DOT Pilot Project on e-Rulemaking

On January 21st, 2009, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government in which he described how: "public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge."

To support the President's open government initiative, DOT has partnered with the Cornell eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI) in a pilot project, Regulation Room, to discover the best ways of using Web 2.0 and social networking technologies to: (1) alert the public, including those who sometimes may not be aware of rulemaking proposals, such as individuals, public interest groups, small businesses, and local government entities that rulemaking is occurring in areas of interest to them; (2) increase public understanding of each proposed rule and the rulemaking process; and (3) help the public formulate more effective individual and collaborative input to DOT. Over the course of several rulemaking initiatives, CeRI will use different Web technologies and approaches to enhance public understanding and participation, work with DOT to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques, and report their findings and conclusions on the most effective use of social networking technologies in this area. DOT has invited other Federal agencies to work with us and we have been joined by the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in working to develop Regulation Room with Cornell.

DOT and the Obama Administration are striving to increase effective public involvement in the rulemaking process and strongly encourage all parties interested in this rulemaking to visit the Regulation Room website, www.regulationroom.org, to learn about the rule and the rulemaking process, to discuss the issues in the rule with other interested persons and groups, and to participate in drafting comments that will be submitted to DOT. CeRI will submit to the rulemaking docket a Summary of the discussion that occurs on the Regulation Room site; participants will have the chance to review a draft and suggest changes before the Summary is submitted. Participants who want to further develop ideas contained in the Summary, or raise additional points, will have the opportunity to collaboratively draft joint comments that will be also be submitted to the DOT rulemaking docket before the comment period closes.

Note that Regulation Room is not an official DOT website, and so participating in discussion on that site is not the same as submitting comments to the rulemaking docket. The Summary of discussion and any joint comments prepared collaboratively on the site will become comments in the docket when they are submitted to DOT by CeRI. At any time during the comment period, anyone using Regulation Room can also submit individual views to the rulemaking docket through the federal rulemaking portal Regulations.gov.

For questions about this project, please contact Brett Jortland in the DOT Office of General Counsel at 202.421.9216 or brett.jortland@dot.gov.