The LII crew has been looking pretty closely at the world of regulatory information lately. \u00a0We\u2019re trying to build applications that make it easier for people to find and understand the regs, like<\/p>\n
searching the CFR by product or brand name. \u00a0Want to know what regulations affect Nyquil?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
developing \u201clegal-360\u201d views of real world objects. \u00a0Want to know how many places the legal system touches pseudoephedrine?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
linking science to regulations. Want to know who\u2019s studied arsenic contamination levels in drinking water?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
linking agency guidance and interpretations to the regs. \u00a0Want to know how the agency thinks about whether or not you\u2019re affected?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
All of that stuff would be vastly easier to build if the issuing agencies would do a few simple things. \u00a0As always with agencies, the \u201csimple\u201d is in scare quotes, because, well, very little is actually simple, but bear with me. \u00a0I know you have no budget for this. \u00a0I know you have no mandate for this. I know you have no time for this. \u00a0But I am pretty sure that if you do it your compliance and enforcement costs will go down and the quality of the commentary that you get in notice-and-comment periods will go up. \u00a0And it ain\u2019t that expensive, and what the hell, let\u2019s go wild here, \u00a0public understanding is really part of your mission.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s another thing: the perception of excessive regulatory burden is most often about costs, but for political purposes it is just as often expressed in terms of the difficulty of finding and understanding obligations. \u00a0Two minas, a shekel, and two parts<\/a>, if you want to talk about where the costs really are. \u00a0Ask the folks at the Obamacare site.<\/p>\n Everything that follows is based on a single idea: \u00a0the stuff you write and put on your websites is now reaching your regulated communities almost exclusively through an intervening technology layer that is only possible if your information \u00a0is consumed and arranged by machines. \u00a0Google is a sophisticated example of such a layer — one \u00a0that functions pretty well without much work on your part. \u00a0But you and I both know that for some purposes it is a blunt instrument. \u00a0We can build better stuff, more helpful and more aware of context and the substance of what you do, if you help us. \u00a0Machines don\u2019t do language all that well, and while they\u2019re getting better at it, they need your help. \u00a0Your audience needs your help even more.<\/p>\n Here are some concrete suggestions.<\/p>\n Most agencies have site maps of some kind. \u00a0\u00a0They help human readers discover what\u2019s on the site and navigate to it. \u00a0There\u2019s a standard for doing the very same thing<\/a> in ways that help machines find stuff and index it. \u00a0My suggestion: make two of these — one for the whole site, and one that identifies guidance documents specifically. \u00a0And that means the documents, not some program description that leads to a narrative essay that leads to an index page on which a PDF link has been concealed. \u00a0That means a map of the documents themselves. \u00a0Some folks already do a good, concise job of this in various kinds of listing pages meant for humans but easily scraped by machines — IRS is good at it, for example. Many don\u2019t — common problems include hiding the documents behind \u201csearchable\u201d databases, as Commerce does, scattering them through a welter of program descriptions and disconnected stuff, as EPA does, and so on.<\/p>\n All of those sins can be more than atoned for by providing separate, organized maps using the standard described here<\/a>. \u00a0Make two: one describing the whole site, called sitemap.xml. \u00a0Make another called guidancemap.xml and place both in the root document directory for your whole site. The whole site. \u00a0The one identified with the agency, the one with the agency acronym in the domain name, not some subsite associated with the Office for the Regulation of Left-handed, Red-headed Inheritors of Somebody Else\u2019s Problem.<\/p>\n PS: APIs are not necessarily the answer to harvesting problems like this, but they help. Federal Register 2.0 is a pretty good example.<\/p>\n A significant amount of interpretive information appears in the Federal Register, either on its own hook or as preambles to final rules or as notices of the availability of various kinds of publications, including print. \u00a0Final rules are easy enough to find, and separating out the preambles for indexing should not be that hard (that\u2019s next on our list of things to try here). \u00a0\u00a0Other interpretive information is titled using the word \u201cGuidance\u201d somewhere. \u00a0Maybe all of it is, but we can\u2019t be sure.