SUPPORTING STATEMENT FOR
PAPERWORK REDUCTION ACT 1995 SUBMISSIONS
General Instructions
The QHSR will engage its diverse stakeholder base and fulfill its congressionally-mandated consultation requirements. The QHSR will create a national dialogue with stakeholders from all homeland security disciplines through an online collaboration platform.
Specific Instructions
A. Justification
1. The legislation mandating the QHSR (Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007) includes the following consultation requirement:
The Secretary shall conduct each quadrennial homeland security review under this subsection in consultation with--(A) the heads of other Federal agencies, including the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Director of National Intelligence; (B) key officials of the Department; and (C) other relevant governmental and nongovernmental entities, including State, local, and tribal government officials, members of Congress, private sector representatives, academics, and other policy experts.
2. The homeland security community is so vast that physically convening representative and inclusive study groups able to work efficiently and effectively presents a major challenge. To address this challenge and the QHSR consultation requirement, DHS will make use of a collaborative web-based engagement tool (herein the “National Dialogue portal”) to create a true national dialogue on homeland security. The feedback will help inform the nation's homeland security goals and objectives and the tools in which the Department will seek to achieve them over the next four years. DHS will hold three dialogues involving discussions on six topics under review in the QHSR. The topics include:
Counterterrorism and domestic security management,
Securing our borders,
Smart and tough enforcement of immigration laws,
Preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters,
Homeland Security national risk assessment, and
Homeland Security planning and capabilities.
DHS partnered with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to host a series homeland security dialogues. Established in 1967 and chartered by Congress, NAPA is a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of top public management and organizational leaders who tackle the nation's most critical and complex challenges. To provide analysis of the feedback gained through these dialogues, NAPA assembled a panel of Fellows. This panel brings subject matter expertise to bear on topics directly relevant to federal homeland security policy, and will provide DHS with a neutral, independent interpretation of the feedback received.
However, the collaboration tool fulfills only one element of an expansive outreach strategy. The collaboration tool is designed to engage our intergovernmental partners (state, local and tribal), private sector partners, non-governmental agencies, academics and policy experts in as expansive a manner as possible. We do have other avenues for engaging other members of our diverse stakeholder community. Specifically, our inter-agency partners are engaged via special sub- Interagency Policy Councils convened by the Homeland Security Council for the QHSR. We also established a Homeland Security Advisory Council Sub-committee that includes members from the intergovernmental sector, the private sector, academics and policy experts to advise and consult with the QHSR Study groups.
3. A stakeholder online collaboration platform will be created and hosted to engage homeland security stakeholders around the compelling questions are produced by the QHSR study groups. The dialogue platform is based on the principle of radical scalability: the more feedback that is received, the more clearly sorted participants’ preferences and priorities become. In the platform, users can submit their best ideas, refine them in open discussion, and use simple rating and tagging features to identify the most popular ideas and important overarching themes. It must be noted that the rating mechanisms used on the online collaboration platforms are only for first order filtering of comments to help study groups initially review dialogue results. All comments will be provided to the QHSR study groups for their consideration regardless of the comment’s score. The platform can host multiple simultaneous dialogues, and dynamically pose new questions, so that DHS can repeatedly “pulse” participants over a three-month timeframe. All homeland security stakeholders are eligible and are invited to do so. The website will be public facing with self-identify and opt-in user information requested. To participate in the dialogue platform one would visit http://homelandsecuritydialogue.org
NAPA established the National Dialogue portal to seek comments from state, local, and tribal governments, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and the American people, as key elements of the national homeland security enterprise. The QHSR study groups post their work product to the Portal and solicit feedback from users. When participating in the dialogues, the user is actually taking part in the study groups. Comments will feed directly into the study groups’ deliberations as they frame options for homeland security decision-makers. The study groups will not provide responses to all of the comments made as part of the National Dialogue.
The three national homeland security dialogues (August 3 to August 9, August 31 to September 6, and September 28 to October 4) are designed to engage our stakeholders early and often throughout the process. The study groups and the dialogue participants will work throughout the summer to develop and refine the study content. The findings that derive from this interactive process will be presented to DHS Leadership, Federal interagency leaders, and state and local government leaders for their consideration. The Secretary of Homeland Security will provide her conclusions to Congress in a final report by December 31, 2009.
