You probably hoped we were talking about Spring – long awaited for those of us on the East Coast – but in truth, we’re talking about the every-two-year review of the agency’s Open Government plan.
We published our first plan on April 7, 2010, and then issued a revision on June 7, 2010, to reflect your feedback. In April 2012, we updated our plan again – although our effort to get your feedback wasn’t what we’d describe as a resounding success.
On June 1, 2014, we will re-publish our plan. Among other things, we will note accomplishments over the past two years and plans over the next two years, including:
• Focusing on improving the process of handling Freedom of Information Act requests;
• Embracing the President’s Digital Government Strategy and, among other initiatives, deploying a mobile-based public meeting feedback option;
• Continuing to grow our social media program with increased subscriber and viewer rates – at times nearly doubling previous years’ statistics;
• Continuing to enhance our collaboration with state and tribal governments through a range of outreach efforts;
• Continuing to enhance our collaboration with the international community, with increased focus on sharing information after the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident;
• Improving the public’s ability to participate in the NRC’s regulatory processes by creating a one-stop web location for rulemaking actions and other documents open for comment;
• Modernizing the management of our records to make information capture and categorization more complete and transparent; and
• Enhancing stakeholder involvement in public meetings using technologies such as web streaming and conferencing
As we finalize our plan, we invite your thoughts on how we can further improve our openness program and its focus on transparency, participation and collaboration.
While comments are welcome at any time, comments must be received by April 4, 2014, to be considered specifically for the June update. Please submit your thoughts as comments to this post or via our Online Comment Form. We very much look forward to hearing from you!
U.S. NRC Blog 
The blog is checked for comments at least twice every work day, usually many more, to get comments posted promptly. The blog is not moderated on evenings, weekends or federal holidays.
Moderator
I applaud the NRC for only a minor amount of moderation, however, the long time frame between comments and approval makes it hard to have a “conversation” which is what a blog is all about. Get some interns or something! Thanks!
To address the delay in the discussions on the blog, the NRC piloted an alternative, additional, real-time discussion platform we called Chat. However, after six months of Chats, we determined it wasn’t quite meeting the need. The platform seemed to best support only very short responses to questions, which put off some users. So the NRC is now looking at alternative platforms, either one that allows more complete written dialogue or one that uses video. Stay tuned while we do the research!
Moderator
The NRC needs to provide equal amounts of access/time/money to those that speak against topics, as it does to the Nuclear Industry that speaks for a topic that is before the NRC because that will level the playing field we all must use…
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Much faster moderation would be key to promoting actual discussions instead of what we have now which is just a series of “posts”…
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Being able to use basic formatting and/or edit functions would also make this blog better for all.