OMB narrative
Once upon a time, not so long ago... eRegs was born!
eRegulations (eRegs) is a web-based application that makes regulations easier to find, read, and understand. This open source platform was built by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and 18F, and is in the public domain.
In the example of ATF, regulatory enforcers would often have the print version, what they call the "orange book", that they would take with them on an audit of let's say an explosives storage facility. They would then be able to refer to a subpart, such as § 555.26, to then speak to an issue that was found onsite. Simply put, the eRegs platform is an application dependency that is included in a larger application, such as ATF, that allows users to see digital versions of regulations.
The first phase of the engagement with OMB was driven by the success of eRegs on CFPB and ATF. Many of the same individuals who worked on ATF implementation of eRegs were brought over to solve the similar problem of taking policy, and making a requirement (a sentence that says a directive) within the policy easier to find. It is important to remember that even though the phrase eRegs OMB are often used together, the eRegs platform is not explicitly used in the OMB Policy Library and requirements within a policy are not synonymous with regulations. Simply put:
The OMB Policy Library includes excerpts from memos and policy documents issued by the White House. This project is part of our ongoing efforts to make it easier to find, read, and understand OMB policy.
This first engagement/phase focused on a similar activity as eRegs in that pdf documents were imported and parsed for key phrases that would denote a requirement. These requirements were then massaged by OMB in a spreadsheet and imported into the OMB application. Eventually an admin interface was created to tag and curate requirements. To the end user, requirements and their associated meta data were prioritized.
https://omb-eregs-demo.app.cloud.gov/requirements?policy__id__in=269&topics__id__in=
Snapshot of requirements based app if ☝️ is not working.
The second phase was informed by a new product direction and supported user feedback that isolated requirements were not useful without the contextualization from the rest of the surrounding policy. This has led us to the current direction we are pursuing as of Nov 2017.
