Your Right to Know: Disciplined workers should be named
When state employees misbehave, does the public have a right to know who they are? Two state agencies are answering that question in different ways. Both the state Department of Justice and Department of Natural Resources have in the recent past bl ...
Public has a right to all commission business
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Addressing cost and privacy issues with open data in government
No doubt the government’s push for more open data could drive innovation in private sector organisations, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. At the Australia 3.0 forum in Melbourne last week, a mixed group of IT professionals, go ...
Editorial: United States’ shameful behavior: Suppresses release of torture photographs
Under the Protected National Security Document Act, enacted by the Obama administration in 2009 to cover the period September 2001 through January 2009, the United States Government has prohibited the release of photographs depicting 'enhanced interrogation techniques' - Torture - administered on enemy combatants taken into custody abroad by the U.S. military and/or its allied forces. Barack Obama read more ...
Who’s afraid of Jon Caldara’s school board sunshine?
Jon Caldara, the controversial president of the Independence Institute free-market think tank in Colorado, has succeeded in doing what many might see as the impossible. With his latest ballot initiative, he has pushed teachers unions and school board administrators into the same camp ...
Colorado campaign ad spending is still tough to track
There’s a lot of money in politics to follow in Colorado, and during the campaign season, those dollars fund a lot of ads ...
New Illinois law increases transparency, creates salary restrictions for transit employees
Illinois residents will now have easy access to online information regarding mass transit employee salaries as well as safety and budget information. Citing the benefit of increased government accountability, Gov. Quinn Friday signed a bill to reform ...
OAS Launches Virtual Course on Open Government for Public Officials in the Americas
The Organization of American States (OAS) will launch, on Tuesday, August 26, the virtual course "Strategies for Open Government in the Americas" for 217 officials from the region, in order to enable them to implement strategies for the consolidation of more participatory, transparent and open government. read more ...
Why PACER removed access to case archives of five courts
If you want to download court records in the United States, your first stop is probably PACER, the oft-maligned digital warehouse for public court records. Maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the system charges 10 cents per page of search results within its archive, and 10 cents per actual page of court documents that are officially in the public record. It's a useful tool for attorneys, but often difficult for the average citizen to navigate and understand. read more ...
Virginia State Police refuses to disclose publicly funded weapons and vehicles
The Virginia Department of State Police has refused to disclose the types of patrol rifles and other tactical weapons and vehicles it possesses in a decision criticized by civil liberty groups and open-government advocates. The Rutherford Institute i ...
