June 30th Bacon's Rebellion Blog article "Establishing Transparency's Bottom Floor for Virginia's Localities" is a good followup on the THOMAS JEFFERSON INSTITUTE'S TRANSPARENCY PROJECT. It brings home the fact that the internet has provided a wealth of opportunity for citizen involvement and for governments to be open and empowering of citizens. The internet has opened doors for people to be involved in government in ways that were not dreamed of only a few years ago. Suddenly, access is available to more people, limited only by governments' efforts to provide the information.
However, there are tremendous differences between how jurisdictions handle this new era of 'openness'. I have been looking at various websites around the State of Virginia for more than a year now. Some jurisdictions make it incredibly easy for information to be found. Other jurisdictions make finding some information easy and other information more difficult to locate. Still others, offer a lot of self-promotion to encourage the home buyer or business, but the 'meat and potatoes' of local government is all but missing in action.
I believe that the last paragraph of that blog clearly identifies some of the opportunities that are before us and within the hands of our lawmakers:
"If all of Virginia’s counties and school boards met these standards we
would be a much more informed and aware citizenry, but this is just the
tip of the iceberg. Simply following through on these measures, while a
significant upgrade over the hodge-podge collection of documents that
passes for transparency throughout much of the commonwealth, doesn’t
take full advantage of power of the internet. There are a lot of
additional things that governments can do that enable their citizens to
get much more out of online transparency. From video archives to real
time data feeds, innovative governments are making themselves more open
and their constituents better informed. Next issue we’ll take a look at
what the best practices in this new online world look like.
I am looking forward to that next issue. I have some ideas of my own, first and foremost, that standards should be established for all jurisdictions (state, county, city & TOWN) and that those standards should be developed based, in large part, upon citizen input. Let the people who will be using the devices have a part in determining what is needed, not just the lawmakers. Find out what people want. Oh, yeah. That's what government is all about anyway, right?