Cairns Blog

RegInfo - How (Not) to Post the Regulatory Agenda

The Washington Post published an article about the new reginfo online version of the federal regulatory agenda.  "For U.S. rule-watchers who live in the digital world, the new searchable online version of the Bush administration's semi-annual regulatory agenda is an early holiday gift. For those who like to scoff at 1,500-page lists of documents, it's cause for Scrooge-like complaints. In print, the agenda is slimmed down to a mere 483 pages in the Dec. 10 Federal Register. That compares with the 1,700-page online edition, which contains the administration's full list of proposed and expected health, safety and other rules....Now you can search for a 2005 proposal by the Department of Health and Human Services to set standards for a sort of retirement home for chimpanzees used in federal research. Or you can discover a recent rulemaking to determine whether passengers on small planes should get compensation when they are bumped off of a flight on which they have reservations."

If I take 10 minutes, I can come up with ten better ways this information could have been made publicly available online, some of which are suggested by the article.  Other ideas?

1) List rules in terms of priorities, not agencies.  Let's see what matters!
2) Make rules taggable and therefore searchable by subject more readily. Now they can only be searched by name of agency.
3) Post a list of questions with each rule on which citizen participation is sought or let people come up with their own questions.
4) Show, using a timeline or some other visual metric, how a rule has progressed and whether stated targets have been met.
5) Offer an API to allow others to mash-up and make good use of this data.
6) Connect the rules to opportunities for action - allow people to comment on pending rules or at least link back to www.regulations.gov.
7) Show the connections between the stated regulatory priorities enunciated in each agency's statement and the agency rule list.
8) Link back to the rules themselves.  Now I can see a summary and then I have to go to another website type in the legal citation and then pull up the rule.
9) Tell me something about what a rule is likely to cost.  Show me the environmental and other impact statements that might have been filed in connection with the rule.
10) Taking a cue from the Washington Watch wiki, create a mirror version of each regulatory agenda and each rule and let people annotate them.

Thanks to Prof. Cary Coglianese for pointing me to the article.

Democracy Journal Wins Award

Democracy was named Best New Publication by the Utne Independent Press Awards.

They were 111 nominees in 15 categories that were chosen from an universe of more than 1,300 independent publications. Since 1989, these awards have showcased the best from the Independent Press in categories ranging from reporting excellence to personal life, cultural, and international coverage. In their citation, Utne had this to say about Democracy:

"Heavy intellectual hitters in the world of politics, including Dennis Ross, Joseph Nye, Jr., and Anne-Marie Slaughter, have their say in the pages of Democracy. From the first issue, when Kathryn Roth-Douquet called on progressives to enlist in the military, this quarterly "journal of ideas" has consistently presented fresh perspectives on American foreign policy and politics. Democracy fills a void in today's media landscape: It's an intelligent, wide-ranging political magazine committed to "grooming the next generation of progressive thought-leaders." Conservatives have magazines like the National Review, Commentary, and National Interest to arm their troops for battle. Editors Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny conceived their journal as a way for the left to do the same. Contributors often contradict each other, with every issue devoting space to responses to the previous issue's points of view. Ultimately, the editors hope these disagreements, polemics, and discussions will strengthen the progressive movement in the United States."

And in the upcoming print edition of the Utne Reader, Democracy is spotlighted with two other winners -- the Chronicle of Higher Education and Foreign Policy -- for putting forth views contrary to the conventional wisdom. For a PDF of the entire package, go here: http://www.utne.com/uploadedFiles/utne/articles/issues/2008-01-01/UIPA_2007.pdf.

Senators Launch New Effort To Put CRS Reports Online

From Congress Daily, 12/13/07, Senators Launch New Effort To Put CRS Reports Online

A bipartisan group of Senate heavyweights has introduced a resolution to require the Congressional Research Service provide online public access to all its reports, in what could be the strongest in a series of attempts to force CRS to make its work widely available.Introduced Tuesday by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins, R-Maine; Judiciary Chairman Leahy; Agriculture Chairman Harkin; Senate Armed Services ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz.; and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the resolution mandates that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms work with the director of CRS to put the service's reports online.CRS has long resisted making its reports available to the public despite criticism from advocates of government transparency who say the reports are paid for by taxpayers and would illuminate issues facing Congress. They are released only to members and their aides. Similar legislative efforts have failed. This one could succeed because the Senate can mandate the change without consulting the House and because of the seniority of

the sponsors, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy."This is a tough nut to crack . . . but if these senators cannot make this happen, then
it's not going to happen," he said.

