What Technology Can Do for Rulemaking: Social Media &The RegulationRoom partnership

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1 What Technology Can Do for Rulemaking: Social Media &The RegulationRoom partnership Administrative Law Conference November 7, 2013 CFPB Whitney Patross Counsel, Office of Regulations CeRI Cynthia R. Farina Faculty Director, RegulationRoom project

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5 RegulationRoom An example of how social media and other Web 2.0 technologies can be used to bring new voices and new information into rulemaking A lesson in how technology alone can t give us broader, better rulemaking participation.

6 The missing stakeholder problem Individuals and [small] entities who: historically have not participated (or participated effectively) in the commenting process, but have experiential situated knowledge that might be helpful to rulemakers What does it take to get them meaningfully involved?

7 Alert & Engage

8 Sample: Google & Facebook ads

9 The outreach goal: messages that get attention, educate, motivate This is a proposal for new federal law and it will affect you in the following way. We want public reaction to this proposal. You have a legal right to comment. We have a legal responsibility to review the comments and consider them carefully before we make a final decision

10 Getting informed, useful comments

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14 Triage Goal: restructuring the NPRM info for the Web and for new participants making sure that the most important information gets the most attention Signposting making it easy for people to find the issues they are most interested in discussing Translation focus on conveying info in ordinary language Layering giving users access to info at different levels of complexity

15 To see more and follow the current open discussion: To read more about what agencies can learn from the RegulationRoom project about using social media in rulemaking:

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17 Comment Deduplication Engine What Technology Can Do for Rulemaking November 7,

18 What s the Deduplication Engine? It was deployed in the FDMS October 2012 release Uses a leading text analytics software technology to detect duplicate/near duplicate documents and text All comments received via Regulations.gov on rules, proposed rules, notices or uploaded to FDMS can undergo deduplication analysis 2

19 Benefits of using Deduplication Engine Provides Federal agencies users ease of reviewing and processing comments: Efficiently identifies mass mail campaigns and duplicate comment submissions Detects similarities/differences among comments within each campaign Provides agencies with deeper comment analysis Offers reporting on deduplication results Enables quicker posting of comments for public access on Regulations.gov 3

20 Running the Deduplication Engine Agency users access the Deduplication Engine in FDMS using the Actions dropdown Agency users can Re-run Deduplication to analyze new comments or Rerun Deduplication from scratch to include new and old comments 4

21 Reviewing the Deduplication Results - Deduplication Results are organized using a split screen display - Agency users can view their deduplication results in the Duplicates Tree - Main Display Frame shows Deduplication Details using a Bar diagram - View the Deduplication Details for the analyzed FR: Document ID, Title, Docket ID, and the number of Pivots, Duplicates and Unique Documents - Bar diagram offers users a visual representation of their deduplication results 5

22 Reviewing the Deduplication Results Deduplication Engine selects Pivot documents (i.e. a baseline) and matches Near Duplicate comments that are at least 70% similar Pivots and their Near Duplicates are organized into distinct campaigns (folders) These distinct folders enable users ease of exploring similar comments 6

23 Reviewing the Deduplication Results Each folder with a Document ID identifies the Pivot and contains its Near Duplicate comments At the bottom of the Duplicates Tree is the folder containing the Unique comments 7

24 Reviewing Pivot Documents Click on the pivot document folder in the Duplicates Tree to view the document in the right panel Appended to the Document ID users find the similarity percentage of each near duplicate comment Agency users can override the Pivot/Near Duplicate designation on any document using the Mark as Unique feature 8

25 Reviewing Near Duplicate Comments Click the Document ID of the desired Near Duplicate to view its content in the frame Markup enables users ease of reviewing similar and unique phrases identified in each campaign 9

26 Reviewing Near Duplicate Comments Markup of each comment shows phrases common to the group of comments: Red strikethrough = phrases from the pivot document that are not in the near duplicate comment Blue = additional phrases in the near duplicate comment that are not in the pivot document Black = same phrases contained in both pivot document and near duplicate comment 10

27 Example of a Unique Document All Unique comments are individually listed in the tree for ease of review and processing 11

28 Next Phase: Deduplication Engine PII and vulgarity filtering in FDMS Expand capabilities of the technology in FDMS e.g., enable document sorting based on concept categorization and clustering Future metadata enhancements for comments (i.e., Public Submission documents) on Regulations.gov e.g., extend document filtering using FDMS deduplication metadata: duplicate, unique and pivot designations 12

29 erulemaking PMO Bryant Crowe, , Regulations.gov, FDMS.gov, FDMS Training, Electronic Docket Best Practices, Communications 13

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31 Regulatory Affairs Management System (RAMS) Christina E. McDonald Associate General Counsel for Regulatory Affairs Nov 7, 2013 ABA Conference

32 DHS has a diverse regulatory mission Coast Guard: Standards for Living in Organisms in Ships Ballast Water Discharged in U.S. Waters NPPD: Ammonium Nitrate Security Program TSA: Passenger Screening using Advanced Imaging Technology 2

33 DHS has a diverse regulatory mission CBP: Definition of Form I-94 to Include Electronic Format ICE/CBP: Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Sexual Abuse and Assault in DHS Confinement Facilities 3

34 What is RAMS? The Regulatory Affairs Management System is... An enterprise-wide, web-based, internal information technology system that facilities the review and clearance of regulations through the Department. 4

35 How did we build RAMS? 5

36 Behind the Scenes RAMS is comprised of three Microsoft applications: 1. Customer Relations Management (CRM) SharePoint 2010, and 3. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 6

37 How does RAMS work? Workflow Management Tool Collaboration Platform Tracking System Reporting Solution Automates clearance workflow Records all decisions and actions Allows simultaneous review and editing Stores documents & in centralized location Provides real-time status on projects Tracks all data associated with each project Generates reports on workflow, timing, etc Produces metrics on all aspects of projects 7

38 Considerations Providing flexibility while accommodating complexity Educating the development team Migrating old data & in-progress projects Accommodating different components systems Obtaining buy-in Training 8

39 What are the benefits of RAMS? 9

40 Questions? 10

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42 U.S. Department of Transportation s Rulemaking Management System (RMS) Brett A. Jortland Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Regulation and Enforcement November 7, 2013

43 History Began development in 2001 Addressed 3 major needs Tracking information, documents and status of rules Generating reports for management Reducing paper trail and physical storage requirements Custom-built to meet DOT s needs with a web-based front-end and a database behind 2

44 Tracking Completion Schedule Designation Effects Internal notes 3

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47 Reporting Weekly status reports Agenda Special reports RRR Report Priority Rulemakings Report Regulatory Review Meeting 6

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50 Efficiency Eliminates paper storage Digital concurrence system (no grid) NARA approval to have only digital storage (dockets) 9

51 Future Development Winter target for deployment Transfers to DOT Sharepoint 2010 platform Benefits Decreased security cost Decreased future development cost Decreased hosting cost Greater reliability 10