The purpose of this blog is to illustrate what the U.S. Department of Commerce is doing each day to realize its committments to the American people.  The blog and its commenting feature also aims to increase openness, transparency, citizen participation at the Department of Commerce -- key objectives of the White House's Open Government Directive and our own Open Government Plan.

We encourage comments. Your thoughts, ideas and concerns will play a critical role helping Commerce better explain our actions, improve our customer service and be even more responsive to the needs of the public.

We want to publish your comments, but we expect conversations to follow the conventions of polite discourse. Therefore, we won't post comments that:

• contain vulgar language, personal attacks of any kind, or offensive terms that target specific ethnic or racial groups;
• promote services or products (non-commercial links that are relevant to the blog post or comment are acceptable);
• are far off-topic;
• make unsupported accusations;
• promote commercial websites or services.

We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above.

Reporters are asked to send questions to the appropriate individual listed on our Media Contacts page and refrain from submitting questions here as comments. Reporters' questions will be removed.

We recognize that the Web is a 24/7 medium, and your comments are welcome at any time. However, given the need to manage federal resources, moderating and posting of comments will generally only occur during regular business hours Monday through Friday. If you submit a comment after hours or on weekends, we'll read and post them as early as possible the next business day.

To protect your own privacy and the privacy of others, please do not include phone numbers or email addresses in the body of your comments. If included, they will be removed prior to publishing.

Due to increased spam, comments will be closed after 90 days. If you wish to comment after the 90-day period, we encourage you to email the webmaster.

Thank you for taking the time to read this comment policy.

If you have questions about the comment policy or how we apply it, please don't hesitate to contact us at webmaster[at]doc[dot]gov.