Articles by Jerry Brito

In my recent paper on e-transparency and in other forums I’ve been critical of the federal government’s Regulations.gov website for not offering XML feeds. Well, last week the site began offering an RSS feed for the site. You can see it here.

It looks like it’s a feed of every new proposed rule that is added to the site. Each item has a few elements, including a title, a link to the proposed rule’s page on Regulations.gov, a date, and a category that corresponds to the issuing agency. This is a big step in the right direction and I congratulate the folks who are making this happen. There’s a long way to go, though, in making the most of the technology, and I’d like to offer a few suggestions.

First off, the site isn’t yet offering feeds by agency. A feed of all proposed rulemakings in the government is less valuable to me personally than a feed for just FCC rules. On the other hand, a complete feed could be argued to be even more valuable because a third party could easily parse out the different agencies and offer individual agency feeds. ( Anyone interested in helping a poor, code-impaired guy with a lazyweb request?) Still, individual agency feeds (in addition to a complete feed) should be pretty easy to make available.

Second, there is no description element. In your RSS reader all you get is the title and a link. You have to click the feed item to get to the web page that describes the regulation, etc. Why not include the Federal Register notice right in the feed?

Finally, and this is my dream scenario, why not offer feeds for each rulemaking? Subscribe to a rulemaking and be instantly alerted anytime a new document is filed in the docket? Why not also include the documents as attachments in the feed?

The “what’s new” section of Regulations.gov (which I can’t link to because the site uses dynamic frames!) says that there is more to come in the next few weeks. It says, “The all-new Regulations.gov 2.0 will be launched shortly featuring a powerful new search engine and a re-designed homepage that makes searching, commenting and accessing other site features quicker and easier.” I sure hope so, and I commend the Regs.gov team for their hard work. I also hope they adopt Google’s sitemap protocol to make keyword searches work from anywhere on the web.

The more government information is available online, and the easier it is to access it, the more accountable we can hold government.

SHARE: 0 comments

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing today on “E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.” Written testimony from the witnesses is available here. Because the Senate doesn’t make available the audio or video of hearings on their own sites, I made sure to capture it and it’s available here as an MP3 for your listening pleasure.

The impetus for the hearing is the reauthorization bill for the E-Government Act that, as I wrote about earlier, includes new requirements on federal websites that would make them more easily indexed by commercial search engines such as Google. Joe Lieberman chaired the hearing and witnesses were Karen Evans, Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology a OMB, John Needham of Google, Ari Schwartz of CDT, and a clean-shaven Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Here are some highlights from the hearing:

Continue reading →

SHARE: 6 comments

Today Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech at Google where he laid out his tech policy platform. (Platform here in PDF; speech soon available here and here.) There’s much not to like, including a net neutrality regulatory agenda and support for media ownership restrictions, but I’d like to focus on the positive aspect of his speech. In the arena of technology-aided government transparency, Obama laid out a terrific set of ideas that every candidate, Republican or Democrat, should be able to adopt. From his speech:

To seize this moment, we have to use technology to open up our democracy. It’s no coincidence that one of the most secretive Administrations in history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to sunlight. As President, I’ll change that. I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts. I’ll let you participate in government forums, ask questions in real time, offer suggestions that will be reviewed before decisions are made, and let you comment on legislation before it is signed. And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, I’ll appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. (Emphasis mine.)

I hope whoever becomes president can carry out these technically simple but socially powerful reforms. Mr. Obama himself doesn’t even have to wait to be president to do something about this. He successfully teamed up with Sen. Tom Coburn to bring us the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t try for an encore with a “government data online in universally accessible formats” bill. Heck, adding one sentence to the E-Governemt Act reauthorization bill I wrote about yesterday might just do the trick.

SHARE: 6 comments

Last week, Joe Lieberman and others introduce a bill in the Senate to reauthorize the E-Government Act of 2002. In my new paper about online government transparency I explain how most agencies are likely in compliance with the Act by simply putting their regulatory dockets online, even though those dockets may be largely inaccessible by the public. For example, the FCC’s online docketing system, about which I’ve been griping lately, is probably up to par as far as the Act goes.

The good news is that the reauthorization bill includes an amendment that aims to make federal websites more accessible. It reads in part:

Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of the E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007, the Director [of OMB] shall promulgate guidance and best practices to ensure that publicly available online Federal Government information and services are made more accessible to external search capabilities, including commercial and governmental search capabilities. The guidance and best practices shall include guidelines for each agency to test the accessibility of the websites of that agency to external search capabilities. … Effective on and after 2 years after the date of enactment of the E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007, each agency shall ensure compliance with any guidance promulgated[.]

The purpose of these changes are to make federal sites more easily indexed by commercial search engines, such as Google, which are what most citizens use to find information. Some agencies have begun looking into this already. That is great in itself, but what really interests me here is the notion of “best practices” guidelines with which the agencies must comply. This could be the Trojan Horse that gets XML into federal sites. Once data is available in a structured format, then third parties can use it to create different (and likely better) user interfaces for the data, as well as interesting mashups.

I hope OMB will take this opportunity to revamp their e-gov efforts. Regulations.gov, a site they manage along with EPA, does not offer XML. (I’ve talked about this before here.) It also does abysmally on search engines, perhaps because they use outdated frames markup. A quick check shows Google last indexed the site in January. I sincerely hope this kick-starts things.

SHARE: 2 comments

When Congress delegates its authority to make laws to unelected regulators, a certain bit of accountability is lost. To make up for this, the Administrative Procedure Act requires regulators to act openly and transparently. They must make publicly available the rules they are considering, must take comments from the public, and must consider these in adopting final rules. As I explain in my new paper, making something publicly available in the Twenty-First Century means putting it online. But merely putting documents online is not enough to be truly transparent. The public has to be able to easily find and access the documents and hopefully also be able to use them in the sort of innovative ways the state of the art allows.

In this installment of my series looking at the FCC’s website, we’ll take a look at the Commission’s online docket system. So what’s wrong with it?

Continue reading →

SHARE: 14 comments