The FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) can be a useful tool for commenting on proposals before the FCC and to view comments by all parties in a proceeding. However, the Commission’s Version 1 of the ECFS had its problems. In proceedings such as those involving “White Space Devices” the number of comments totaled in the thousands. This made it difficult to sort through and identify pertinent comments. Further, comments might appear in a number of formats, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Adobe Acrobat files and even scanned documents in Adobe Acrobat wrappers.
On Wednesday the FCC announced Version 2.0 of the Electronic Comment Filing System [PDF]. The commission said that the upgrade will include many new features, such as Section 508 compliance, the ability to file multiple documents to multiple rulemakings in a single submission, advanced search and query of rulemakings, the ability to extract comments, RSS feeds and capability for exporting results to Excel or PDF formats.
The commission will hold a public presentation of the system on Friday, Oct. 23, from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. in the Commission Hearing Room to provide information about ECFS V2.0 and to give the public an opportunity to discuss future uses and capabilities of the comment filing system.
