National Freedom of Information Coalition
Protecting Your Right to Open Government

Author: NFOIC

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Posts by NFOIC

OK Judge to review redacted records from Governor, Department of Public Safety

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An Oklahoma County judge has agreed to conduct a closed-door review of material that was redacted from records made public by the governor and Department of Public Safety in response to a lawsuit filed by the Tulsa World and a former editor.

The review will determine whether the governor’s office and DPS complied with the Open Records Act when it redacted some material before making the documents public.

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Sunlight Foundation: US Senate passes historic endorsement of open government data

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Amidst unanswered questions about the future of open government in the United States, the Senate has provided a unanimous endorsement of a set of enduring principles that the Sunlight Foundation has advanced and defended for a decade: that data created using the funds of the people should be available to the people in open formats online, without cost or restriction.

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Brookings Institution publishes working paper on the impact of open government

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Vanessa Williamson and Norman Eisen, both fellows at the Brookings Institution, co-authored a working paper that "reviews the empirical and theoretical literature examining the international impact of open government, and offers recommendations for policymakers and an agenda for further research on the subject."

You can find the full text of the report here.

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Universities cite U of Kentucky v. Kernel in open records denials

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The case between UK and the Kernel has been cited by other universities in multiple denials of documents and information, but some universities have released information about the numbers of investigations conducted.

Western Kentucky University and Kentucky State University denied all records in a fashion similar to UK.

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Dispute over Shawnee County open records highlights gray area in Kansas law

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Shawnee County attorneys redacted portions of a document that overviews possible problems and solutions at the county’s Emergency Communication Center — an entity that has been plagued in recent years with understaffing and steep criticism from city of Topeka officials.

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Chattanooga researchers push for Hamilton County to open more data to public scrutiny

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Two years ago, the city of Chattanooga adopted an "open data" policy that made public huge amounts of information gathered every day by local government agencies.

Now a small nonprofit organization is calling on Hamilton County government to follow suit.

Metro Ideas Project, an independent, nonprofit research startup based in Chattanooga, has released a new project, Open Hamilton, that argues as much.

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Missouri Sunshine Law Request Yields $1.5 Million Tab, Then $5,000, Then Outright Refusal

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Back in February, a nonprofit group called Reclaim the Records filed requests for Missouri birth and death listings from 1910 through 2015.

The California-based outfit describes itself as a “group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates who are filing Freedom of Information requests to get public data released back into the public domain.”

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Colo. AG’s office opposes open record reform

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An effort that proponents say would modernize Colorado's open records law for the digital era hit a bump last week when the state attorney general's office stated its opposition to the effort.

Deputy Attorney General David Blake, according to a statement read by a representative from his office at the meeting, said his office believes the proposal, in its current form, "creates more problems than it cures" and makes the Colorado Open Records Act "more complicated and vague."

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Ohio Supreme Court rules police dash-cam videos are generally public records

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Dash cam video recorded by police officers in the course of their duties is a public record generally available upon request, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

In a 7-0 ruling, the court said that some exceptions could be made for materials deemed to be investigatory work product by police, but that in general the recordings should be open to the public.

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