The Public-Records Question

posted by Zach Patton

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

At the final conference session on Friday, public sector leaders talked about how Web 2.0 is already changing government -- and how those tools will continue to bring about drastic changes in the coming years.

A lot of the conversation was spurred by Governing's May cover story on this topic, "Working in Wiki: How to Assemble Real Ideas in a Virtual World."

It was really cool seeing how some states and cities are already using Web 2.0, including Missouri's recruiting kiosk in Second Life, the Washington Secretary of State's MySpace page, Seattle's real-time mashup of emergency-response info, the LAFD's Twitter feed and the state of California's YouTube channel on paying your taxes (which we actually wrote about a couple months ago).

So anyway, yay technology! Yay, government!

But there's a rub.

The different speakers at Friday's session -- and conference attendees in the audience -- kept coming back to one key question:  When does this become public record?

Is your presence in Second Life part of the public record -- and subject to open-records laws and retention requirements?  If your agency uses a wiki to collect ideas, must you save every version of that document?

It's a question that no one has completely figured out, but it's a very important one.

Gary Robinson, director of the Department of Information Services for the state of Washington, said it's actually not that hard to figure out an answer to the question. "Really, it's the same thing we've been dealing with for years," he said. "Just like how we started documenting and storing emails on mainframe computers 10 years ago, we need to treat this the same way."

The key, Robinson said, is determining whether you're using a particular technology in the business of  government. So if some third-party user -- say, the UK site FixMyStreet.com -- creates a mashup of official graffiti reports with a map of your town, it's not your responsibility to maintain of record of that. But if you start using that map to help manage how you clean up your city's graffiti, then you now most likely need to treat that as a public record.

It's worth figuring out these answers -- and it's worth employing some of these new kinds of technologies in your city or state. Bill Schrier, the chief technology officer for the city of Seattle, said that Web 2.0 innovations help government be what it's supposed to be. "What is government? It's about people coming together in a community to accomplish what they can't do as individuals. And that's just what these technologies do. They make government a stronger part of the community. And that's why we should be embracing them."

Comments

[Brian Humphrey]

Zach,

Thanks for the kind mention of LAFD Twitter, which is but one of several endeavors by the Los Angeles Fire Department to remain relevant to those we proudly serve.

Whenever possible, we seek to populate our Twitter feed and other outreach efforts via agency e-mail and Department computers, so as to remain reasonably accountable.

We also roll the RSS feeds from Twitter and other LAFD web 2.0 endeavors into other sites. While the prime purpose of doing so is to remain robust in real time, the redundancy can certainly be seen as a prudent and reasonable effort to catalog our written word.

Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,

Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Service Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department

[Dan Ross]

Zach-It was great to meet you at the Governing-Managing Technology conference. Missouri's Second Life presence has generated over 400 responses and inquiries to date. We'll be holding our next job fairs "in world" on June 24th at 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.-7:00 p.m.

[Lurker]

About wikis: Don't most of them automatically save "every version" of the documents thereon?