3.4: Public Engagement
Engage the public through a variety of means Other Information:
The National Archives engages the public through a variety of means and for a variety of reasons. With every approach, the
agency will seek to apply the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration. Policymaking Process - NARA’s
policymaking process for creating and revising NARA regulations will continue to incorporate online public engagement through
Regulations.gov and RegInfo.gov, which provide information on the status of pending regulations. Additionally, NARA is working
on a publicly available web page that will explain the agency’s regulatory process. NARA will explore the possibility of a
site similar to EPA’s Rulemaking Gateway (http://yosemite.epa.gov/opei/RuleGate.nsf/) to increase transparency and participation
in our rulemaking process. Engaging Through Social Media - Within the past year, the National Archives has worked to develop
presences on Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter. We are looking to expand our presences, as well as monitor new spaces
where the public may expect to hear from us or access our records. In the process of developing this Open Government Plan,
we engaged the public using a social voting platform called Ideascale. We developed our Open Government Forum (www.naraopengov.ideascale.com)
and closely monitored ideas, comments, and votes. As our internal Open Government Working Group met, we carefully considered
each idea and the feasibility of executing each idea. While we saw the potential in each idea, not every idea presented was
feasible within a two year time frame. Also, many ideas will need further development within the Archives to make them executable.
Please see appendix A of this report for a summary of ideas we received during this process. Open Government Working Group
- NARA's Internal Open Government Working Group will look at a variety of ways to increase public engagement and reduce barriers
to public innovation. These include: * Developing public engagement as a highly-valued and measured aspect of all employees’
jobs. * Developing incentives to increase collaboration among employees and the public. * Ongoing and proactive identification
of constituencies who are interested in our work and sharing their own work. - We will do this not only by monitoring traditional
news outlets but also by actively engaging in online communities interested in our work. * Creating spaces for community building,
participation, and collaboration. - Developing an Archives wiki, for the public to enhance the information we currently provide
in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC). For example, see the UK Archives wiki at http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Home_page.
* Researching policy changes to create greater transparency in NARA processes. * Continuing access to high-quality raw datasets,
as well as other formats. - Expansion of NARA's high-value datasets available on Data.gov.
Indicator(s):
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