FederalRegister.gov Wins Award for Innovation & Best Practices

On December 8, 2011, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) selected the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register as the winner of the first annual Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award for developing FederalRegister.gov. A panel of notable experts unanimously chose the OFR from a prestigious field of nominees.

The Administrative Conference’s Gellhorn Award cites the OFR as a “Model Agency” – the most innovative Federal agency of 2011. ACUS selected the OFR as its first Model Agency for “demonstrating efficiency, enhancing customer service, increasing transparency, and streamlining the regulatory process.”

The award is named for the late Walter Gellhorn, who was a pioneering administrative law scholar at Columbia University, and a member of the ACUS Council from its beginning in 1968 until his death in 1995. The OFR was nominated by Carl Malamud, a technologist, author, and public domain advocate, at Public.Resource.org.

The Gellhorn Award is part of the ACUS Model Agencies Initiative, which was developed to help agencies become exemplary 21st century agencies, driven by innovation and the adoption of best practices.

At the Administrative Conference’s 55th Plenary Session, Chairman Paul Verkuil made the following remarks:

This submission met nearly all the criteria. FederalRegister.gov streamlines and enhances public participation in the regulatory process, and unifies the Regulatory Agenda. It provides direct access to individual agency dockets on Regulations.gov; it includes a comment countdown clock to alert readers to comment due dates; and it integrates Unified Agenda data into Federal Register documents. Notably, OFR shares its XML data with Regulations.gov, OMB, and others to achieve greater regulatory data harmonization.

This is wonderful; it’s a great, great moment for us in honor of Walter to do this … I am so pleased … that we can remember him in this way. And that we can help make government better. The President told us that when we appointed the Council. And these people are making government work better, and I am proud of all of them.

ACUS is an independent Federal agency dedicated to improving the administrative process through consensus-driven applied research, providing nonpartisan expert advice and recommendations for improvement of federal agency procedures. Its membership is composed of innovative Federal officials and experts with diverse views and backgrounds from both the private sector and academia.  The Administrative Conference was reestablished in 2010.

The Gellhorn Innovation Award panel of judges for 2011:

Sheila Bair, former Chair of FDIC, and currently with the Pew Charitable Trust.

John Dilulio, Jr. Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Hahn, Director of Economics at the Smith School of Oxford University; and Senior Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Business and Public Policy.

David Lewis, Professor of Science and Law at Vanderbilt University.

Norman Ornstein, Co-Director of the American Enterprise Institute / Brookings Institution Election Reform Project.

OFR Director, Ray Mosley, accepted the award and commended the ground-breaking work of OFR staff, the critical technical support provided by the Government Printing Office, and the invaluable contributions of the three citizen-developers who founded GovPulse.us.  In the words of Director Mosley:

The Federal Register is honored to receive the prestigious Gellhorn Innovation Award. To see the hard work of OFR staff and GPO staff recognized with this award by ACUS and this esteemed panel is especially gratifying. We continue to be inspired ‘to make government better.’

This honor is made more poignant by the fact that ACUS was dissolved in 1995, the same year that Walter Gellhorn passed away. His daughter, Gay Gellhorn, was in the audience to witness the new ACUS present the first-ever Gellhorn Innovation Award. Walter Gellhorn is regarded as a giant in the field of law, one of the nation’s leading administrative law experts, a champion of civil rights, and a pioneer in the modern study of law.  His textbooks were widely used by generations of law students across the nation, and many of his students and younger colleagues became outstanding legal scholars.

Now that ACUS has been reconstituted to reclaim its mission of improving the operations of Government, one of the first major initiatives of the Conference was to establish the Gellhorn Award to honor and encourage the values that Walter Gellhorn exemplified throughout his life.

At the OFR, we congratulate every staff member who works on the daily Federal Register and supports the mission of the Office, as well as our colleagues at the GPO. FederalRegister.gov would not be possible without the XML files and descriptive metadata provided by GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).

No matter how innovative our website may be, we depend on a dedicated cadre of staff to review each document for legal consistency and format, to process thousands of pages of complex material on deadline, and to assure the quality of each issue in print, on FDsys, and on FederalRegister.gov. We are tremendously proud to be recognized as the first-ever winner of the Gellhorn Innovation Award.