This is the first in a series of posts summarizing recommendations for using the explosion in information technology to open New York State’s government.

Citizens Union • Common Cause NY • League of Women Voters of NY State
Reinvent Albany • New York Public Interest Research Group

Basic Principles

We urge our elected leaders to adopt and publicly endorse the following basic principles for using Information Technology to open up government.

1. Government information is public information. Information subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Law is public information, except for privacy, security and contractual concerns.
2. Public digital information should be put online in a searchable, usable, common format, and kept updated.
3. State policymakers should use Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to guide what information goes online first. The universe of digital records is huge. New York State government gets twenty thousand or more FOIL requests a year. The most FOILed (non-personal) records should be posted online in usable formats.
4. The State should seek ways to use technology to keep the public informed and engaged. Information Technology is abundant and cheap. Most transparency measures involve a change in mindset, not great expense.
5. Online digital information should be searchable, downloadable, and usable by the public. Government documents should be online in common, usable formats like TXT and CSV. Government should not hide information in plain sight — scanned paper copies of documents, saved as image files in PDF format are unsearchable from the web or within the document. They are effectively inaccessible to the public.
6. Government should welcome and share public feedback
7. Government websites should give the public many opportunities to comment on government decisions before they are made. Those comments and responses should be shared.
8. The state should use online maps to show the public what government is doing.

A picture is worth a thousand words – a map is worth ten thousand. A government serious about transparency will post information online as interactive maps as the federal government did with Recovery.org, including spending, tax breaks, capital projects, member items, economic development projects, etc.