Yesterday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman attempted to throw down the gauntlet on campaign finance disclosure regulations for New York state. The prime target? Nonprofit profit organizations, labor unions, political action committees and other entities that engage in election advocacy at the federal, state, and local level.

If approved, Schneiderman's new regulation would require any organization spending $10,000 or more on a New York election to publicly report itemized schedules of expenses and contributions, including the name and address of the recipients of the expenditures, and "a clear description" of the purpose for the expense. For this kind of disclosure to be truly transformative, two outstanding issues from the draft proposal should be addressed.

1. Make that Real Time, Online Disclosure -- Although it proposes that all disclosure reports will be published online on the Attorney General's website, the current text of the proposed regulation only requires annual disclosure of electioneering activities. One filing per year online is an unreasonably low threshold for disclosure of activities that are ongoing, critically related to one of our most vital democratic institutions (our elections!), and in the public interest to be reported in a manner that’s as timely as the activity. When you measure the potential burden of filing more regularly against the public interest in timely disclosure, technology has changed the balance: The best target to shoot for is real-time online disclosure of key influence data.

2. Close the Exemption Loophole -- The proposed legislation exempts those organizations who already publicly disclose information to other government agencies from filing with the state Attorney General. Although it’s appropriate to guard against redundant requirements, more thought should be put into the potential consequences of this provision. Just because organizations are reporting to other government entities does not mean that the reporting and disclosure these agencies already require is as detailed or timely as what the Attorney General’s office plans to disclose. Nor is there any guarantee that this provision will be interpreted as its meant or that the disclosed information will be easily accessible. New regulations should create reliable disclosure requirements that create a meaningful window into political activity regardless of whatever laws already exist.

Schneiderman is authorized as the Attorney General with statutory authority to oversee nonprofit organizations -- many of which played a big role in this year’s elections -- and his regulatory approach is a creative answer to Congress’s failure to act. As Attorney General, Schneiderman is charged with defining the form and manner in which organizations make annual financial reports to the state and to enact rules and regulations to administer the financial reporting system. Just as it is within his purview to address issues of influence in the political system, Schneiderman can make changes that reflect the best practices of online disclosure and to require necessary and appropriate timelines for doing so. At one time, requiring real time, disclosure may have been a burden, but with the bevy of online tools (including the NYOpenGovernment.com website that Schneiderman himself created earlier this summer), closing the gap between electioneering activity and public notice has never been easier.

As our nation’s campaign finance transparency laws continue to be attacked and weakened, it’s refreshing to see a new, viable proposal that has promise to bring new information to bear on elections that are increasingly taking place in the shadows. The proposed regulations will be published in the New York State Register on December 26th and will be subject to public comment until March 6, 2013. We hope the public takes the chance to address these and other issues at that time and supports Schneiderman’s proposal.

You can read the full text of the proposed regulations here.

As Sunlight’s Video production Director it is my delight to be producing an ongoing video series called OpenGov Champions, featuring citizens who take action in their own ways to open up, or as in this case, contribute to, government data.

I was especially excited to go to Brooklyn, NY to film this episode in which we showcase Liz Barry from Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) and their grassroots mapping efforts. Theirs is a unique way to work with and contribute to open government data. I had watched Liz’s TED talk about the mapping they did in 2010 of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast. Their maps were the only high resolution images available at the onset of the spill and spread all over the world media because access to airspace was restricted and planes could not capture aerial photos using traditional methods. It all had started with Jeffrey Warren in MIT and others who were experimenting with new ways to create high resolution maps using low cost, DIY technology like kites, balloons and cheap digital cameras. When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, they saw the opportunity to help by mapping the scope of the disaster. That’s when Liz met them and jumped right in, helping with logistics and connecting people with boats and crews. In my mind there is a rock star quality to this kind of opengov data work. And they have indeed gotten a lot of fame for their work and were a Knight News Challenge winner in 2011 among other things.

Liz has been with Public Lab (as it’s often abbreviated) as Director of Urban Environments ever since. Her goal is to empower citizens to take on their own investigations using DIY scientific methods. Anyone can -- and many people now have -- use their open source methods to make maps of all kinds of environmental, social or cultural phenomena all around the world where governments have not gathered geospatial or other data in high enough resolutions, or in some cases, like in the Czech Republic, were actively trying to hide damage done to their national forests.

Liz has worked her whole life in widely varied projects that all share the goal to enable citizens to participate in and improve upon their urban environments.  Her past projects include starting an urban youth-led farm, encouraging neighbours to talk to each other by organizing events in a Bryant Park that thousands attended, to designing new cities for a company she worked for. More recently she has been combining technology and open data with a lot of hours spent outside on foot or on bicycle, whether slugging through rough terrain or on the streets of Brooklyn.

