Site launched to collect public input on airline rule

Cornell University launched an interactive website on Wednesday to engage the public in reforming a proposed rule to expand the rights of airline passengers, marking the second time the institution has partnered with the Transportation Department to improve the regulatory process using Web 2.0.

The rule, which Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced on Wednesday, would require airlines to increase compensation for travelers bumped involuntarily from flights, allow passengers to cancel reservations within 24 hours at no charge and require full disclosure of baggage fees.

LaHood previewed the proposal on May 25 at a meeting of the Future of U.S. Aviation Advisory Committee, a new panel that counsels the secretary on ensuring the competitiveness of the nation's aviation industry in the global economy. It expands on a December 2009 rule that established a three-hour time limit for keeping passengers waiting on an airplane.

The site, dubbed Regulation Room, is part of President Obama's open government initiative, which calls on agencies to use technology to embed transparency, public-private collaboration and civic participation into everyday business. Transportation partnered with Cornell to create a hybrid blog-discussion forum to lure individuals with little or no policy backgrounds into taking part in the regulatory process.

"It is some form of Web engagement that quite honestly we haven't come up with a name for yet," said Cynthia Farina, a Cornell University law professor and a principal researcher with the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative. CeRI is a research group that works with governments to include the public in policymaking through the use of social media.

On Tuesday, Farina briefed government employees and attorneys on rule-making at a Washington conference co-sponsored by the American Bar Association and American University.

The 2002 E-Government Act mandates agencies make it possible for the public to comment on proposals electronically -- a process called e-rule-making -- but most regulatory experts agree it has not been a success, she said.

The goal of Regulation Room is to move the static e-rule-making process into the interactive Web 2.0 environment. Regulation Room is not an official government website, but the university works closely with Transportation to pick and describe rules for the site. The website is operated and moderated by CeRI and is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and Google Research Awards Program.

The website first experimented with interactive tools on a proposed rule that Transportation issued in April to ban texting by interstate commercial truck drivers.

CeRI attracted Internet users to Regulation Room through social networking sites, media outreach and e-mails to specific interest groups, including drivers, businesses that would be affected by the new rule, safety organizations, government agencies, open government advocates and researchers. The site attracted 2,024 unique visitors during the rule's 30-day comment period. Facebook was the third major source of traffic to Regulation Room. Traffic from Facebook probably would have been higher had the social networking site not inexplicably shut down Regulation Room's Web page, according to Farina.

About 35,000 followers, or subscribers, to the broadcast text-messaging service Twitter, were fed Tweets about Regulation Room. For the airplane passenger rule, CeRI will attempt to attract people waiting for flights at the airport to visit Regulation Room by issuing Twitter messages containing a link to the site, Farina said in an interview with Nextgov after her presentation.

At the end of the review period for the text-messaging ban, 54 people had registered to comment on the site, but 18 actually submitted comments. For perspective, she said it is important to compare those figures with participation levels on other Web 2.0 sites. Research shows that only 5 percent of visitors to blogs register to comment and just 0.1 percent comment regularly, she noted. In 2008, Regulations.gov, the government's official commenting site, generated about 580,000 submissions from 110 million website hits -- a 0.5 percent comment rate.

Farina said the results of the text-messaging ban experiment were not bad for a first try. Researchers cannot conclude the format has an effect on rule content, because only one trial has been conducted. Cornell researchers, however, learned lessons they will apply to the next iteration of the site, which is tied to the passenger rule.

This version will feature user comments more prominently because the first experiment indicated younger users like to see what others are saying about a rule and then refer to the actual text, Farina said. From now on, text and comments will have equal standing on every Web page.

In addition, researchers, who are faculty and students based at Cornell, determined the word "propose" misled users into thinking Transportation already had definite plans to execute the rule, so there was no point in commenting. Now, the site will preface explanations of the official text saying the department "is thinking about," "is wondering about" or "is considering," Farina said.

"My bet is that this is still not the right design," she said, adding she was constantly surprised by the results of the first trial.

Other interesting findings included the large amount of traffic from Facebook and the small number of comments on the relatively high-profile texting rule. Farina questioned whether LaHood's earlier public remarks about banning texting dampened excitement about the official proposal when it was published months later. "We didn't expect for the news cycle to have as much of an impact as it did," she said.

Some government transparency activists welcomed the new form of rule-making participation when Regulation Room debuted, but said applying the format to every rule might be too much of a hassle for most agencies.

Farina acknowledged the Web 2.0 method might not be appropriate for every rule-making and agencies should spend the time and money on it only when they expect a good response rate. The hope is Regulation Room will help agencies determine when interactive rule-making will produce a high response rate, she said.

"It may just be overkill. It may be not worth it. Americans are just legendary for not getting involved with the political process," Farina said of the entire Regulation Room concept. "But we can't tell."

Testing the idea is a useful academic exercise, she added.