Tackling a county budget may seem daunting, but Smart Cville tactfully lays out Albemarle’s budget in a spread of colors with its new budget visualization tool that illustrates how your money helps the county.
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Read More… from Virginia: New web app shows how your taxes are broken down
A training seminar on ethics and open government will be held in El Paso on Wednesday by the Austin-based Texas Center for Municipal Ethics.
The full-day seminar is open to anyone that wants to register, but organizers said city officials such as city managers, city secretaries, elected officials and city attorneys from the region are encouraged to attend the “Integrity at City Hall” training. Continue…
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Read More… from Texas: Ethics and open government seminar to be held Wednesday
The criminal charges against a Blue Ridge weekly newspaper publisher and his attorney, charges based on their attempts to access public records, were dropped Monday, putting to rest a case that riled media nationwide and stunned the legal community.
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Read More… from Charges dropped against North Georgia publisher and his lawyer
Two White House offices jointly released new guidance on July 14 instructing agencies to expand their data transparency activities and incorporate public feedback.
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Read More… from White House pushes agency heads to expand open data
The Department of Corrections is seeking authority to destroy recordings of staff training just one day after their creation.
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Read More… from Wisconsin DOC seeks to destroy training recordings after a day
A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.
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Read More… from Justice department ‘uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests’
GovDelivery, the leading provider of cloud-based software solutions enhancing the citizen experience, announces availability of the first performance-based benchmarking report for public sector digital communications. The GovDelivery Benchmark Report, titled “Metrics that Matter in the Public Sector,” identifies proven metrics for measuring the success of digital communications within government and provides government-specific data that can be used to improve the citizen experience.
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A task force looking at possible changes to North Dakota’s open records laws is considering whether the attorney general should be able to penalize government agencies that hold illegal private meetings or don’t share records.
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Read More… from Task force mulls changes in North Dakota’s open records laws
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting en banc in Detroit Free Press v. Department of Justice, has concluded that individuals have sufficient privacy interests in their police booking photos to preclude their release under the Freedom of Information Act. The decision, which produced an unusual lineup among the court’s justices, is available here.
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Read More… from Court concludes FOIA does not require release of booking photos
In the 2015 fiscal year, the U.S. federal government processed 769,903 Freedom of Information requests. The government fully fulfilled only 22.6 percent of those requests; 44.9 percent of federal FOIA requests were either partially or fully denied. Even though the government denied at least part of more than 345,000 requests, it only received 14,639 administrative appeals.
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Read More… from MuckRock is launching a national database of FOIA exemptions
