to say so, but the current control room would almost certainly support livestreaming the Senate with minimal upgrades. The cost to outfit House committee rooms ran $65,000 a pop. So cost isn’t a reason for the Senate not to join their colleagues. An even worse excuse? Grandstanding. Current Senate leader Michael Lamoureux (R-Russellville) has often said he doesn’t support the move because he’s afraid his colleagues will suddenly start preening for the camera. Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Searcy), who’s in line to take Lamoureux’s place, made a similarly lame argument in an interview with the Times. “There’s a lot of tradition and some apprehension [cameras] would change it. There’s a lot of camaraderie. ... There’s not a lot of grandstanding in the Senate. There’s not a lot of political posturing on the bills. It’s more about the facts surrounding the bills.” Those of us who are able to show up at the Capitol know that lawmakers do not need cameras in the room to grandstand. Dismang added that he’d never gotten a request from a constituent. That misses the point: Most people won’t watch gavel-togavel coverage, of course, but if a few motivated citizens have access, they can spread the word, leading to a more informed and engaged citizenry. It’s 2014. Access to the government of the people should not be limited to Arkansans able to go to the Capitol in Little Rock in the middle of the working day. The General Assembly should pass a law mandating online filing of all financial disclosure reports. Lobbyists are already required to do so, thanks to a law passed in 2011. But PACs and candidates at the state and district level have the option of filing online or on a physical form. The Secretary of State’s office scans forms and includes them as PDF documents in its Financial Disclosure database, but they’re incredibly laborious to sort through. The advanced Disclosure search, which only includes those candidates, officials and PACs who file online, is organized in a searchable, sortable, downloadable database. The difference between the two methods is like going to the library to learn the definition of “efficiency” versus using dictionary.com. Thanks to yeoman’s work exposing improprieties in disclosures from Blue Hog Report’s Matt Campbell and others, there’s enough political pressure that this seems likely to happen during the next general session, in 2015. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State should work to improve the functionality of its database, something spokesman Alex Reed said has been discussed with an eye towards 2015. The Bureau of Legislative research should make it easier to track legislation. RSS feeds would enable visitors to the Arkansas General Assembly
“We think that a big problem in the market is that companies like CGI [the primary contractor of Healthcare.gov] get trusted with major contracts for the government because there’s no one else responding to the bid … . There’s a lack of modern government technology. We want to change that … . We’re supporting civic start-ups — modern, open, lean, efficient tech companies that can really work with government to provide the services that we expect in the 21st century.” When Lowe was frantically searching for a partner to join San Francisco in the restaurant inspection standard project in advance of a presentation before a mayoral conference, he turned to the technology office of the White House. Their recommendation? Louisville. “I thought, ‘No way,’ ” Lowe said. But in less
website to follow the progress of bills. Arkansas courts should expand public access. The state court system is currently amidst a massive, multi-year effort to digitize all of its paper records. Individual courts choose whether to participate. If they do participate, they have the further option of enabling a public-facing interface, CourtConnect. Once a court’s records have been digitized, making them available to the public is as easy as “flipping a switch,” according to Stephanie Harris, communications counsel with the state Supreme Court. So far the Supreme Court; Court of Appeals; nearly two dozen county circuit courts, including the Pulaski County Circuit, and district courts in Faulkner and Hot Spring counties are fully online. The goal is to get 80 percent of the caseloads from courts around the state digitized by 2016, according to Tim Holthoff, information systems director in the Administrative Office of the Courts. Harris said she expects a number of courts to hold out. To keep growing the number of digitized courts, “it’ll take demand from the public and demand from attorneys, and it’ll also take demand from younger judges who’re used to using [the online system],” Harris said. More cameras in state courts. Without cameras recording the 1993 trials of the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols would be a dead man (or still rotting away on death row). That should be all the evidence courts need to join the growing, national cameras in court movement that the state Supreme Court embraced in 2010. The Arkansas Health Department should post restaurant inspection scores online and conform to the open data standard. Currently, to find out how area restaurants rated on their latest restaurant health inspection — i.e. whether they were storing food properly, had vermin infestation, etc. — you have to visit the health department unit in the county where the restaurant operates and request to see the paper file. That’s unacceptable for information so critical to public health. Robert Brech, Health Department CFO, said the department hopes to unveil an online search this spring. Department spokesman Ed Barham expressed skepticism of the fairness of employing a grading scale that would meet the open data standard. “I don’t know how you could come up with a 1 to 100 scale and compare a hot dog stand to Red Lobster,” he said. But, of course, the same argument could be made about any grading in just about any context — say 8th grade math and English. It’s just a useful shorthand that, in the case of restaurant inspections, would help the public make informed decisions.
than a week, Louisville had agreed to embrace the data standard. A little more than a month later, Louisville’s restaurant inspection scores were live on Yelp. Under the leadership of Mayor Greg Fischer, Louisville has become one of the country’s leaders in open data. Last October, Fischer issued an executive order that made his city the first to treat all of its data as “open by default.” It’s one of around 25 open data policies in U.S. cities; five state legislatures are currently considering open data legislation. Fischer’s order builds on the Kentucky Open Records Act. Acting on the order is still a work in progress three months later, but as the Sunlight Foundation explained, “This combination [of an open data order with the Open Records Act] implies that all information that is legally accessible now will be proactively disclosed online via
Louisville’s open data portal (or future successor site).” In his speech announcing the policy, Fischer said he wanted his city government to have a “culture of weakness orientation.” “I want to know what’s not working. All organizations have lots of problems. Strong ones got them out in the open. They’re prioritized; they’re working on them. Weak ones have them hidden away in a drawer. When you open that drawer, boy is it stinking. ... “When you think about innovation, it is disruptive. It often creates a mess. You fail forward. You fail fast. And that’s a good thing.” As an Arkansan who avidly follows Arkansas politics, Lowe wondered in a speech in September at the Arkansas Times’ Festival of Ideas, “If a city like Louisville can be this pioneer… for open data initiatives, why can’t Arkansas?” www.arktimes.com
JANUARY 23, 2014
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