IPads saving cities paper costs

from USA Today:

Soon after Hampton, Va., Mayor Molly Ward bought an iPad for her personal use last spring, she started thinking of an application of her own — one that might save her town both paper and money.

Ward decided it would make both environmental and fiscal sense for the Hampton City Council to switch from paper to iPads for conducting official business.

[....]

Hampton joins a growing number of municipalities — from Williamsburg, Va., to Albertville, Ala., to Redwood City, Calif. — that are turning to iPads to conduct government business.

[....]

"In most states, some if not all electronic records are public," [Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition] says. "Around the country, there has been lots of litigation in the states about the nature of electronic records and whether or not they differ from paper records."

Read the rest here.

Is Obama's Open Government Initiative Technologically Feasible?

Obama's open government directive will include a schedule for data distribution in formats that are machine-readable, says the Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra.

But some e-government interest groups say that's unrealistic because most agency data exists in PDF format, which is not machine-readable and from which data cannot be easily extracted.

That makes the transfer of legacy data difficult, but one e-government advocate says newly created data could be stored in a new PDF/A version that is more suitable for long-term preservation.

For more information, click here.

NFOIC Summit: Technologies you should be using

Lisa Skube, principal of Creaturekind Communications; Jeff Lennan, chief operating officer of Winning Mark; and Karl Pearson-Cater with MinnPost.com spoke about the technologies that can be used to strengthen state FOI coalitions. Here are the notes from their session at the 2009 NFOIC Summit:

Blogging:

• The most fundamental technology to get higher visibility is syndication. RSS feeds will allow your content to be rebroadcast. Most free blogging tools already have these built in.
  
• Make your RSS feed link visible on your Web site.
• Free blogging tools include: WordPress, TypePad ($5 per month), LiveJournal, Blogger.
• The key is getting people to link to your content. In that way, those people become your sales force.
• Set up your feeds so that they are automatically posted on Facebook and Twitter.
• When creating blogs, re-package information. If it's a story with a lot of jargon, simplify it. Localize it. Mention the location in the headline or first sentence. People are searching for information relevant to their area. Tag your location as well.
• Headline writing is crucial. Sometimes Google News will pick up your headline, exclude the summary you wrote and use a picture from another site. Therefore, our headlines should be clear and straightforward. Avoid cute heads that refer to the first paragraph or the photo.
• Post consistently.
  

Other technologies:

• Sign up on Alltop.com. This is an aggregator of RSS feeds. Freedom of Information has a channel: http://freedom-of-information.alltop.com/
  
• Create a presence for your coalition on LinkedIn. It's a site that's easy to use but often overlooked.
• Choose one or two technologies to get your feet wet.
  
• Using these technologies no longer requires a Webmaster. However, try to get a Web services person on your board or heavily involved. That person will know about all the latest, free tools and can point you in the right direction.
• Get a Twitter account in your coalition's name.
• Drive content back to your main site or blog. You want to inform using different technologies, but you don't want to lose visibility that this is your organization.
• Sign up for Google analytics to find out what people are looking at online. Do more of what works.
  

NFOIC Summit: Oklahoma FOI roundup

State-by-state updates at the 2009 NFOIC Summit: Joey Senat with Oklahoma State University School of Journalism and Broadcasting provided a summary of his state's FOI news.

• The attorney general issued a binding decision regarding private technologies. The public access to it depends on the nature of the document not the technology. If it has to do with public business, it's public. The Oklahoma Department of Libraries helped make that request. The state also has a statute related to records retention, which is what the library was interested in. There's still an need to talk to state agencies on what to do with the records they are now keeping.
• Enforcement of open-government laws falls to local district attorneys, which is a problem. The Court of Civil Appeals says said if you violate the open meetings law based on advice from your attorney, it's still a violation. You're supposed to know what the law is.
  

