Earlier this year, the White House's Office of Management and Budget requested comments on improving the Paperwork Reduction Act. The law requires agencies that wish to gather information from the public to first run their plans by OMB. In revisiting the law and its implementing regulations, OMB is focused on:

• Reducing current paperwork burdens, especially on small entities;
• Increasing the practical utility of information collected by the Federal Government;
• Ensuring accurate burden estimates; and
• Preventing unintended adverse consequences.

One of the unintended adverse consequences of the PRA arises in the Internet context, with what the government deems "surveys." Government websites may not use surveys, even when compliance is strictly voluntary, without first receiving approval from OMB in a process that is lengthy and laborious.

Agencies interpret the term "survey" broadly, banning or restricting tools that would allow users to publicly rank or assess the usefulness of information. This restricts online rating systems like those commonly used by blogs, retailers, and so on. For example, imagine YouTube without its five-star rating system, or Slashdot without the ability to vote for stories.

We address the survey issue in a comment we submitted to OMB late last year.

The approval process for a survey can take half a year or more and requires multiple periods for public comment. The law intentionally creates disincentives for surveying the public.

The authors of the Paperwork Reduction Act never considered the ways that the Internet would allow citizens to directly communicate with one another on government websites through the use of voluntary surveys. Nor did they imagine that surveys could be as quick and easy as clicking yes or no. The law was intended to make the government more efficient and reduce the burden on citizens. 15 years into the Internet age, it's time to take another look.

Based on the Open Government Directive issued by the White House yesterday, American Public Media is asking its National Public Insight Network to find out what kind of data people would really like to see. Here's a link to their survey.

Minnesota Public Radio has already begun to ask its listeners this question: What Data Do You Want? How Would You Use It? And the answers they are getting are serious, thoughtful and informative.  Here are some recent submissions (each from a different contributor):

I would like to be able to able to "drag and drop" any type of event data - such as legislative voting records of a bill, purchases by an agency, crime report in my neighborhood, right on to my Google home page to get updates in real time. There are many standards (RSS/Atom etc.) that make this easy to do...

NRCS data. Billions of dollars go to federal farm subsidy programs and the FOIA forbids sharing specifics of that data, even among agencies. The federal info could be very valuable to state agencies working on pollution control projects and also represents a major lack of transparency in a federal program...

I would like to see very clear and very precise information on private donations to our elected officials. Specifically how much money, goods, and services were donated and what interest group the donations represent. I would like this information made public as soon as the donations are made - not several years after a vote was taken on an issue...

Information about contributions to political parties that are over $1,000 and an easy way to access what earmarks are attached to bills passed by congress, better yet a system that connects earmarks with contributions in the same data base...

This is really good stuff. There's a meme here. Online. RealTime. Data.

Yesterday, the Congressional Management Foundation released the report, Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement, in which they reported on a survey of over 10,000 citizens about their interactions and communications with member of congress.

Of the report's findings, what caught my interest is CMF's statement that the Internet is now the primary source citizens use to follow and communicate with Congress. Their research found that 92 percent of Internet users who had contacted Congress had visited a member of Congress' Web site.  And a plurality (43 percent) of citizens contacting Congress did so using online methods, which is twice the percentage that used snail mail or telephones. Obviously, this was bound to happen...not surprisingly it seems like we reached this milestone pretty fast.

CMF also found that almost half of adult Americans (44 percent) contacted Congress in the last five years to support, oppose or learn more about issues of interest to them. This is a much higher contact rate than a report in 2004 which found that 18 percent of Americans had contacted Congress.

According to CMF, other findings include:

• The majority of people surveyed do not believe Congress is interested in what they have to say, but they want Members' to keep them informed of their views and activities and of the policy issues being debated in Washington.
• Those who had contacted Congress tended to be more politically active in other ways than those who had not.
• A majority of people who contacted Congress had been asked to do so by a third party - primarily through interest groups - and they place a high value on the role of advocacy campaigns in our democracy.

Along the same lines, U.S. Rep. John R. Kuhl (R-N.Y.)launched a couple weeks ago his "Fix Washington" project where he is soliciting online input on ideas for bills to introduce. On July 18^th he will take what he considers the best five ideas and put them up on the site so users can vote for their favorite.  It's definitely an interesting experiment. Kuhl's experiment is one more example of how some lawmakers are really starting to get it.