Posts By James Freeman

Four Lessons Learned From Implementing Forest Service’s Lauded eMNEPA Program

USFS Program Selected by Presidents Council on Environmental Quality as a Pilot Program to Help Modernize and Reinvigorate NEPA The President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) announced August 31st that the Electronic Management of NEPA (eMNEPA) program at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been selected for the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) Pilot Program,Read… Read more »

A useful Open Gov Commitment? Focus and Harness the Winds of Public Comment

The White House Recently asked citizens to post suggestions on how to improve regulations.gov, data.gov, and the Federal web strategy. This is part two of a multi-part series on how to and more importantly, why we should consider changing the way these, (potentially) game-changing efforts could be improved. Here, we present some comments for regulations.govRead… Read more »

The Federal Agency’s Hierarchy of Needs: How “Higher-Level” Needs and Activities Can Help Secure “Lower-Level” Needs

The Phase One team has had another productive year helping the Forest Service streamline and automate their processes surrounding the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). We’ve helped our clients leverage data that is entered to comply with legal mandates into useful information for their public websites; we have given them tools to make their proceduresRead… Read more »

NEPA and the USDA Forest Service: Some Lessons Learned Over 40 Years of Implementing “Open Government”

In the Open Government world, we spend a lot of time focusing on phone apps, e-mail marketing, data sharing, social networking, blogging, etc. All of these are great tangible examples of openness, but really, they are just tools. At the heart of an Open Government there are three guiding principles: transparency, participation, and collaboration. AnRead… Read more »