[Air-L] Draft Agenda for eRulemaking at the Crossroads, v.2.0

[Stuart Shulman]

eRulemaking at the Crossroads, v.2.0
a pre-conference workshop at
The 9th International Conference on Digital Government Research, May 18-21, 2008

Sunday May 18, 2008 - 9:00 am - 4:00 pm

Overview

The topic of eRulemaking has gained prominence in the Digital
Government research community as well as the federal government. In
2006, a dg.o workshop examined "eRulemaking at a Crossroads". Over the
past seven years, spurred by funding from the NSF's Digital Government
program and other US agencies, government officials, citizens,
activists, business leaders, and a wide range of scholars at Pitt ,
CMU , USC-ISI , and Cornell , have converged around the specific
problem of building tools to manage the flow of public comments into
the U.S. federal government. At the same time, the Office of
Management and Budget has overseen the development of government-wide
eRulemaking Initiative, now 5 years old, which created Regulations.Gov
, a portal for reviewing all open rulemakings, and a Federal Docket
Management System (FDMS). Meanwhile, a special committee of the
American Bar Association is preparing a report on the "Status & Future
of Federal e-Rulemaking". A vigorous debate still continues about the
utility of mass public comment campaigns and alternate means for
promoting citizen engagement. As a result, despite considerable
scholarly and practitioner interest, eRulemaking is once again at the
crossroads.

Draft Agenda

Opening Remarks
Stuart W. Shulman, University of Pittsburgh

"Drinking from the Firehose? Interest Group Use of e-Commenting"
David M. Shafie, Chapman University

"Ontology Construction for eRulemaking"
Hui "Grace" Yang, Carnegie Mellon University

"The Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project (DeER): Improving Federal
Agency Rulemaking Via Natural Language Processing and Citizen
Dialogue"
Peter Muhlberger, Texas Tech University

"Facilitating Issue Categorization & Analysis in Rulemaking"
Cynthia Farina, Tom Bruce, and Stephen Purpura, Cornell University

Closing Remarks
Tom Bruce, Cornell University

Please come and join us in Montreal, Canada for the 2008 Digital
Government Conference!  Before the main conference program begins,
there will be several workshops and tutorials dealing with highly
focused, critical, and emerging issues in the field.  We welcome you
to consider participating in these workshops and tutorials (see
below).

To register, please visit:
https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=197025

Conference web site: http://www.dgo2008.org/

Late registration closes May 9th.