Feature: timeline

Description

Tools for viewing how a piece of regulation has changed over time, with a focus on past versions of a regulation (the history of the regulation) and the current effective version. This includes viewing the differences between versions.

This tooling overlaps with viewing effective-in-the-future versions and proposed versions, but these two directions in time have somewhat different use cases and user needs.

Resources informing this

• Comparative review: how other regulations tools present changes over time
• "Timeline" tag in our research repository

Problem statement

When people are researching reasons for something or figuring out why something happened (such as to answer questions, document a policy rationale for a decision, or draft a well-reasoned change to regs), they sometimes need to figure out:

• What changed in the regs between a specific date in the past and the current version of the reg?
• What was the reg text effective on a specific date in the past?

This can be quite laborious to figure out - often people have to dig up the versions and visually compare them.

Feature hypothesis

• We believe that: enabling people to view and compare past versions of regs (for the past several years - as distinguished from beta eCFR, which only can go back to 2017) with associated context (including final rules).
• For: people doing reg research, especially CMCS staff and reg writers (including people at group/division leadership levels), and likely states and providers doing research as well.
• Will result in: the ability to understand what changed between reg versions (including to find the information they need), including to explain or justify something to somebody else, as part of a regs research tool that serves many of their needs.
• We will know we are right when: people know this is an option (can find it) and are able to navigate the functionality.

Example uses

I want to look at the differences between the current effective version (modified Feb 1 2020) and the old version that became effective on Feb 1 2019. This is so that I can do an interpretive task, such as check to make sure that somebody has implemented the appropriate updates.

I sometimes want to look at differences between two old versions, such as the version that became effective on Jan 1 2017 and the version that became effective on Feb 1 2019. This is so that I can do an interpretive task, such as figuring out why something changed in the past.

I want to look at the differences between the current effective version from Feb 1 2020 and the proposed rule from Feb 1 2021. This is so that I can do an interpretive task, such as planning for changes I need to make to something.

I rarely have a reason to compare an old version to a potential future version, such as looking at the differences between the version that became effective on Feb 1 2019 and the reg as it would be modified by the proposed rule from Feb 1 2021. This is because I'm usually looking at how proposed or future-effective requirements are different from the current requirements that I work with (I'm comparing future versions to the current effective version). If I compare an outdated version by mistake, I'll come up with the wrong interpretation.

Subject matter context

See "How regulations change (through “rules”)" in the main eRegs docs.