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California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money
It costs money (at least in the short run) to make governments open and transparent. Even if open government is better for democracy and cost-efficient and cost-effective in the long run, governments may use the short-term cost as an excuse to curtail openness. OMB Watch reports that, as part of its Budget Act of 2012 (passed in June), California suspended the state's open meetings law for the next three years in an effort to cut state expenditures. The California open meetings law "requires cities and other agencies to publish the agendas of public meetings before they occur and make the minutes of these meetings available to citizens after they occur." As OMB Watch says, "In suspending the law, the state is sacrificing not only a fundamental element of a democratic society, but a vital tool that can actually save money."
- California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money, OMB Watch (August 14, 2012). The state, facing increasingly tight budgets, suspended the law to save money. Under state rules, California is required to reimburse cities and counties for the cost of complying with mandated requirements, which includes its open meetings requirements. However, California has not reimbursed local governments for open meetings costs since 2005, accumulating a debt estimated at $96 million. By suspending the open meetings provision in the Brown Act, California expects to avoid paying open meetings costs for the next three years, as well as eliminate the current debt owed to local governments.
Happy Birthday Freedom of Information!
The National Security Archive at George Washington University is marking the anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act with a special post:
- Happy 46th Birthday, Freedom of Information!, National Security Archive (July 4, 2012). Marking the 46th anniversary of President Johnson's signing the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Archive today posted a compilation of 46 news headlines from the past year made possible by active and creative use of the FOIA. This representative sample, drawn from hundreds of FOIA stories reported by newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and researchers, describe FOIA requests that revealed the theft of Jack Daniels whiskey by airport security screeners, the keywords used by homeland security officials to monitor social networking sites, the soil contamination endangering Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, pre-9/11 attempts to whack Osama bin Laden, and $1.2 trillion of secret Federal Reserve loans to banks, among dozens of other topics that the public has a right and a need to know.
C-SPAN’s essential video record of Congress has new clipping tool
Gary points to a great, newly enhanced tool from C-SPAN that allows you to create and share video clips in its extensive video library of Congressional proceedings and Committee hearings. The tool is available for all of C-SPAN's online video content, which includes Book-TV and Booknotes, C-SPAN specials, interviews, news conferences, White House events, National Press Club speakers, and more. The archive includes every program aired on C-SPAN since 1987, almost 190,000 hours of video!
- The Wonderful C-SPAN Video Library Releases Enhanced Video Clipping Tool, by Gary Price, infoDOCKET (June 22, 2012). All of the material is searchable not only with metadata but also using each word spoken during a program. That's right, transcript search.
- Clipping in the Video Library, by RXB, C-SPAN video library blog (June 22, 2012). Over three million clips have already been created by users.
- C-SPAN Video Library. Here is a four minute sample: a clip on the Volker Rule, taken from the two hour and fifteen minute testimony of Jamie Dimon on July 13, 2012 before the Senate Committee Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, about J. P. Morgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss on May 10, 2012.
The Digital Preservation Network
The focus of the Digital Preservation Network, which is being created by research-intensive universities, is "the complete digital scholarly record" and its goal is to ensure the long-term preservation of that record. Already, twenty-nine organizations have agreed to participate in start-up planning and committed "seed capital" to fund initial planning efforts. Its Brief Overview describes some of the thinking that is going into this effort, which sounds remarkably like the FDLP and what we at FGI have been advocating for the digital FDLP:
- The Digital Preservation Network: Overview of the Initiative (Feb 21, 2012). [PDF 3 pages] Over time, reliance on common approaches, technologies and organizations creates risk of common points of failure in securing long-term preservation of the record. To avoid the catastrophic loss of scholarship, we must build and sustain a diverse ecosystem that can ensure the survival of scholarship in digital form for future generations. We envision a system that is scalable, sustainable, and complementary to existing collection and preservation efforts--the Digital Preservation Network (DPN or Deepen). DPN will create a federated approach to preservation of academic content. It will build upon the higher education community's current investments to create sufficient diversity of preservation approaches to assure access to the digital scholarly record far into the future.... The objects and metadata of the scholarly record must be replicated across: 1. Diverse software architectures 2. Diverse organizational structures 3. Diverse geographic regions 4. And in the future, diverse legal/political environments (nations) ...This diversity requires a supporting ecosystem for preservation that enables higher education to own, maintain and control the scholarly record throughout time. While commercial entities may partner with us to contribute to this effort at different points in time depending on priorities and business models, final control must reside with the academy.
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