eRulemaking at the Crossroads, v.2.0 a pre-conference workshop at The 9th International Conference on Digital Government Research, May 18-21, 2008 Sunday May 18, 2008 - 9:00 am - 4:00 pm Overview The topic of eRulemaking has gained prominence in the Digital Government research community as well as the federal government. In 2006, a dg.o workshop examined "eRulemaking at a Crossroads". Over the past seven years, spurred by funding from the NSF's Digital Government program and other US agencies, government officials, citizens, activists, business leaders, and a wide range of scholars at Pitt , CMU , USC-ISI , and Cornell , have converged around the specific problem of building tools to manage the flow of public comments into the U.S. federal government. At the same time, the Office of Management and Budget has overseen the development of government-wide eRulemaking Initiative, now 5 years old, which created Regulations.Gov , a portal for reviewing all open rulemakings, and a Federal Docket Management System (FDMS). Meanwhile, a special committee of the American Bar Association is preparing a report on the "Status & Future of Federal e-Rulemaking". A vigorous debate still continues about the utility of mass public comment campaigns and alternate means for promoting citizen engagement. As a result, despite considerable scholarly and practitioner interest, eRulemaking is once again at the crossroads. Draft Agenda Opening Remarks Stuart W. Shulman, University of Pittsburgh "Drinking from the Firehose? Interest Group Use of e-Commenting" David M. Shafie, Chapman University "Ontology Construction for eRulemaking" Hui "Grace" Yang, Carnegie Mellon University "The Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project (DeER): Improving Federal Agency Rulemaking Via Natural Language Processing and Citizen Dialogue" Peter Muhlberger, Texas Tech University "Facilitating Issue Categorization & Analysis in Rulemaking" Cynthia Farina, Tom Bruce, and Stephen Purpura, Cornell University Closing Remarks Tom Bruce, Cornell University Please come and join us in Montreal, Canada for the 2008 Digital Government Conference! Before the main conference program begins, there will be several workshops and tutorials dealing with highly focused, critical, and emerging issues in the field. We welcome you to consider participating in these workshops and tutorials (see below). To register, please visit: https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=197025 Conference web site: http://www.dgo2008.org/ Late registration closes May 9th.