St. Paul, Minnesota, recently reinvigorated the debate over government transparency by adopting a new policy that automatically purges all city emails after six months. The city had previously kept email for three years.
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Tag: transparency
More transparency coming for San Diego referendums
Groups sponsoring or fighting against referendum campaigns in San Diego, where such efforts have become increasingly common and divisive in recent years, must disclose their funding sources more quickly and completely under new city rules approved Tuesday.
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Most Idaho school districts, charters break transparency laws
Almost every school district and charter in Idaho is out of compliance with state laws created to promote transparency in spending, contracts and long-term strategic planning, according to a new study.
Only 14 of 164 districts and charters are in complete compliance, while at least 18 have posted nothing on their websites. Continue…
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Sunlight Foundation: Why should cities have an open data policy?
As more cities break into the world of transparency, policy remains an important piece of the open data puzzle.
But just how relevant and important is an open data policy to a successful open data program? What does it actually accomplish, not just symbolically, but functionally? Or, to put it more bluntly, why even have an open data policy? Continue…
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Covert electronic surveillance prompts calls for transparency
Law enforcement officials across the U.S. have become enamored of the StingRay, an electronic surveillance device that can covertly track criminal suspects and is being used with little public disclosure and often under uncertain legal authority.
Now, though, some states are pushing back, and are requiring the police to get a court order and local consent before turning to the high-tech tool. Continue…
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Open gov advocates face obstacles when publishing state codes
Transparency advocates in the U.S. are facing legal obstacles to moving state codes online.
Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 200 years ago that government work can’t be copyrighted, a tug of war between private companies with contracts to publish state codes and open government activists has raised questions about the ruling’s scope. Continue…
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Memo to Vermont state workers: Call Gov. first before talking
A memo directing state commissioners, agency secretaries and their employees to call Gov. Peter Shumlin’s office before they respond to media inquiries was never intended to muzzle anybody, according to the governor’s office.
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Editorial: Transparency and avoiding the pitfalls of bad data
Governments across the country are striving to meet a call to transparency by upping their data collection and analysis efforts. But with this trend toward big data comes an influx of “bad data” — inaccurate, outdated or misused information that leads to ill-informed policies, misled initiatives and an ensuing lack of citizen trust.
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Ohio’s expenditure database includes more than 100 local governments
More than 100 local governments added their expenditures to the state's online checkbook on Thursday, a move Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel hopes will spark other local entities open their books to taxpayers.
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Editorial: California bill punishes cities that do right thing
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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