Telltale Information is a recent spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University's eRulemaking research group, which is part of the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute. Telltale's staff and its products have provided public comment review and analysis services to federal regulatory agencies since 2007, helping three U.S. regulatory agencies to review over 1.6 million public comments and comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements.
Telltale's DURIAN comment review tool is recognized as an effective solution to the problem of mass comment campaigns by advocacy groups.
"Fortunately, an e-tool has been created electronically to process mass comments in a way designed to serve both the agency's and the public's interests. The tool's development process involved rulemaking personnel of several agencies, and it has already been used in several rulemakings. [Footnote: These include the recent Fish & Wildlife Service rulemaking on whether to declare polar bears a threatened species. The agency received more than 640,000 email campaign comments, in addition to a substantial number of other comments. Use of the tool allowed a single agency analyst to review these comments rather than contracting out the task to a team of professional comment readers.]"
-- Achieving the Potential: The Future of Federal e-Rulemaking. A Report to Congress and the President by the Committee on the Status and Future of Federal e-Rulemaking by the Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice of the American Bar Association. pp. 53-54. 2008.
Telltale Information was formed in 2009 to build upon this success. The company was founded by Jamie Callan, Ph.D., a well-known computer science professor who does research on search engines and text mining, and who led eRulemaking research at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Callan's background includes 7 years developing software at Digital Equipment Corporation, 15 years as a professor at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Massachusetts, and experience as a co-founder of and CTO of Sovereign Hill Software.
Seed funding for Telltale Information was provided by Carnegie Mellon's Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation and Innovation Works' University Innovation Grant program. CMU's Project Olympus provides resources and expertise during the company's startup phase.
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