Wash. considers bill concerning transparency via the Web

A bill introduced in the state of Washington would help merge citizens and their government via the Internet, The Washington Blog reported. The bill would require meeting agendas to be posted within 72 hours before the start of the meeting (24 hours for special or emergency meetings) as well as the text of any rule or ordinance to be discussed. Meeting minutes would have to be posted within 15 business days.

There has been a lot of talk at the national and state level about bringing government into the 21st Century and taking advantage of technology to help connect citizens with their government. A bill introduced today would put the force of law behind that talk.

Consider the following sections from SB 6098 - Requiring public agencies, special purpose districts, and municipalities to post certain information on their web sites:

(1) The agenda of all regular meetings of the governing body of every public agency, special purpose district, and any municipality that owns or maintains a web site shall be posted within seventy-two hours before a meeting. The agenda of all special or emergency meetings shall be posted within twenty-four hours before a meeting. The posting shall indicate if the agendas are in draft form.

More here.

European convention to discuss Web 2.0 projects

According to the Sunlight Foundation, a European workshop in March will promote ways in which governments can adopt Web 2.0 tools.

The European Commission’s ePractice portal is teaming up with some Europe-based social media consultants to host a workshop on how to promote user-driven and developed Web 2.0 tools to further public services. They will focus mainly on examples of what is being done currently to actually make government more responsive, as opposed to what might be done theoretically. The workshop will be held on March 16th in Brussels.

The organizers are responding to the dramatic rise over the past three years in user-driven, Web 2.0-style initiatives to make government more open, transparent and accountable. They rightfully point to TheyWorkForYou, the product of Sunlight’s friends at the United Kingdom-based MySociety.com, as a good example. The organizers see a growing gap between the innovation culture underlying these initiatives and government approaches to information technology innovation in public services.

More here.

Obama selects Google manager as Director of Citizen Participation

Katie Jacobs Stanton, who has worked for Google and Yahoo, has been selected to help President Obama "create a 21st century government." The Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Working Group has already split into four teams to examine how innovation can be applied to government, national priorities, sciences and civil society.

According to reports, President Obama has selected Google (and former Yahoo) group product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton as the country's first "Director of Citizen Participation."

Citizen Participation has been a key phrase in Obama's technological policy vernacular since the start of his campaign. From campaign literature: "Barack Obama will use the most current technological tools available to make government less beholden to special interest groups and lobbyists and promote citizen participation in government decision-making."

Part of this approach included the development of the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform (TIGR) Working Group, a team of more than 30 tech industry professionals set to "create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country's most pressing problems; respects the integrity of and renews our commitment to science; and catalyzes active citizenship and partnerships in shared governance with civil society institutions."

More here.

Somebody Has Been Watching Too Much Crime Drama On TV?

The Department of Environmental Protection fears unhinged hunters might use the Freedom of Information Act to track down state conservation officers at home.

The department's safety concerns convinced the legislature's Environment Committee to back legislation blocking the release of the home addresses of conservation officers.

The Freedom of Information Commission opposes the bill, but not because the commission objects to the DEP's request for confidentiality.

Rather, the commission finds the proposed exemption too narrow. It wants to include all public officials and government employees in Connecticut. The only exceptions would be elected officeholders.

More here.

The proposed change would significantly narrow the amount of information available through the FOI Act. It also would depart from the past practice of carving out exceptions case by case.

A Great FOI Idea From Across the Pond...

A charity is testing a website which automates the submitting, tracking, and publishing requests made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.

MySociety, which runs sites including elected representative service TheyWorkForYou.com and mass pledge system PledgeBank.com, has built a list of FoI contacts at central government departments and is creating one for local authorities.

A request made through the new site is sent to the appropriate state sector contact from a unique email address, allowing all responses to be tracked and published on the site. "Everything the department sends to that address is tacked on," mySociety director Tom Steinberg said. "The whole communication is all online."

Steinberg said so far only one organisation – Parliament – has refused to reply to a request made through the system: "They said, we can't send you this information as you are going to put it on the internet."

More here.