It was more than a 100 degrees with jungle humidity the day we met with Liz and some other activists who work on the Gowanus Canal project in Brooklyn. And yet these people were out there, flying up kites, documenting the watershed around the heavily polluted canal, as they do in all seasons: through mud and rain in fall, snow and slush in the winter, the sunshine and heat in spring and summer. They do all this mapping in order to get the full picture of the life of the canal throughout the year and to find out how the rehabilitation efforts, namely building a park around the edges is going, which plants are thriving and which are not, and to find and document sources of ongoing surface pollution like trucks doing illegal oil changes. Even though the Environmental Protection Agency has declared the canal a Superfund site and have already done a survey of the deeper contamination issues on the canal, as Eymund Diegel, one of the grassroots mappers, points out, unlike the concerned residents of the neighborhood like himself, they are not there every day, documenting the smaller scale, subtler issues that all contribute to the trash and chemicals creeping into the canal. Residents who go canoeing and spend time around the canal are invested in the improvement of the watershed in a totally different level. Eymund wants his kids to be able to come to the canal and learn about different kinds of fish, birds and plants instead of the trash currently floating around in the water.

Liz has some of these maps created by Public Lab’s citizen scientists on the walls of her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They are even more impressive online where you can zoom into the details: the ones from the Gulf Coast incident have 8000 pixels to cover the same area that would be captured in one single pixel in the daily MODIS satellite imagery provided by NASA. You can clearly see individual birds and plants and how the oil is making landfall, leaking through the barriers that were supposed to keep it out. In many areas these grassroots maps have actually been incorporated into Google Maps, giving them a real detail boost as they are a hundred times bigger in resolution.

The Gowanus Canal is just one of many examples of projects like this cropping up around the world. Public Lab conducts trainings and offers starter kits and free, open source software for people to use so that they can easily set up their own investigations and make maps in their own areas. (Our Associate Video Producer Solay Howell got to film one of those trainings in Brooklyn the day after our Gowanus adventure where they made solar balloons that require no helium.) Anyone can join, start conducting their own research, collaborate with others and add their findings to their Data Archive. Liz is particularly interested in increasing interchange between this data and open government data.

What a great example of OpenGov Championship: enabling citizens and governments to work together to gather data and put it to use to improve our own environments.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

“Create Open NY” is the fourth item on a list of prominent issues New York Governor Andrew Cuomo highlighted as part of his agenda to “Clean Up Albany” -- “a comprehensive plan for how to fix the State government” that he released in June 2011, seven months after taking office. Although most of the "Open NY" section targets how to use technology to process and make public the “staggering amounts of valuable information” (page 65) the state possesses in a data catalog, other parts of “Clean Up Albany” also indicate ambitious updates to ethics and disclosure laws and their enforcement.

It almost makes you think that Cuomo cares about government transparency...at least, as long as it doesn’t apply to his office.

According to recent media reports, the Cuomo administration is doing everything in its power to reduce the amount of valuable information about their operations to zero. The abuses listed include limiting staff communications to telephone chats and untraceable Blackberry messages (rather than FOI-able email, text, or instant messages) and reports about record destruction related to Cuomo’s service as state Attorney General. This kind of calculated, selective disclosure, if true, can not be tolerated.

Last we checked, the materials generated by state executives and their senior staff are just as relevant to the public as the data about budget spending and contracts talked about in Cuomo’s “Open NY” report. Retaining these email communications and archival materials provides vital insight into the process of governance -- not just the approved outcomes. Although requiring disclosure for the communications of top officials can be complicated, we’ve put to rest whether or not the public right to access these records exists -- and we’ve created appropriate restrictions to allow for confidentiality and security exemptions. In this context, the need to go a step further -- to not (just) lock up public records but to prevent their existence in the first place -- is extreme.

To be fair, the letter of the law gives Governor Cuomo a long leash: According to New York law, outside a few specified documents, the governor's office is only legally responsible for retaining what he deems “of sufficient value for preservation.” And, to his credit, Cuomo didn’t accept all the slack: On July 2, 2012, he released a record-keeping policy outlining the various categories of records dealt with by his office and timelines for retention (when applicable).

But writing policy doesn’t create a clean slate, nor does it grant license to avoid the constraints of said policy (let alone to flout open records laws already on the books). The best reporting to-date has covered Cuomo’s use of Blackberry PIN communication, a system that allows for email-sized communications to pass from one Blackberry to another without leaving a traceable footprint. Actual email is reportedly left for nonsubstantive communications between staffers. Cuomo himself never touches the stuff.

