and colleagues, will present a paper entitled Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking, at dg.o 2012: The International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 4-7 June 2012, at the University of Maryland, College Park, in College Park, Maryland, USA.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. 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. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in “live” [U.S.] Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifiers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically significant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result.

For the full text of the paper, click here.

Thanks to Dr. Vallbé for granting permission to post the abstract.

FederalRegister.gov Now Integrated with Regulations.gov

Michael White of the Office of the Federal Register has posted In Synch With Regulations.gov, on the OFR Blog.

Here is a summary of the post:

FederalRegister.gov (FR2) is now tightly integrated with the electronic dockets on Regulations.gov. Comments submitted to Regulations.gov and processed for public display are now accessible from FR2. We also added connections to “Supporting/Related Materials” maintained in the dockets.

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @dan_munz.

Call for Papers: dg.o 2011

A call for papers has been issued for dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 12-15 June 2011, at the University of Maryland, in College Park, Maryland, USA. Here are the deadlines:

• 10 January 2011: Workshop, tutorial, and panel proposals due
• 6 February 2011: Papers, posters and demo descriptions due
• 30 March 2011: Camera-ready manuscripts due

Papers or proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “Digital Government Application Domains: such as courts, emergency response management, education, government statistics and data, grants administration, intelligence, international initiatives and cooperation, health and human services, law enforcement and criminal justice, legislative systems, natural resources management, open government (o-government), regulation and rulemaking, security, tax administration, transportation systems, and urban planning.
• IT-enabled Government Management and Operations: such as cross-boundary information sharing and integration, decision-making processes, digital government organization and management strategies, information assurance, information technology adoption and diffusion, IT and service architectures, long-term preservation and archiving of government information, program planning, service integration, as well as technology transition and transfer.
• Information Values and Policies: such as accessibility, digital democracy and governance, digital divide, openness, privacy, public participation in democratic processes, security, transparency, trust, and universal and equity of access to information and services.
• Information Technology and Tools to Support Government: such as cloud computing for digital government domains; collaboration tools; digital libraries and knowledge management; geographic information systems; human-computer interaction; intelligent agents; information integration; interoperable data, networks and architectures; large scale data and information acquisition and management; mobile government; multiple modalities and multimedia; national and international infrastructures for information and communication; service-oriented architectures; semantic web; and social networking, mashups, and software engineering for large-scale government projects.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.