Digital Government: SGER: Citizen Agenda-Setting in the Regulatory Process: Electronic Collection and Synthesis of Public Commentary

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EIA-0089892Shulman, Stuart W.Drake UniversityDigital Government: SGER: Citizen Agenda-Setting in the Regulatory Process: Electronic Collection and Synthesis of Public CommentaryThis planning grant will support initial examination of the impact of new communications technologies, such as the Internet, on public involvement in the regulatory rule-making process, leading to more sophisticated and manageable information systems for citizen/government interaction. A related topic of interest is to explore the degree to which electronic avenues make public comment more difficult or less effective for the citizen. The partner agency is the National Organic Program (NOP) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the project progresses, it will promote further collaboration between social scientists, federal agencies, and information scientists. Recently, the NOP received over 275,000 comments via email, fax and postal mail in response to a proposed regulation. It is difficult to draw conclusions from such a large and heterogeneous set of responses without the assistance of information technologies. NOP has provided the PI a sample data set of 20,000 responses to begin this project.