New online tool for federal rulemaking: Regulation Room

New from Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute:

Regulation Room is ... a pilot project that provides an online environment for people and groups to learn about, discuss, and react to selected rules(regulations) proposed by federal agencies.  It expands the types of public input available to agencies in the rulemaking process, while serving as a teaching and research platform. ...

CeRI [Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative] cooperates with various federal agencies to select and present the proposed rules that are available in Regulation Room.  However, this is not a federal government site. Discussions on Regulation Room are moderated by CeRI students and faculty or other nongovernmental researchers collaborating with CeRI. The federal agencies whose rules are offered here collaborate in this research, in order to learn about the most effective Web 2.0 strategies for increasing public understanding and participation during rulemaking, but all content and operation are the sole responsibility of CeRI.

Regulation Room is a work in progress.  Services and applications will be added in phases and may be modified with experience.  This is an overview of our current plan:

Alert and Engage: Social networking services and other online and conventional outreach strategies will to used alert individuals and groups who may have an interest in proposed rules.  Our focus will be on reaching people and groups who might not learn about the rulemaking through traditional channels, and providing them enough information about the rule and the process to encourage them to participate.

Educate and Inform:   Materials about rulemaking and effective participation will be available, structured to allow people to learn about the process in as much detail as they feel they need.  For each specific rule,  summaries of the important issues and the agency’s reasoning,  as well as links to relevant primary and secondary materials, will make the legal and factual bases of the proposal more accessible.

Facilitate Reaction and Discussion:  A moderated blog will lead people through the major policy issues of the rule.  Users who want more detailed discussion will be offered a novel focused commenting function (”Dig In”) that allows them to highlight particular sections of the agency’s proposal and reasoning, and react specifically to those sections.  For both applications, comment threading will enable users to comment on the comments of others, as well as on the main post.

Encourage Comment Aggregation & Consensus-building:  Reaction and discussion will lead into a collaboration phase during which users can participate in drafting, and signing on to, collaborative comments.  Moderators trained in group facilitation will actively assist this phase.

Harness Technology to Manage Information:  Regulation Room is part of ongoing CeRI research into the use of natural language processing and other information management techniques to categorize and summarize public comments in rulemaking.

Emphasis in original. Thanks to beSpacific for the pointer. EMM