DG Researchers Work to Bridge the Process Gap
Harvard Project Studies the Distance Between Government's e-Rulemaking Process and Public Understanding
By Karen Heyman
For the DGRC

Spanning the "Process Partition"
	Researcher profile: Cary Coglianese Project profile: A National Center for Digital Government: Integrating Information and Institutions

Public agencies are required to solicit public comment on proposed regulations. Digital Government researchers are participating in projects to make the process easier on both the public trying to offer comments and the officials trying to sort through them. (See earlier coverage)

But despite the success of Regulations.gov and other online efforts, challenges remain, cautions DG researcher Cary Coglianese, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has organized two NSF-funded workshops on digital government and created the NSF-funded e-rulemaking portal, Erulemaking.org.

The challenge most frequently mentioned is the "digital divide:" What good are online documents to people who have no computer access?

But there's an irony that underlies the question: The previous, paper-only system was accessible to even fewer citizens, according to Coglianese, who additionally chairs the Regulatory Policy Program at the Kennedy School's Center for Business and Government.

Back then, regulatory information was more easily available to DC-based corporate and public interest group lobbyists who needed only to cross a few streets to an agency they already knew well: A concerned citizen had to travel all the way to Washington, D.C., find the appropriate agency, the appropriate office and the appropriate staffer who finally - perhaps - could find the appropriate docket (the administrative record of the ruling) in the appropriate filing cabinet.

Coglianese's work underscores how far we have come with Digital Government and how far we still have to go. Even if a citizen as far away as Alaska or Hawaii can now theoretically access a proposed rule, he or she may still be at a loss. The Digital Divide turns out have been only the first, most obvious challenge.

There's a second, more sophisticated cognitive challenge that might be dubbed the "Process Partition" - the gap between the government professional and lay citizen's understanding of regulatory processes.

The government is now in the position of a car manufacturer that has put its entire parts catalog online, says Coglianese. It's a tremendous resource for car mechanics and the occasional car buff - but it's overwhelming and nearly useless to the average driver who barely knows a carburetor from a carbohydrate.

Unfortunately, few resources are available to the average citizen to explain how the regulatory process works. Civics classes may teach about the branches of government, but they seldom go into the details of what happens when a regulatory agency solicits comments. Many grade school teachers encourage students to write to their Congressional representatives, but it would be a rare teacher who demonstrated how to draft a comment to the Federal Trade Commission. Would an average citizen even know that the same rule may be split into different dockets?

"As we research this issue, we're finding all sorts of other electronic processes [like related filings] that need to be linked together," says Rick Otis, Deputy Assistant Administrator at the EPA's Office of Environmental Information.

"To be able to find something online at a government Web site you have to already know a great deal about what you're looking for," explains Coglianese.

For example, an environmental professional will understand that the EPA's mercury water pollution rules will likely be located in a different section from the mercury air pollution rules. But would a concerned citizen simply searching for "mercury" become confused and frustrated at all the places and kinds of documents to sort through? (Mercury is in fact such a broad subject, says Otis, that the EPA will be devoting an entire section on its Web site just to mercury, which should help eliminate much of the confusion.)

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Coglianese is now working with the federal government to construct a unified government-wide document system (FDMS - the Federal Document Management System), as part of the Bush administration's inter-agency efforts to provide better services to citizens. The FDMS will digitally archive all the supporting documents, including public comments, for proposed regulations. Says Otis, "Currently you can use Regulations.gov to find anything that's been published in the Federal Register, but you can't see the content of the actual docket, which still resides - electronically or on paper - at the agency."

"We need to make sure there's a correspondence between dockets and the Federal Register," says Coglianese. "There has to be a very consistent way to make sure docket systems are linked to what will become rules."

Central to this plan will be an intuitive search and indexing system. Coglianese envisions a simple interface that would make sense to a citizen who'd just read a newspaper article about a mercury poisoning in a local river and went to either Regulations.gov or EPA.gov to find out more about the EPA's latest rulings. It could possibly use natural language searching to narrow the scope of an inquiry. For example: "Is your search related to: 'mercury and fish' or 'mercury and birds'?" Additionally, it might take an idea from the private sector: Amazon's Recommendations, so someone requesting information could be guided to similar requests.

Coglianese has been working with officials from the EPA, like Otis, and also the U.S. Department of Transportation. Recently he presented a study demonstrating how long it took participants to find a specific document in a docket using their Web sites as examples, alongside Regulations.gov. Participants were given a brief description of a proposed rule and asked to search for four items, using either Regulations.gov or one of the agency Web sites.

It proved a stark example of how far we still have to go. Even though all three Web sites have won praise for their ease of use, only 4% of the participants found four out of four documents in the time allotted.

"Every agency like ours is acutely aware of this issue," says Otis. "Many Web sites were developed ad hoc over time - now we are committed to making the Internet the primary means of communication to the American people."

"It's not enough to just digitize the documents," concludes Coglianese, "if we're truly going to make them broadly accessible."

"'How do you give the non-expert the ability to effectively participate?'" is the most important question, says Otis. "What I'd like to see is a portion of Regulations.gov that gets into education. We're hoping to create such a section for a portion of the site, possibly as early as this summer."