I stumbled across New York Law School’s Do Tank today (via via via). From their about us page:
About the Do Tank and the Democracy Design Workshop
The Do Tank strives to strengthen the ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing software and legal code to promote collaboration. Tools alone cannot create a culture of strong groups. Hence Do Tank projects address the role of legal and political institutions, social and business practices and the visual and graphical technologies — what we term the “social code” — that may allow groups, not only to foster community, but to take action.
Among the various Do Tank projects is one that deals with the collection of innovative tools around e-rulemaking. The section about The Comment Process provides a nice list of requirements:
COMMENT: Making comments more deliberative, making comments more meaningful, making comments more manageable
…
Why Electronic Commenting?
E-rulemaking provides the opportunity to solicit a larger number of comments from a wider array of more informed sources. It also creates an opportunity for more Americans to exercise their democratic right to participate. Participation via the web might make it possible to transform e-rulemaking into a more deliberative and collaborative process.
Innovation in the Comment Process?
Technology, if designed with participation in mind, could make the comment process more informative and manageable for regulators and, at the same time, render it more relevant and deliberative for citizens.
Innovations should ideally:
- Be cost effective;
- Make citizen participation relevant and meaningful;
- Shift the comment from a one-off event to something more connected to the rule, other comments and the community of rulemaking process;
- Make it easier to find comments and their contents;
- Help authors to manage copyrights and confidentiality of information while encouraging participation;
- Make comments more deliberative and meaningful to the rulewriter;
- Extract the useful aspects of each comment, and;
- Create a process that can manage such a large volume of comments to the benefit of the agency receiving them; and
- Enable conversation among members of the rulemaking community of practice.
Not entirely unrelated to what we’re working on currently.
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