Petitioning ourselves into obscurity?
I show up in Prof. Shulman's report on the impact of information technology on Federal rulemaking. He seems pretty down on action centers. You can see what Ren and I had to say about this a few months ago.
Everyone at Prof. Shulman's workshop seemed to feel that there is a systematic asymmetry between people who engage in lobbying on a professional basis and people who do it as a hobby. (It seems to trivialize it to say "as a hobby" because nonprofessional commenters often care a great deal more about what they're saying than do professional commenters. Maybe I should say "avocational commenters" or simply "nonprofessional commenters".) The trouble is that professional commenters can usually afford to do more research, to become more familiar with the law, to learn more about the specific interests and concerns of the agency (or of particular staff members), to do prettier layout and presentation, and much more. Despite the theoretical prospect that treating them differently might violate the Administrative Procedure Act, it's hard for anyone to avoid the psychological effects of contrasting a professionally typeset article with a poorly hand-written informal note. Some people (especially some professional lobbyists) don't feel particularly unhappy with the imbalance. There has been a lot of optimism that the Internet might erode this asymmetry, by allowing the general public to do more research more quickly and cheaply, or to co-ordinate comments by people who exist outside of a formal organization. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening to the degree optimists had hoped. (Maybe this should be described as another case of the failure of the most optimistic predictions about the disintermediating effects of the Internet, as described, for example, by Brown and Duguid in The Social Life of Information.)
If it did happen, in any case, action centers would probably play only an indirect role. Most people who use action centers to comment to agencies in rulemaking proceedings do not, in fact, use them in a way that immediately leads a receiving agency to lend more weight to the petition. As Ren and I described, action centers might have other useful functions. But the ways in which rulemaking disadvantages the general public run fairly deep. Agencies emphasize that rulemaking is not a matter of popular vote, which leads to strange situations where one corporation (citing hard figures about millions of dollars, or merely citing a single code section or prior regulatory decision that seems to call for some interest of its to be taken into account) may beat out vast numbers of people who can only say that a proposed rule with disadvantage them each individually.
On the bright side, there's a lot more publicity surrounding many kinds of government activities than ever before, and a lot more contextual information available to anyone who merely becomes curious. That is a success of open-government legislation, not to mention of librarians, not to mention of Google.
I think people like Brown and Duguid are going to have more prominence in the next decade. Like the telephone, the Internet has had some important disintermediating effects, but like the telephone's, they have been far from total. You can call pretty much any government employee, but you probably don't, because you don't know the actual telephone number of the government employee you would want to call, and if you did call, you might not be able to make your case as clearly as you can to a friend or colleague, and the government employee might not particularly care to hear from you anyway. Now the same thing is true of e-mail!
I haven't finished reading Prof. Shulman's report yet, but I'm grateful to him for the opportunity to participate in his workshop. If the Federal Docket Management System ends up supporting RSS, that alone will be progress, whatever happens to action centers.
