1. Congress should direct each Federal Agency to establish a "classical" style ombudsman. Statutory authority should include:

A. Require that the ombudsman be appointed for specified renewable terms with removal only for incapicity or specified causes;

B. Require that the ombudsman report directly to the Department Secretary or Agency head;

C. Authority to investigate or inspect without notice any office in the Agency based on a citizen or employee complaint or on the ombudsman's own initiative and to make reports of its findings publically available; Authority to have access to all Agency records, including confidential records; subject to the same prohibitions against public disclosure as any other Agency employee;

D. Authority to attempt to resolve complaints through voluntary participation of all parties using confidential dispute resolution processes such as mediation and conciliation; The confidentiality of these dispute resolution processes shall be protected by a privilege against testifying in any legal or administrative hearing except as necessitated in the work of the ombudsman;

E. The Ombudsman will not have the authority to issue orders, revise polices, make personnel changes or direct any change in the Agency; that authority to be fully retained by the Agency as contained in statutory and regulatory authorities and requirements.

2. This recommendation is designed to achieve a number of objectives:

A. Collaboration - The independence of the ombudsman's office will encourage more direct collaboration to make Agencies responsive to the public and to resolve issues that arise. Because of the report writing authority, the Agency won't be able to obfuscate, conceal and stonewall as many issues.

B. Transparency - The independence of the ombudsman will give the ombudsman the ability to investigate any alleged failure, inefficiencey, mistake, wrong doing, error or omission, procedural problem or substantive program inadequacy of the Agency and make public reports of its findings. This will lead to more transparency in how Agencies work, react to mistakes, resolve issues, apply policies, etc.

C. Participation - The ombudsman can accept complaints from any citizen or employee, can use conflict resolution to directly resolve the issue and/or investigate and report results directly to the individual and/or the public allowing a direct form of participation.

3. This is an important proposal because it helps to make responsible Agency officials directly responsive to individuals and groups that have legitimate complaints about the functioning of Government.

4. Success will be readily visible by the number of individual complaints that are resolved and by the number of investigations that result in substantive changes in Agency functioning. For example, success might look like: 300 of 400 (75%) of complaints successfully resolved and 30 of 50 (60%) investigations resultng in change.

As a conceptual start, how about this:

1) There is a regular schedule. Once a month, the department heads of every major federal agency will see to it that the 'top of the list' for their agency is openly and honestly addressed. This can be done by the highest ranking member of the agency, but I suspect it will have to be a group effort with various members contributing content.

2) The format is broken up into two basic phases: The executive 'position' and the public's 'inquiry'. The 'position' is first a statment of policy. This can be board of education testing standards, EPA pollution limits, FDA regulations or DEA drug classifications for example. It should be accompanied with a detailed break down of the reasoning for the policy, the sources for any scientific claims made, any objectives of the policy and, for a change, questions to the public on anything the executive would like more information on themselves. Think of our current govt websites, only with much more explination to back up the statements of policy. The 'inquiry' is a peer-reviewed, voted on, concentrated list of objections, counter points, and requests for clarification on various details of the 'positon'. Once per itteration, the govt reps are to directly answer, as well as they can, the issues raised. Their reply should be directly incorporated into the 'position'. They should change the content of their site, either to clarrify their position, or to change their position. Repeat.

3) The 'inquiry' can be a sub-section of the 'position'. Something along the lines of the 'discussion' tab of wikipedia, although considerably more involved to include voting and group revisions. This would allow a joint executive/public stance on the particular field of govt to be located in one place. However, the mechanics of the 'inquiries' for all agencies should be identicle, so that a citizen does not have to re-learn the system to participate in each area.

4) Issues can remain unanswered, but should not be ignored. The potential for abuse of this system is high. If there was a requirement for every question to be answered, any single group could monopolise the available time given to addressing concerns. Developing a system that reasonably satisfies all parties while contributing substantivly to executive policy remains the challenge ahead of us.

5) The history of all 'positions' and 'inquiries' should be always available so that we can both learn from our mistakes and see where we are going.

Recommendation:

1.Who is being directed to do something

? (e.g. "All agencies must...")

All departments and agencies of the United States Government should be directed to include ODR services in current ADR programs where ODR technology could facilitate dispute resolution.

2. What is the institution being directed to do?

Work with other agencies, particularly the existing Inter-Agency Dispute Resolution Working Group (IADRWG) and the IADRWG Steering Committee. to expand use of technology in dispute resolution and dispute prevention activities

3, Why is it important that they do so?

Dispute resolution may be the most common citizen-government interaction. ADR and ODR offer direct advantages in at least four areas associated with the effort to make government more transparent and to enlarge the use of e-government strategies: 1) supplying information to individual citizens and groups; 2) obtaining citizen input; 3) delivering services to the public; and 4) facilitating the right of redress.

4. How will success be measured?

This recommendation builds on the 1996 Executive Order 12988 (Civil Justice Reform) which established alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs in all Federal court systems, and encouraged the development of ADR programs across all government agencies and departments. The success of this executive order has been documented in various studies and similar evaluation techniques would be used to assess the impact of ODR.