About Project DeER

Project Goals

The Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project (DeER) is a two year, National Science Foundation funded research initiative that is testing ways to generate better and more effective public input in federal agency government rulemakings.

Federal agencies turn laws passed by Congress into concrete rules that clarify what is legally acceptable and what is not. The agencies are required by law to seek public input on the rules they propose to instantiate laws. This public comment opportunity represents one of the broadest opportunities for citizens to influence how they are governed.

Unfortunately, many researchers, advocates, and even agency personnel agree that the quality of comments currently coming into the government are often too poor to be helpful. Many comments are highly redundant form letters put together by public interest groups. These letters constitute a 'vote' for a particular point of view, but agencies are most interested not in how many people take a view, an issue presumably settled by Congressional representatives, but in insights about facts and legal issues concerning their proposed rules.

For example, there have been 34,961 comments filed with the FCC on network neutrality. Of these, a mere 569 comments appear on the FCC comments system after the user selects the 'Eliminate Brief Text Comments' option. The vast majority of comments, then, are highly redundant form letters or off-the-cuff opinion snippets that are unlikely to influence the FCC. Your informed voice could make a real difference.

This project seeks to improve the quality of comments by experimenting with different methods of public deliberation and with advanced computing technology, called Natural Language Processing. Our Question Answering tool seeks to make it easier for people to find information and learn about complex regulations. Later in the project, we will also test our "Digital Facilitator," DiFA, to help facilitate the deliberations.

Phases

The DeER Project has completed Phase 1 and is in the middle of Phase 2. Phase 1 included setting up and testing a message board system for deliberating net neutrality regulation, and testing the functionality of the Question Answering tool.

For Phase 2, we have continued with the topic of network neutrality and have secured the partnership of several public interest organizations to recruit broad public participation in the project. We have been in contact with FCC personnel who have indicated that participant comments from the project can be submitted to the FCC so long as the Notice of Inquiry (NOI) regarding network neutrality remains open. These personnel believe this NOI will remain open for the duration of this project, and actions by the agency suggest they are correct. If any difficulties arise with submitting comments, we will work with a FCC Commissioner's office to submit the comments.

Phases 3 and 4 of the project will likely cover other rulemaking topics, such as environmental and transportation issues, including congestion pricing and privatization of infrastructure.

Researchers

  • Peter Muhlberger, Texas Tech University
    Peter Muhlberger is a Research Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University. Before his current position, he was E-Democracy Research Director at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS) and Visiting Professor of Political Science at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. At Heinz, he designed the Virtual Agora Project, a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded grant project investigating the political, social, and psychological effects of computer-mediated deliberative democracy and community.
  • Jennifer Stromer-Galley, University at Albany
    Jennifer Stromer-Galley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research interests include the political uses and effects of new communication technology, including campaigning through the internet, organic citizen’s political talk, and formal political deliberations.
  • Nick Webb, University at Albany
    Nick Webb is a Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Informatics, Logics and Security Studies (ILS) at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York. His principle research interests are in dialogue analysis, conversation management and interactive question answering, although he is working on a range of social, cooperative, collaborative information systems.
  • Ting Liu, University at Albany
    Ting Liu is a PH.D candidate of Department of Computer Science in SUNY Albany. His research interest is in Natural Language Processing, especially Information Extraction. He is working on the DeER project as well as XDoX, HITIQA, and COLLANE.
  • Brian Tramontano, University at Albany
    Brian Tramontano is a research assistant for the DeER project and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics, business and media. Prior to coming to the University at Albany, he was a vice president at a public relations and communications firm in New York City.