The eRulemaking Research Group was formed at the January 2003 National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop titled “E-Rulemaking: New Directions for Technology and Regulation,” held at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University.  Following the workshop, computer scientists Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute) and Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University) teamed up with social scientists Stuart Shulman (University of Pittsburgh) and Stephen Zavestoski (University of San Francisco). With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the group has since participated in and organized workshops, made presentations to federal agencies, NGOs, and private sector representatives, launched an eRulemaking text data testbed, and collaborated with five federal agencies (DOT, EPA, USDA, BLM, and USFS) in the submission of a successful 4-year proposal, funded by the NSF’s Digital Government program. Computer scientists in the eRulemaking Research Group focus on text clustering, text searching, near-duplicate detection, opinion identification, stakeholder characterization, and extractive summarization. Social scientists in the group are studying the impact of such tools and the Internet more generally on the process of rulemaking. Over the last five years, our group has collected 16 public comment datasets comprising in excess of 1,000,000 public comments on federal regulatory actions. Among the graduate students working in the group are Grace Hui Yang and Jaime Aguello (CMU) and Namhee Kwon (USC-ISI).

Professors Shulman and Zavestoski concurrently worked on a separate NSF-funded study directed by David Schlosberg (Northern Arizona University), a Senior Research Associate in the eRulemaking Research Group. This study was designed to compare traditional paper-based public participation in rulemaking with electronic commentary. The central task of the project is to examine the democratic implications of the move to e-rulemaking. We are comparing e-comments/commenters with traditional comments/commenters through textual analysis of actual public comments and a survey of 1500 rulemaking participants. The key issues in this study include whether the level, tone, and breadth of democratic discourse is improved (or not) by e-rulemaking, with a particular focus on the differences between “form letter” and “unique” comments/commenters. The survey also measures citizen satisfaction with the process, and with the agencies, after their participation in rulemaking.

Other Senior Research Associates in the eRulemaking Research Group are Dr. Mack C. Shelley (Iowa State University), who provides methodological, survey, focus group, grant writing, and external evaluative support for many of the group's efforts, and John Bosley of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, who is collaborator in the usability testing phases of our research.

This research project was initiated during the fall 1999 semester and was made possible with the following grants from the National Science Foundation: IIS-0429293 “Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking,“ EIA-00328914 “SGER COLLABORATIVE: A Testbed for eRulemaking Data,” SES-0322662 “Democracy and E-Rulemaking: Comparing Traditional vs. Electronic Comment from a Discursive Democratic Framework,“ and EIA-0089892 “SGER: Citizen Agenda-Setting in the Regulatory Process: Electronic Collection and Synthesis of Public Commentary.”