Location: Quello Center Conference Room, 405
In his stellar 2011 book, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick argues the case for filters. They are indispensable when information runs over the natural capabilities of the human mind. In 2003, a civil servant in the federal government asked me during a focus group to build a ‘bullshit’ filter to help sort through the public comments increasingly submitted online to U.S. federal agencies. This talk presents the true story of how eRulemaking did not change the world. It could have, but it did not. From the years before Regulations.gov was turned on, through countless form letter campaigns, to recent work with the Department of Interior on three million comments about the national monuments, this talk narrates, from a bird’s eye view, the technical, legal, political, and administrative waters of eRulemaking.
Inventor, entrepreneur, US Soccer National C licensed high school and Olympic Development Program coach, proud Revolution Academy dad, CEO @texifter, inventor of @discovertext, and Taoist garlic grower. Dr. Stuart W. Shulman is founder & CEO of Texifter. He was a Research Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founding Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Pittsburgh and at UMass Amherst. Dr. Shulman is Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, which is the official journal of the Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association.