March 13, 2005

(Updated) Welcome To 'Sunshine Sunday'

Media Examines Public Access To Government Information

Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.

We first learned of the existence of what's known as Sunshine Sunday via a site calling itself Blogshine Sunday, which will be collecting some coverage of the day as reported on by blogs.

Technically, it seems, it's now part of a larger Sunshine Week, an idea which sprang out of an American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting (at a time when the executive editor of The Oregonian was president of that organization) in response to successful Sunshine Sunday events around the country.

You will note a number of articles in today's Sunday Oregonian that fall under the Sunshine Sunday umbrella.

In addition, the Associated Press yesterday published a series of articles which showed up on OregonLive prior to the start of Sunshine Sunday itself.

For our part, as we've said before, our experience has been that Portland apears to be a relatively accessible town. However, it may be important to filter that through the specifics of the issues we've covered and the fact that we have no similar experience in any other city to which we can compare our experience here.

In other words, your mileage may vary, and we're not attempting to draw broad conclusions fromour own experience. We make that perfectly clear, because we fully expect one person or another to post a comment about how they've had trouble obtaining public information from the City, and would prefer that our personal experience not become misrepresented as us saying there are never any problems.

Regular readers know that we currently have two outstanding requests for information which we have not yet received.

In the recent past, we submitted a FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the participation of Portland police officers in the local Joint Terrorism Task Force. It's anybody's guess just how long it will take to see any results.

Plus, we've recently been faced with a silence of the City Attorney's office on the matter of just what sort of training they provide to JTTF-assigned officers regrding certain provisions of Oregon law.

For us, these requests represent a fair example of the challenges of the public or the press obtaining relevant and timely information fom the government. At any moment, City Council could schedule a hearing on Portland's participation in the JTTF. Given the imminence of that consideration, these peices of information are extraordinarily important to proper public discussion of an important public matter.

Which is not to say the delay in either case necessarily is a matter of deliberate hiding of information. But in matters of public import, even simple bureaucracy or other lesser explanations can have the same effect: Keeping the public from being able to adequately debate the issues of the day.

Meanwhile, a brief update on the Freedom of Information Act expansion which in part is intended to treat bloggers as media when it comes to the fee structure of FOIA requests. According to a Blogshine Sunday post, the first committee hearing on this proposal likely will be very soon.

Allof that said, we invite readers to post comments about any of their experiences obtaining public records here in Portland or anywhere else across Oregon.

Also highly relevant in this day and age is the question of how much public information you've been able to access online without having to go through any intermediaries in the process. How well or how poorly is Portland doing at getting important public information posted online?

March 13, 2005

Update

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press publishes an online guide to access is different states, and offers an outline for open records and meetings laws in Oregon, prepared by a local attorney for Ball Janik LLP.

Also, the Citizens Access Project out of the University of Florida lets you examine each state's laws and compare states to each other. None of the tools on the site seems to have their own individual URLs to which we can link (and some of the navigation links fail utterly in some browsers), so interested readers will have to specifically click on the research method they wish to pursue.

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  1. What They're Saying on 13 Mar 2005

    Here's some of what people are writing on Blogshine Sunday....