Redesign spruces up policy, rule-making site

FederalRegister.gov, long criticized as an eye-glazing laundry list of public notices, relaunched on Monday as a more navigable website patterned after an award-winning free application developed by volunteers.

In honor of the print publication's 75th anniversary, the Obama administration is reformatting the daily log of policy proposals, final rules and other formal agency announcements into what it hopes will read more like an online newspaper. Officials sought help on the project from a trio of San Francisco-based programmers, who last summer submitted to a Web design contest a user-friendly version of FederalRegister.gov built from the site's raw data. The Sunlight Foundation, an open government group, hosted the competition.

The former FederalRegister.gov consisted of an index of notices listed in alphabetical order by agency name, with embedded links to plain text and PDF documents. The new site targets specific audiences by categorizing documents based on subject matter, including business and industry, environment, health and public welfare, money, science and technology, and world. Documents likely to have a major impact on constituents are at the top of each subsection, or "above the fold," officials said.

The site also spotlights a few crowd-sourced items of interest -- based on the collective preference of users -- including the most viewed, e-mailed and cited documents.

Besides striving to engage more citizens in policymaking, the site aims to please the developer community, according to officials. The underlying data is available in Extensible Markup Language, standard coding that makes it easy to exchange content online. And the site is open source, meaning any programmer can extract, replicate and improve upon the basic software.

Hobbyists had done much of the labor for free already. Developers Andrew Carpenter, Bob Burbach and Dave Augustine in September 2009 won second place reimagining FederalRegister.gov as GovPulse.us for Sunlight's Apps for America contest. The competition required volunteer programmers to turn content from Data.gov, a warehouse of downloadable federal statistics, into practical Web tools for holding the government accountable.

The Office of the Federal Register in March invited the creators of GovPulse to refine and expand their offering for the publication's official website.

Government officials admit the old site made it hard to see proposed rules and agency announcements.

"The Federal Register is dense and difficult to read whether in print or online as a PDF," U.S. Archivist David S. Ferriero wrote on his blog on July 22. "It's also difficult to find what you're looking for."

He noted the new site is intended to make government more open, in accordance with the Federal Register's mandate. The 1935 Federal Register Act "ensured that legal issuances could no longer be adopted in secret and arbitrarily enforced against the public," Ferriero stated.

But by law, FederalRegister.gov cannot rewrite the often-cumbersome text that agencies submit for posting. Critics have complained that the lack of plain English in agency proposals and updates adds to the complexity of the rule-making process.

The Sunlight Foundation says it is pleased with the administration's decision to bypass federal contractors and instead collaborate with citizens on the overhaul.

"I think it shows a great deal of vision and flexibility to approach those developers and take advantage of what they'd offered in order to improve the Federal Register," said Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs, the programming arm of the foundation that organized last year's contest.

The organization's position is that public access to raw federal data can save the government money by allowing enthusiasts to build applications at cheaper rates than traditional government contractors.

Sunlight has posted numerous prototypes of redesigned federal websites, including a hypothetical refresh of the Supreme Court and Federal Election Commission sites. Last summer, the group unsuccessfully attempted to bid on a contract for upgrading Recovery.gov, the government's stimulus-tracking website.

Lee said the development approach for the Federal Register will not be suitable for every redesign.

"The GovPulse effort was basically a gift for the government," he said. "They didn't have to go and pay for that work again. That won't always be the case. I don't want to imply that the government will not have to invest money into improving its Web outlets. Our priority is having agencies release the raw data and the tools that are necessary to perform this kind of work."