Facilitative moderation for online participation in eRulemaking

Abstract

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government's most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution [24,1,18,14] for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in "live" Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifiers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically significant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result.

Identifying Appropriate Support for Propositions in Online User Comments

“…Rulemaking is the process by which U.S. government agencies make new regulations and enact public policy; its digital counterpart -eRulemaking -moves the process to online platforms (see, e.g. (Park et al, 2012)). By providing platforms in which the public can discuss regulations that interest them, government agencies hope to enlist the expertise and experience of participants to create better regulations.…”

E- rulemaking: technologies used and achieved results

“…(Muhlberger et al, 2011) Este artigo aborda o projeto deliberativo de e-Rulemaking, sendo que, os resultados obtidos foram fracos. (Park et al, 2012) Este artigo procedeu-se à aplicação de uma ferramenta de processamento de linguagem natural num site específico de e-Rulemaking, procurando promover a interação social e os resultados obtidos foram bons. Recomenda motivar as pessoas a participar no processo de e-Rulemaking.…”

“… Permitam que todos os comentários a regulamentações sejam visíveis a utilizadores registados, visto que, esta prática fomenta a interação e uma maior compreensão do assunto em questão, contribuindo para comentários mais informados e originais (R. D. Carlitz & Gunn, 2002;Park et al, 2012;Schlosberg et al, 2007;Walker & Oard, 2013).…”

Balancing inclusion and "enlightened understanding" in designing online civic participation systems

“…An evolving moderator protocol identifies several distinct Moderator roles, each of which is operationalized through one or more facilitative interventions. These roles create the conditions for effective deliberation and consensus-building by increasing task clarity and focus, helping commenters articulate their interests and contributions, fostering shared group process norms, and ensuring that individuals have the substantive and site use information required to participate effectively [44].…”

“…This is doubtless true, and highlights the importance of selecting rulemakings in which the anticipated value of newcomer participation is likely to outweigh the cost of getting it [22]. Eventually, these costs may be lowered by natural language processing techniques that can identify comments that would benefit from moderation [44].…”