Although Cuomo’s spokesman would prefer to pass these operations off as “normal, standard offices practices” to ensure confidentiality, let’s get real. It’s “normal” to use email. Email is subject to disclosure under public records laws and Blackberry PIN messages are not -- and neither are telephone conversations and other communication mediums that leave no trace or record of their existence. The media has speculated as to the motive behind the decision to operate this way -- lessons learned as NY Attorney General, a looming 2016 Presidential bid -- but Cuomo’s motivation is irrelevant. One doesn’t just stumble into conducting official business via recordless operations. The decision to do so is calculated and is an obvious attempt to evade standard disclosure requirements. (Remember: We created exemptions in our open records laws for a reason.)

History isn’t supposed to be flattering. It’s supposed to reflect, to the best extent possible, the events as they happened. Executive records are essential for understanding how and why decisions were made and what was the context and working conditions in which discussions occurred. Sometimes these records reveal unsavory dealings. More often, they don’t. When emails from former Governor Sarah Palin were released to the public in June 2011, the wild scandals some people wanted to see just didn’t appear.

Palin’s emails were made public because, shortly after she was named a vice presidential candidate, various media organizations and individuals requested these records through Alaska’s public record law. Using those emails, Sunlight created a simple web tool -- Sarah’s Inbox -- that let you examine all the emails sent or received by Alaska’s 9th Governor in a familiar format.

It’s interesting to reflect that if the Cuomo administration continues to operate like a black hole, there will never be an Andrew’s Inbox.

“Open NY” is supposed to “use the power of digital information to bring about the beginnings of a new era of public participation in everyday governance” -- in other words, the opposite of the way the Cuomo administration operates. New Yorkers should demand more from their governor because, in his own words, “You can always have more transparency.”

“Guess Who’s Coming to TCamp12” is an mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. This week, we’ve highlighted Ohio advocate, Beth Sebian and Transparency International Slovakia’s Matej Kurian. Today, we bring you a few of the TransparencyCamp Scholars.

The TransparencyCamp Scholarship program was started as part of our 2011 Camp. It’s an application driven process that provides partial travel stipends for folks from around the country (and the world) to come to Washington, DC to join us for Camp. This year, we accepted 10 Scholars -- a mix of long-time and first-time opengov activists, developers, journalists, and thinkers. Like last year, we’ll do a round-up of the full list of Scholars post-Camp, but first, here’s a sneak peek at these awesome peeps:

Yvette Cabrera

Berkeley, California

Currently, Yvette interns with the Oakland Food Policy Council, blogging on topics like aquaponics, food policy, interesting events, and supporting the Council’s efforts in building partnerships and identifying key regional allies and decision-makers.

Think food policy has nothing to do with transparency? Think again. From the data held by government agencies like EPA, FDA, and USDA to having access to the meetings and records of government boards charged with setting local policy, those invested in food distribution, quality, and regulation have plenty of concerns that overlap with us transparency geeks. When asked why Yvette in particular wants to come to TransparencyCamp, she answers:

I want to learn about building transparency in the government on a national and local level in order to create a food system that is healthy and just for everybody. Transparency to me means efficiency and increased citizen participation in decision-making, and I think that is the only logical way to improving the current food system that we have here in the U.S.

Nuno Moniz

Porto, Portugal

Nuno is a civic hacker whose interests in open civic data have led him to work on a variety of different projects. His first was to open up the Portuguese State Budget, making it available in JSON. Using this information and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s “Bubble Tree” (a way to display interactive visualizations of spending data), Nuno went on to create visualizations for both the Portuguese 2012 State Budget and the Azorean 2012 Autonomous Region Budget.

Currently, Nuno is sinking his teeth into the meat of Portuguese legislative data. “For the last 6 months (and for the next 6 months) I've been working on my Master's Thesis: in a nutshell, I'm transforming three years of Portuguese Legislation's .PDFs into open data.” Knowing that the TransparencyCamp community is full of civic hackers from all over the world who work on legislative data and others who can provide help insight on the use and governing of this information, Nuno hopes to lead a session at TCamp about his work:

"Opening the Portuguese Legislation: What useful information lies in the documents?" was the name of the session I proposed [on Google Moderator]. As I said before, I've been working for the last months on an open legislation project. The objective of this session, besides sharing the project, its development status, and the "bumps along the way", would be to think what more information lies in the legislation texts. Which and what entities are present in those texts? People, Organizations? What do we gain by processing, discovering and interlinking that information and not just publishing its text? How could mapping that information add more transparency in the legislative process? Questions for the debate, and at the end, I hope, new and better ideas. :)

Dan Schneiderman

Rochester, New York

Dan says that he got into the world of opengov-ery because of his “passion for playing with big data and seeing how it can be used to help people.” Building off his experience at TCamp 2011, he hopes that TCamp 2012 will be an opportunity to explore new possibilities for future projects and how he can become involved with the transparency movement after he graduates.

