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 goal was not just transparency, but real accessibility to give individual citizens the opportunity that they would find very difficult under the previous technology to both see proposed regulations, gain access to them easily, but actually then to comment on them.

From what I can see, while there has been progress, I have been disappointed that the development of Regulations.gov has not opened up the rulemaking process to a greater degree. CRS, which we referred to earlier, recently reported, ‘‘It still appears that relatively few comments have been coming to the agencies via Regulations.gov compared to other methods of comment.’’

Further, in relation to what we have been discussing today, the data in Regulations.gov cannot be found by outside search engines.

So give us your status report on how Regulations.gov is doing and tell us whether you agree that more needs to be done to facilitate public access to tracking and ability to comment on regulations.

Ms. . Sir, the short answer is yes, sir, more needs to be done on Regulations.gov.

The other part of it is about searching and doing the docket systems that are back within the agencies and making that information available. Again, this would be one where we would have to partner with commercial search providers about the best way to make that information available because we know that is a limitation right now within it.

Agencies do have to post all of the regulations, proposed rules at Regulations.gov, but what we wanted to do was make sure that the public had the availability to comment through multiple channels. So the comments can go directly to an agency, not necessarily all comments have to come through Regulations.gov. And that was flexibility that the agencies still wanted to maintain.

Some of the things that are being looked at with Regulations.gov because this is really not a technology issue. This is really looking at how do we want the business of rulemaking to evolve? Some of the basic things that I have asked as the technology is going forward is do more comments make a better rule? Those are things that I think the way the technology is working and that you see through the development of functions like Wikipedia that there are arguments on both sides of that. And that is what needs to be looked at. We are in partnership, we jointly manage that with the OIRA Administrator, Susan Dudley. And these are things that she is embracing because she does want more transparency, she does want more openness in the regulation process. And so we are working with that.

There is an ongoing study right now with the American Bar Association that we have been meeting with them of improvements and requirements, some things that we can do to Regulations.gov that would just make it easier to use so that more people would want to put comments in there, as well.

Chairman. Mr. Wales, would you say, based on the Wikepedia experience, that as a matter of policy or that we could conclude that more comments would make better rules?

Mr. . I think so, yes. But I think one of the interesting things about Wikipedia, what is innovative about the wiki tech-