Hiding in Plain "Site": Making Government Information Findable

I remember a talk by Cary Coglianese, then of Harvard, now of Penn, where he demonstrated how it took him -- one of the country's leading experts on administrative law -- over an hour to find a government regulation online.  And not some obscure regulation, mind you, but one that was the subject of a front-page New York Times article.  His students had long before given up in despair and frustration.

This chase down the rabbit hole in search of information was despite the fact that the E-Government Act of 2002 was supposed to make agency information electronically available.  But available means more than putting it on a server.  It has to be findable to be useful to citizens in a democracy.

Hence the Web 2.0 and  "search" gurus were on Capitol Hill yesterday talking to Congress about how to make government information easier to find.  This comes just as the Center for Democracy and Technology releases its report, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Governmental Information Cannot be Found through Commercial Search Engines."

Video of the congressional testimony is here.

Democracy Journal Publishes "Wiki Government"

New Issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

The Winter issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has arrived - available at the website, www.democracyjournal.org ; via print subscription by clicking here; or at your local bookstore or newsstand.

The Winter 2008 issue of Democracy contains my article, "Wiki Government," which discusses the opportunity presented by new technology to create institutions that are both more expert and more democratic.  Download democracy_journal.pdf

In addition:

• Historian Matthew Dallek looks back at World War II-era Civil Defense as an inspiration for a progressive response to homeland security that is bottom-up, not bureaucracy-based.
• The Council on Foreign Relations' Steven Simon and the Naval War College's Jonathan Stevenson argue that the real lesson from Vietnam is that we need to withdraw from Iraq now to preserve American prestige and power.
• Anne-Marie Slaughter takes apart Norman Podhoretz and neoconservative foreign policy and offers a liberal internationalist alternative.
• Aziz Huq from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU traces the imperial presidency of George W. Bush and how we must recalibrate the balance of power between Congress and the president.
• And political scientist Thomas Schaller explores the new world of regulating "public bads" - from carbon emissions to cigarette smoke.

This issue also features Jim Sleeper's assessment of labor leader Al Shanker's "tough liberalism"; Peniel Joseph's exploration of how the civil rights movement weaves into the fabric of American democracy; Mary Jo Bane's look at the Bush Administration's faith-based initiative; Rick Perlstein's revisiting of the 1972 McGovern campaign; and Sierra Club president Carl Pope's response to Gregg Easterbrook on the future of the environmental movement. Finally, in our "Recounting" essay, Andrei Cherny looks at the battle over the phrase "War on Terror."

About Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is a quarterly journal of progressive thought founded by Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny that serves as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred. Democracy is the progressive analogue of conservative journals such as Commentary, the Public Interest, and the National Interest, and it showcases breakthrough thinking on the major domestic and foreign policy issues of our time. Democracy is sold in bookstores in 49 states, and its readers - in print and at www.democracyjournal.org - can be found in 90 countries around the world.

House Releases Report on Administration Abuse of Science

The House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform releases report on White House effort to manipulate climate change science.

"For the past 16 months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been investigating allegations of political interference with government climate change science under the Bush Administration. During the course of this investigation, the Committee obtained over 27,000 pages of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Commerce Department, held two investigative hearings, and deposed or interviewed key officials. Much of the information made available to the Committee has never been publicly disclosed. This report presents the findings of the Committee’s investigation. The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming."

One Laptop Per Child Hit with Patent Lawsuit

A Boston-based company has filed a claim in Nigeria - one of the countries where the laptops were due to be distributed - alleging that the OLPC has infringed a patent it holds on a 'four shift key' keyboard, which helps the computer handle multiple languages.  See story.

Automated Content Access Protocol

James Grimmelmann has a useful post today about the Automated Content Access Protocol.  ACAP describes itself as:

a joint initiative by the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council. Working with leading publishers, search engines and other technical and commercial partners, a global, open and flexible standard for the communication of rich information on access and use of content on the Internet has now been developed.

Or as James describes it: "It’s a proposed protocol by which content providers will tell Google how to do its job."

The concern, of course, is that if the publishers insist on telling search engines how they want their content to be indexed and searched, they might attempt to sue for failure to respect the conditions that they set.  Those conditions may not promote access to knowledge.

Google Goes Minority Report

So why is Google offering free directory assistance at 1-800-GOOG-411?  Turns out it's not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google. 

As this article reports:

Google, and online rival Microsoft Corp., are using their free directory services to build vast, digital petri dishes loaded with samples of users' speech patterns. Those patterns are in turn being fed into the companies' myriad server computers, where they are analyzed in an effort to make their respective speech recognition technologies progressively smarter.

Will voice recognition be increasingly used to target advertising?