Public Participation and Government Feedback Systems

Traditional public participation often favors people with time, resources, and specialized knowledge to attend meetings or navigate complex comment processes. Many people have opinions on bank regulations or pollution standards, but they're asked to comment on technical documents they can't easily understand, using processes they may not even know exist: not many people read the Federal Register on a daily basis to check for new comment opportunities.

Digital tools - from simple surveys to sophisticated platforms - can either amplify these inequities or help overcome them, depending on how we design them. My work includes transforming regulatory comment systems (eRegs), crowdsourcing policy feedback (Know Before You Owe), and researching how people actually want to interact with government.

The challenge is ensuring technology enhances rather than replaces human judgment in democratic processes. When we received thousands of comments on Know Before You Owe, we would have welcomed AI tools to help summarize and prioritize them - but humans still needed to read them all. How do we use technology to include more voices without losing the deliberative quality that makes public input valuable?

A key insight: the "town hall" model assumes people can show up at scheduled times and places. Future participation systems need to meet people where they are, not where government finds it convenient.