Manor 2.0 documents ‘Live Government Innovation From Small-Town Texas’

Hi Alex.  Cool that you captured the conversation on Twitter here@twitter-8739552:disqus

I have many ideas about using social media in a big, big way to take comments and create discussion.  I agree broadly with the points you and others made, including Clay Johnson.

But “should” and “do” are two different things, esp. in this age of very, very constrained budgets and given where our attys say the APA is.  Being able to handle what is sometimes thousands or tens of thousands of comments in a reliable way is made MUCH more difficult when those comments come in through multiple channels.

Again, I want to see gov’t going exactly that direction (and you know me – I’m pushing as much as I can).  We’re just not there yet, at least not at the federal level.

So my question remains: do people argue that unless a gov’t effort hits the ground with 100% two-way dialogue, they should stay offline?

I still think no: being there is better than not.

I think the core of the question here is, “Why is regulations.gov on Facebook in the first place?” There already exist a number of ways to subscribe to information about the regulatory and non-regulatory official activities of government – including, but not limited to, the Federal Register. A simple calculation of the volume of regulatory activities and the duration of their comment periods would clearly show that creating a Facebook feed of that information will bury many important regulations. Monday, October 3rd’s Federal Register has 18 rules, for instance (and 105 notices!)

I’m going to take the controversial stance that no one is going to subscribe to regulations.gov in hopes of being able to filter signal and noise. People interested in regulations should be driven to the appropriate agency for content about the rule, not to a Facebook clearinghouse in hopes that they will be looking at the feed on the right time on the right day to find the right regulation that might matter to them.

So, that leaves us where? Many studies point us to the fact that citizens do need to be oriented to the rulemaking space to make effective comments. If all we’re doing is migrating the UX of regulations.gov to Facebook, we’ve missed the boat entirely. This is the same strategic mistake we made when we just threw all our stuff on the Web a decade ago. Plopping the Federal Register online, with no markup and layering of content misses the opportunity to take advantage of the capabilities that the Web offers to package and make content digestible.

I’ve said this in other forums, and I will say it here: many proposed rulemakings offer key questions that the agency is asking the public to provide input on. If there was a way to tag those questions, package them as facebook updates/tweets, and use regulations.gov as a marketing platform, agencies might indeed drive more traffic. So, let’s take the the example of @RegulationRoom:disqus  and how it’s tweeting on *just one regulation* right now. Asking questions, inviting people to the discussion, etc.

If all we’re doing is being on Facebook to say were there, then…no, we shouldn’t be there.

and furthermore there is NOTHING ‘satellite’ about this! Why would Nasa fund some fools like these who don’t know anything about what they’re doing other than oh i logged some accel data and gps and took some pictures. BIG DEAL