In honor of sunshine week
by Jeremy | March 22, 2010 | KLAMP | Comments Off
Yesterday marked the end of Sunshine Week, which hoped to, well, shine some light on efforts around the country to encourage open access to government records. I wanted to flag a unique, if bland, interview of Miriam Nisbet, who directs the Office of Government Information Services, a body that helps deal with Freedom of Information Act concerns.
Nisbet says that talking about FOIA and its limitations – funding issues, the inordinate lenght of time it takes those requesting information to actually get a response – misses the larger and more essential point of trying to change the government’s general “culture” of openness: “You have to have people at the very top, people in leadership positions who not only are believing it and saying it and doing it but who are themselves accountable and who are willing to be accountable if it doesn’t work.”
While this may seem obvious, it is certainly worth thinking about as an organization as we bang our head against the judicial wall trying to pry out information from agencies that see no upside in disclosure. How do you go about convincing the higher ups that greater personal vulnerability from more open records is actually good for their business and job prospects? Nisbet suggests, perhaps naively, that a lot of the barrier results from the fact that agencies and the general public really don’t understand each other very well. People call their Congressman all the time demanding action, but who has had a friendly conversation with a staffer at HUD? “If people can really interact with government personnel just like they have no hesitation, it seems, to going to their members of Congress. Why? Because they think that when they go to their member of Congress they are going to get an answer. Somebody’s going to help them get the answer they want, the information they want, the service they want. They need to be doing the same thing with any agency that affects what they do.”
Maybe Nisbet’s right. We’ll be there to litigate when the time comes, but in honor of the end of Sunshine Week, take a few moments to get to know your friendly neighborhood bureaucrat. It might just save you a FOIA administrative appeal.
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