The recent Cyber Dust secret text messaging scandal at the Fresno Unified School District is exposing gaps in California’s public records law.
The app allows users to send confidential text messages that are deleted as soon as they are read. Now open government advocates are asking a big question: Are we entering a new age of government officials using technology to hide from public scrutiny? Continue…
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Read More… from Is technology killing California’s public records law?
Gov. Jerry Brown has signed the State Bar of California’s annual dues bill, allowing the agency to collect dues and stay in business another year.
But mandates under Senate Bill 387 include new requirements for greater transparency, financial accountability and improved attorney-discipline reporting. Continue…
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Read More… from California’s approval of funding bill continues State Bar reforms
California has brought us a series of great pieces of transparency news over the past month.
However, the implementation of the campaign finance reforms enacted through the passage of 2014’s SB 27 have really helped us feel the sunlight. Continue….
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Read More… from Sunlight Foundation: California shines a light on political dark money
Last December, the California Senate’s new President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, shut down a small legislative staff bureau filled with investigators who provided oversight of a few of the state’s myriad bureaucracies and government programs. De Leon decided that Senate committees would now handle oversight – and his office has since dubbed various run-of-the-mill Senate hearings as “oversight hearings.”
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Read More… from Editorial: California bill punishes cities that do right thing
The city of Berkeley has officially launched a new website featuring 17 data sets related to everything from municipal water usage and employee salaries to crime heat maps, energy consumption, restaurant inspections, registered business licenses and much more.
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Read More… from California: City of Berkeley unveils new open data portal
SACRAMENTO – Assemblyman Scott Wilk’s, R- Santa Clarita, bill AB 85 which will stop state agencies from taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to hold closed door meetings without public involvement passed unanimously out of the Senate Governmental Organization Committee.
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Read More… from California: Wilk’s State Agency transparency bill passes Senate committee
While California may be home to some of the most aggressively forward-thinking tech companies in the world, that enthusiasm for innovation hasn’t carried over to the public sector. State and local governments have been frustratingly slow to make public data available online. There hasn’t been anything close to a statewide standard, leaving individual agencies to voluntarily develop open data policies, often in an inconsistent and piecemeal fashion, or not at all.
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Tim Draper wants to make California county governments more transparent — and the venture capitalist said Wednesday that he will spend up to $500,000 to make it happen.
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Read More… from Draper, backer of Six Californias, funds government transparency
SANTA MONICA—On June 9, the City of Santa Monica won a Technology Solutions award from the Public Technology Institute for its Open Data Initiative.
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Read More… from California: Santa Monica Wins Award For Open Data Initiative
For advocates of government transparency, there’s a particularly delicious paragraph in a judge’s written decision upholding the lawsuit that this news group and its sister organization filed against the state Senate.
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Read More… from California: The people are victors in lawsuit against state Senate
