Drawing on public comments and drafts of an environmental impact statement, this article examines public participation in policy making via the federal Web site Regulations.gov . Aiming to be our “voice” in federal decision making, Regulations.gov encourages citizens to submit comments on proposed actions. Drawing on Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s “hybrid forum,” the author suggests that ethical and effective participatory policy making should be hybrid in scope, inclusion, and agency. While public participation in policy making is commonly positioned as an antidote to the crisis of trust in science, the author argues that such participation gone wrong could have off-target impacts, raising questions about the promise of Regulations.gov .

At the 2014 Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Tech pre-conference at the National Communication Association, the "Expertise and Data in the Articulation of Risk several papers concerned with how risk is and how publics respond to those articulations of risk.E provided different perspectives and cases that concerned why communication of complex scientific and medical information about risks seems to fail and some insights into how to better communicate risks.Here we provide a short overview of each paper's argument, central findings, and recommendations.We then