During each of the dialogues, participants will be asked to rate, tag, discuss, and prioritize feedback relating to the materials proposed by the QHSR study groups. Below is an explanation of these features and how they help DHS understand user feedback:
Rating—Users rate individual pieces of feedback, called “ideas,” that generally consist of a title, a description of the feedback, and a description of why the author thinks that feedback is important. The site provides a five-star scale, similar to that used by other popular sites, with five stars indicating the highest rating, and one star indicating the lowest. The use of this functionality means that, over the course of the week-long Dialogue, the QHSR study groups will be able to assess which ideas are the most popular or resonant with dialogue participants. This, in turn, helps to identify novel ideas, important best practices, and relative priorities.
Tagging—Users may apply topic tags to their own submissions and the submissions of others. Tags are usually one- or two-word phrases describing the contents of an idea; for example, an idea about the need for more focus on communications between first responders might be assigned the tags “first responders,” “emergency response,” and “communications.” Users are encouraged to tag their own submissions as well as the submissions of others. Topic tags are useful for two reasons. For Dialogue participants, they make it easy to find interesting and relevant content; clicking on any topic tag will provide a list of other ideas that have had that same tag applied. For the QHSR study groups, topic tags make it possible to discern what broad themes and topics are being raised most frequently during the Dialogue.
Submitting an Idea—Dialogue participants are also able to add their own submissions to the discussion by clicking the “Submit an Idea” button. Participants can submit an idea by adding a long-form explanation (up to 10,000 characters). These ideas can then be rated and tagged by others.
Prior to the first scheduled National Dialogue, NAPA will collect the e-mail addresses of participants and will use the information to send participants news and announcements about the National Dialogue. NAPA will not provide the e-mail addresses of participants to DHS. After the August 3, 2009 launch date, NAPA will require that participants register with the site. Participants will be required to provide name, zip code, and the type of organization that the individual is affiliated with (i.e., law enforcement). This information is collected in order to provide DHS with aggregate information related to what types of individuals and groups are participating in the National Dialogue. Participant feedback will be collected with an associated username to facilitate transparency. All comments and feedback submitted to the National Dialogue portal during the three dialogues will be publicly available. NAPA will provide analytics (i.e., idea submitted and affiliation) to DHS which will assist DHS with refining questions and developing new questions to present to participants.
4. This information is not collected in any form, and therefore is not duplicated elsewhere.
5. This information collection does not have an impact on small businesses or other small entities.
6. A congressional mandate requires DHS to perform the QHSR with these collaboration features. DHS will not be able to fulfill the law if prevented from collaborating with stakeholders.
7. The special circumstances contained in item 7 of the Supporting Statement are not applicable to this information collection.
8. A 30 Day Notice requesting comments from the public was published in the Federal Register on June 30, 2009 at FR 74, page 31286. No comments were received.
9. There is no offer of monetary or material value for this information collection.
10. There are no assurances of confidentiality provided to the respondents for this information collection.
11. There are no questions of sensitive nature.
12. The hour burden of the collection of information:
Solicitations to 500+ organizations and the public at large
Three opportunities to participate in the national dialogue stakeholder online collaboration platform
Anticipate minimal up to 8 hours of participation per individual at each of their discretion
500 organizations and individual stakeholder volunteers may create a time burden up to 4,000 hours for their point of contact and up to 50,000 individuals contributing 400,000 total hours as an upper limit.
The range will vary considerably based on the interest of an organization or individual to contribute their time. The minimum burden of a participant is to simply consider contributing information and based how much they wish to provide, it is estimated a participant may take up to an 8 hour work day equivalent divide by each of the four opportunities
The cost element to participants is nothing as it is based on opt-in voluntary participation of their own time.
13. There are no record keeping, capital, start-up or maintenance costs associated with this information collection.
14. There will be no cost to the Federal Government beyond the resources already allocated for contractor support. The contractor support is for only analysts at $500k.
15. This is a new information collection request.
16. DHS does not intend to employ the use of statistics or the publication thereof for this information collection.
17. DHS will display the expiration date for OMB approval of this information collection.
18. DHS does not request an exception to the certification of this information collection.
| File Type | application/msword |
| File Title | SUPPORTING STATEMENT FOR |
| Author | TSA Standard PC User |
| Last Modified By | tyrone.huff |
| File Modified | 2009-08-28 |
| File Created | 2009-08-27 |