To kick off this exploration, Dan plans to brings to TCamp the fruits of an independent study of government data he’s been working on using the javascript library D3. His study mashes up information from Data.gov, the Open States API, and a large collection (340,000!) of tweets relating to Super Tuesday that he scraped. Want to learn more? Find Dan’s session at TransparencyCamp.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Matej and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

• In Rhode Island, a public records law might get a much-needed revamp if a bill heard by the House Judiciary Committee this week becomes law. The proposal was introduced by Representative Michael Marcello and would be the first amendment to the state’s Public Records Act in 15 years. According to RI Future, the legislation would, “decrease the amount of time a public agency has to make public records available from ten to 7 days; require municipalities and government agencies to designate and train a public records officer; require police departments to make initial arrest reports available within 24 hours; and would make correspondences between elected officials regarding policy public documents.” Citizens in Rhode Island have had a difficult time of accessing public information in the past. Civil liberties and open government activists applauded the effort, hoping it would improve the state’s access to public records. “This may impose some additional burdens on government employees but it should be accepted as an important part of their work,” said Steve Brown, the executive director of the RI ACLU. For more information, see Bob Plain’s post.
• Members of the meet up group Open Government Chicago demoed some of the newest web-based applications created by local programmers. These apps utilize public data and could be helpful to Austin citizens. Some of the most interesting aps included Chicago Potholes, an app that “displays the open pothole requests on a city map” and MetroChicagoData.org, a  federated data site that makes it easy to “obtain datasets on one website instead of going to each level of government for the various sets of information.” For more of these exciting open government apps, see Ellyn Fortino’s post on Austin Talks.
• In a March 27, 2012 letter, Mercer County Prosecutor Joseph L. Bocchini, Jr. criticized the Trenton City Council  for failing to  make "available to the public written minutes of [Council] meetings for a substantial period of time." He maintained that meeting minutes should be made “promptly available'” to the public and  pointed out that a 1986 court decision defined "promptly available" as meaning within two weeks after the meeting. He asked that the council provide him  "with a timetable when minutes from past meetings will be complete and available to the public." John Paff of NJ Open Government Notes maintains, “ It's not often that a county prosecutor enforces the Open Public Meetings Act.  Bocchini's letter is refreshing and may help convince other prosecutors around New Jersey to take action on complaints about tardy disclosure of meeting minutes. “ For more on his take, see his post.
• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's aides are “clearly unhappy” with a poll that included what they say is a leading question on transparency. The question read, “Governor Andrew Cuomo and the leaders of the Senate Republican and Assembly Democratic majorities are being criticized for secrecy in negotiating major policy deals, then quickly voting at night on the measures. Do you think these closed-door negotiations were necessary to achieve major policy deals or not?” Subsequently, the governor had to  answer questions clarifying  his own definition of transparency,  which is mostly focused on traveling the state to explain his budget and agenda directly to voters. For the whole story see Nick Reisman’s post on Capital Tonight.

• After footage of a tense city council meeting  in West Branch, Iowa  was posted on YouTube, City Administrator Matt Mucker suggested a rule that would have required the public to secure mayoral permission to record meetings. This measure would would have violated the state’s open meetings law. After this breach of the law was pointed out to Mucker, he argued that would “ rewrite the rule to exempt the media.” Gregory Norfleet, editor of the West Branch Times, noted the law was not written for the media’s benefit.  “It’s for everybody,” he said. Furthermore, Mark Tomb, director of membership for the Iowa League of Cities, warns, “It is important to remember that nearly anyone can bring an action against the city for violating the Iowa Open Meetings Law. Each member who participated in the violation may be assessed damages of not more than $500 or not less than $100. These penalties increase to no more than $2,500 or no less than $1,000 when the member knowingly participated in the violation. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.” For the whole story, check out Matthew E. Marquardt’s post on North Iowa Today.
• After a disgruntled employee took to Facebook to air his grievances, Jackson, Mississippi  was forced to come up with a policy regarding social media and public entities. The city itself is now developing a policy. In the meantime, the fire department has released their own policy: “The Department’s memo encourages employees not to: publicly discuss issues that might be detrimental to the Department or that might conflict with the duties and ethics of a firefighter; to air personal grievances; and clarify that their opinions are their own and not those of the Department.”  According to Jennifer Peet of Local Open Government Blog,“ For public entities, the tool is useful for broadcasting to a growing Internet audience, but allowing feedback and conversation can be a risk. Like the Jackson Fire Department, every government entity will need to have a conversation about the inherent conflict between an individuals free speech rights and the government’s legitimate right to protect the government service.”