Two services based on the Federal Register (the US government’s official publication of all proposed and new administrative regulations) have turned up recently:

• FederalRegister.com is a free service from Citation Technologies as a demonstration of the capabilities of its  CyberRegs service, which tracks changes to environment, public health & safety, and transportation of hazardous materials regulations.
• OpenRegs.com (still in beta) will provide an alternative interface to the Federal Register’s docket database. It will take the FR’s existing XML feed and add a number of new services on top of it, including the ability to track by topic or agency, and to track proposed regulations with closing or opening comment periods.  It will also allow discussion forums, user-submitted links, and other features.

Of the two, the latter shows greatest promise as a tool for turning the raw feed of regulations coming out of Washington into a useful tool for changing the way the public oversees rulemaking – FederalRegister.com is still more of a Web 1.0 offering.

OpenRegs.com is the brainchild of Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He’s also behind StimulusWatch.org, a service that allows people to track and evaluate the spending measures coming under the Obama administration’s stimulus package.

This is all part of the frenzy of open access activity taking place in Washington and elsewhere, mostly led by people and organizations on the outside of government, including groups like the Sunshine Foundation, and Carl Malamud’s public.resource.org.

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