Dan described a situation where Petaluma is close to meltdown with public records requests.
In a similar situation, New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin has been inundated with public records requests for various reasons, including the needs that organizations and neighborhoods have for data related to Katrina disaster and recovery, the intransigence of a mayor who has been under assault through a series of scandals, and extreme dissatisfaction with the pace of recovery. The mayor has exacerbated the problem by squeezing all public records requests through the bottleneck of the city attorney's office. Combined with utter insolence by department heads to cooperate with the Council and citizens making simple records requests, and now a virtual war is underway, with public records requests being used as the salvos fired back and forth. We're in a sprint to the 2010 elections, hoping we don't lose too much in the meantime. It's time to take politics, personalities, the inefficiencies of paper forms, and shadow data hidden away in Excel spreadsheets, out of the process of getting information to the community. When the data is there for anyone to use -- and when intermediaries like Dan can make that data useful to a broad audience -- we can start to have discussions about what the data means, rather than how to get the data. It's a brave new world, and I like it. Brian Denzer http://nolastat.org On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Dan Lyke <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 22 May 2009 15:13:11 -0500 > Brian Denzer <[email protected]> wrote: > > By the way, this is going to have enormous implications for local > > governments. The precedent is now established for open data policies > > everywhere. Whether those policies offer truly meaningful > > tranparency, or just a veneer, will be up to us to discern. > > This may not be word-for-word, but it's pretty close: "We are only one > well-crafted sunshine law request from total meltdown". In Petaluma, > California, at least, the IT department has no particular budget to get > ahead of this curve, so there's no systemic funding to get data out, > but there are a number of individuals who understand that their jobs > long-term are going to be much much easier if they get the data out > there first, rather than having to retrieve and correlate it after the > fact based on a sunshine law request. > > One of the mashups I did was grabbing recent building permits out of > the online database and dropping them on Google maps via GeoRSS. Doesn't > seem too interesting to see that you're neighbor's getting their water > heater replaced, but this got some neurons firing, and they're now > seeing if they can get the planning and permitting process online so > that we can do mashups to make sure that the new developments aren't > bombshells dropped off-handedly in city council meetings. > > Dan > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >
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