III.A: Participation History and Baseline

Leverage technology as one tool to help us identify what information our partners and stakeholders would like to receive

Other Information:

At EPA, we leverage technology as one tool to help us identify what information our partners and stakeholders would like to receive. In 2008 EPA held a National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information (www.epa.gov/nationaldialogue) to determine the information needs of our stakeholders. The dialogue used blogs and wikis, as well as face-to-face meetings, to gather public input. This effort advanced the use of blogs and wikis at EPA as we found that they are secure and easy to set up. What we heard from most of our stakeholders is that they cannot always find EPA information, even information they know exists. In response, EPA initiated a web restructuring effort, described earlier in Section II.D. EPA has many active efforts to encourage and enable public participation. Several of these efforts are operational and have been previously noted, including our Open Government Web site (www.epa.gov/open), Regulations.gov Exchange (www.regulations.gov/) and a variety of social media technologies. These tools enable our partners and the public to provide input to EPA. We also use Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) committees to obtain input on decisions; these committees include representation from academia, industry, the public and health professionals (www.epa.gov/ocem/faca). EPA also has the ability to charter new committees, as we did for a negotiated rulemaking on Airline Drinking Water (http://www.epa.gov/safewater/airlinewater/index.html). Rulemaking provides a good example of EPA’s continued innovation in enabling public participation. As a regulatory agency, we developed an automated tool to manage the public comment process mandated in the rulemaking process. That automated tool became the foundation of Regulations.gov, now used across the federal government to allow the public to track, review and comment on proposed regulations. Many of our efforts and tools that provide transparency also have mechanisms for feedback and participation. Since we described these efforts and tools in Section II, we focus on improvements and new activities in the remainder of this section.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

Content