management. Interactive features include threaded discussions, e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, social bookmarks, video clips, tagging, ratings, and more." Future evolution The success of the initial pilot will likely lead to a gradual expansion of Peer To Patent to cover more and more categories of patents; for example the second U.S. pilot has been expanded to include speech recognition, telecommunications, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. Channels, standards, and protocols will be created to let inventors and other participants in the process integrate their own data and work flows. One feature of the Peer To Patent site allows participants to rate each other's comments, just as they now rate each other's prior art submissions. A future stage of the project may allow patent examiners to consult the public during the office action, so that the public not only submits prior art but helps examiners better understand the relevant subject matter. More broadly, Peer To Patent shows how the public can become more self-governing by interacting in an organized manner with government officials. Elements of this interaction include: Clear goals Transparency, created by publicizing and archiving all interactions A guarantee that government officials with the power to make decisions will actually take the public input into serious consideration Building trust among the community and the ability to listen to each other Filtering and rating tools to improve the quality of results Visualization tools that allow participants to quickly investigate each other's qualifications and viewpoints, group themselves into caucuses, and see how many people support each position Evaluation As of November 24, 2010, there had been 557,560 page views from 114,395 unique viewers in 173 countries or territories. More than 2, 800 people signed up to be reviewers. Up-to-date statistics about the number of patent applications submitted to Peer To Patent, the number of community participants searching for prior art, and the amount of discussion around each patent can be obtained from the Peer To Patent web site. Some highlights from the First Anniversary report: Peer To Patent attracted more than 2,000 peer reviewers. The first 27 office actions issued during the pilot phase showed use of Peer To Patent submitted prior art in nine rejections On average, citizen-reviewers contributed 6 hours reviewing each patent application in the pilot Although USPTO rules permit third-party prior art submissions on pending applications (but only before the applications have been published, or before a notice of allowance is issued,