<\/p>\n One thing we do know is that offline interpretive materials — pamphlets, for example — are often mentioned in a \u201cnotice of availability\u201d or some such. \u00a0These need to be clearly titled as interpretive material. And if — as is often the case — the material is intended for print distribution, but a digital version is available somewhere on the web, please put a URL for the digital version in the notice. Please, please, please.<\/p>\n Res ipsa<\/em>, homies. The following fun-size reenactment illustrates the experience so far:<\/p>\n Gummint official: \u00a0What would the legal community like to see in our open data collection?<\/p>\n Legal community: \u00a0Everybody wants ALJ opinions. \u00a0More than life itself, they want ALJ opinions.<\/p>\n Gummint official: \u00a0\u00a0Squirrel!<\/p>\n A man from Mars reading guidance documents would wonder if we actually have codifications — of either statutes <\/a>or regs<\/a>. \u00a0References like \u201csection 101 of the Act\u201d or \u201cRegulation M\u201d are not easy for outsiders to follow. \u00a0We have citations for such things, expressed as references to the US Code or to the Code of Federal Regulations. \u00a0Where possible, use them. \u00a0If it\u2019s too hard to scatter them through the text where they appear, add a header to the document called \u201cCFR Parts Interpreted\u201d or some such. \u00a0FR provides this as \u201cparts affected\u201d information. \u00a0I know that some of you are using references to the popular name of the legislation to send a your-elected-officials-did-this-to-you-not-us message in your guidance. But really, somebody who is trying to find out what your regulations require her to do is not going to be helped much by repeated references to her \u201cobligations under RCRA\u201d, in toto — but approaches like this one<\/a> help a lot.<\/p>\n Incidentally, the same is true of other kinds of information, such as enforcement data. \u00a0For example, EPA categorizes all of its information about enforcement actions using the name of the program under which enforcement is taking place. \u00a0It does not specifically say which rule(s) are being enforced. \u00a0That information would be nice to have, in the form of citation to a CFR Part. \u00a0If that practice risks a short shelf life, or is otherwise too inflexible to be used, providing a cross reference between program names and the chunks of CFR for which the program is responsible would be a good compromise.<\/p>\n I see a hand at the back of the room with an objection having to do with the accuracy or (snif!) appropriateness of codifications. \u00a0Hell, if you want, cite to Stat. L. or the Federal Register, or whatever uncodified version you think is authoritative. \u00a0But cite to something that is both specific and machine-retrievable with a reference that can be understood outside your immediate community of practice.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not my intention to cause heartburn here, and if the witticisms are a little over the top, it\u2019s because they\u2019re intended to make the substance memorable but not bruising. \u00a0I know all too well that anything that can be negatively interpreted in any way by the most bitter enemy of a federal agency will be seen by that agency as causing more harm than good. That\u2019s simply incorrect, and in any case it\u2019s hard to make suggestions about how people can do their jobs better without opening them to charges that they\u2019re not doing their jobs. \u00a0But we\u2019ve reached the point where a certain amount of boldness is called for. \u00a0It\u2019s not a bad time for Federal agencies to show some forward-looking mastery of technology. \u00a0Anybody who\u2019s read a newspaper or a blog in the last three weeks knows what the alternative looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The LII crew has been looking pretty closely at the world of regulatory information lately. \u00a0We\u2019re trying to build applications that make it easier for people to find and understand the regs, like searching the CFR by product or brand name. \u00a0Want to know what regulations affect Nyquil? developing \u201clegal-360\u201d views of real world objects. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Make machine-consumable site maps and clearly identify guidance documents<\/h2>\n
Use titling to identify guidance and put in links to help find it<\/h2>\n
Put your goddamned ALJ opinions up<\/h2>\n
Use citation instead of insider dialects and references to the Act<\/h2>\n
A final word<\/h2>\n