USDOT's Eisner Details Successes, Challenges of e-Rulemaking
The DOT's Regulations Leader Tells of a Well-Designed System Still Under Construction - and Occasionally Under Heavy Load
By Karen Heyman and Mack Reed
For the DGRC

dg.o2005
	The 6th National Conference on Digital Government Research convened May 15-18 in Atlanta, GA. Program: dg.o2005 Shows Evidence of Growing Breadth Overview: Stronger Roots, Broader Application Keynote: Neil Eisner on Challenges of e-Rulemaking DG Society Forming to Help Community Face Uncertain Future Home page Program at a glance Complete program Press release
Neil Eisner delivers the opening keynote address. He is Assistant General Counsel for Regulation and enforcement at the U.S. Dep't. of Transportation

The 6th National Conference on Digital Government Research opened in Atlanta with a keynote speech detailing the state of the art in the U.S. Department of Transportation's e-government applications - and the challenge that heavy use of that system by citizens and government e-rulemakers poses to the DG community at large.

Showcasing the mix of pragmatism and vision that characterizes the field, Neil Eisner (Assistant General Counsel for Regulation and Enforcement at the U.S. D.O.T. ) combined an overview of successful applications of digital technology to the federal rulemaking process with suggestions for ways that academics and government officials could work together to solve remaining problems in the field.

In the space of nine years, the U.S. D.O.T. has developed an intricate set of applications for accepting, tracking and managing citizen comment that must be assessed in the process of transforming legislation into specific rules of law. The systems let D.O.T. rulemakers augment proposed rules by uploading documents, making notes on legal ramifications, and tracking agency actions on editing the rules. The department has even experimented with using chat rooms to solicit comments and then loading the chat transcripts into the department's internal system, Eisner said.

Yet as advanced and powerful as the systems are, Eisner said, they need more and better tools for parsing, assessing and acting upon the millions of comments it receives. "We spend a lot of time reading and organizing comments," he said. The department needs better interoperability for its tracking systems, an interactive comment system that prompts commenters for more specific information and an engine for summarizing the comments and the huge documents used to support changes in the rules, he said.

It also needs comment-gathering systems with front ends that are more responsive to the needs of commenters: He told of a dry cleaner who shipped some cleaning fluid in a Coke bottle to a client. The corrosive chemical ate through the bottle and the box and - were it not for the vigilance of shipping agents, would have eaten through the hull of the aircraft on which it was to be shipped. When a DOT agency fined the dry cleaner for shipping the fluid improperly, the man was irate, saying that he didn't know anything was wrong with it, Eisner recalled. "We need to make it easier for people to find rules online," he said.

But all these improvements must surmount the challenges of budget, resistance to change within agencies, legal issues, the difficulties identifying needs and desires for system improvements, and concerns about loss of control over and increased access to public data on the Internet.

And therein lie the challenges facing the e-government research and development community at large - a need for technical innovation and better user-oriented services within the constraints that restrict all e-government projects today.

Afterward, Eisner said that the most well-received part of his speech seemed to be his practical suggestions for how DG academics and government practioners could best work together. "People said that was exactly what they needed," said Eisner, "Ideas from the users of the systems on what additional things they should be concentrated on."

That advice can be summed up as, "Ask First," which underscores the customer-centric nature of DG research: Researchers should check with agencies about what their needs are, as agencies in turn should check with citizens about their needs. Ironically, that advice was so taken to heart, the Q&A session could not accommodate all those who wished to ask questions, according to Eisner.

"We need to do more, we need to find easier ways to do things. And don't make assumptions - you need to work with the people in the government, don't make assumptions without checking with the people in the government to find out there's a basis for it, don't hesitate to ask questions or make suggestions. We need to work together in developing a solution," advises Eisner. One very practical example he gives is that if government agencies are involved early enough in software development, all it may take to make certain text computer-readable are a few symbols that agency personnel can easily add to documents as they're being created - but if a researcher presents a fully-finished program, the agency may find itself stuck having to hire dedicated data entry personnel.

Recapping some of the other ideas from his talk, Eisner emphasized the importance of interactive communication - and how it can be facilitated in a digital environment. In fact, Eisner took great pains to reassure the audience that at least as far as his agency is concerned, emailed comments and Web forms comments are given as much weight (and in fact are preferred) to hard copy letters. Comments in digitized form can be much more easily shared throughout an agency, he said, so those who fear that email is looked upon as just so much form letter junk, should be reassured that attention is being paid.

The unfortunate mistake the public frequently makes, however, is to not include enough substantive detail in their comments. It isn't enough to say, "Don't build it!" For the agency to pay attention, a writer needs to give financial, environmental or other significant reasons why a particular project should or should not be undertaken. "If they provide good data that helps us make our decisions," says Eisner, "If they make a good point, rather than just saying, 'I don't like it,' then I can say, 'That's right, I didn't think of that."

To further this, one of Eisner's "Dream Projects" would be a real-time interactive form. In this scenario, when a member of the public posted a digital comment on a government Web site, it would be scanned by a software program designed to pick up key phrases and prompt the writer for more detailed information. Thus, if a citizen were to write, "The new project will waste money," the software would respond with a phrase like, "Please tell us how it will waste money."

Another dream, undoubtedly shared by many inside and outside the federal government, would be for software that could automatically scan proposed rules and regulations for duplications or contradictions with other proposals or pre-existing requirements.

Eisner concludes that more research is needed to measure the ultimate impact of digital interactivity.

Some successes as a result of converting to Web-based systems have obvious metrics, such as reduced staff time and space allocation. But communication successes are often anecdotal, "It's not easy to tell whether the people who comment electronically would have commented as well by traditional means," says Eisner, urging researchers to develop quantitative assessments, "We can't yet answer why are people who are sending us email also sending us hard-copy, conventional letters."