On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 11:40:32AM +0100, Nick Landau wrote:
> OK, Tony - how do you propose to do this. It is difficult enough within 
> one's own organisation. What does "everything" mean?
> Really I am asking what in practice "everything" means?

Absolutely everything that would be released if requested should be
pro-actively published.

> Given that different departments in a large organisation are in charge of 
> their own organisation how do you propose enforcing this? And individuals 
> within the departments ditto.

I'm not suggesting that it be compulsory to do this, I'm merely setting
out what best practice should be. 

> How do you make sure that the information is uptodate?

All information should be dated. Working out whether the version you're
currently looking at is up to date is a more difficult problem for the
end user, but that's orthogonal to the publication issue, and is already
an issue on most government sites that publish any historic information
(such as minutes).

> Are we talking about every piece of work that everyone in an organisation 
> produces. Just the final version?

Once a piece of work is circulated in any way internally that should
trigger its publication. (It doesn't have to be instantaneous, but at
whatever point the final version becomes 'releasable' the drafts should
too).

> Contents management etc should improve the working of the organisation so 
> that there is a record of where everything is - but I would contend that 
> what you are suggesting - and I am not quite sure what you are - would mean 
> that organisations would spend more time publishing than carrying on the 
> work of the organisation.

They shouldn't need to spend any time on it; it should all just happen
automatically. There are already tools used to archive all emails that
flow through an organisation, for example; many companies must keep
these records under various laws. For government these archives should
be open to all. This is the same for all types of document management
and storage solutions.

Obviously this can't happen overnight, and there are lots of little
details that would need to be worked out (how to mark that a document
falls under an exemption and shouldn't be published etc.), but I'm
talking about the long term here. 


Short term, there is still lots more than could and should be done
within existing systems. The most common request I make of my local
council is for copies of reports referred to in monthly council meetings.

About 50% of the time the report is already attached to the archived
minutes, (my council is already much better many of than the others
in region in this regard) but the rest of the time the minute just
reads something like "The Head of Some Division presented a report on
such and such and, after some/much/heated discussion, the contents were
noted and the actions were approved". 

They have already had to do the work of gathering the material to
provide to the councillors and council staff attending the meeting
(almost always in electronic format already), and release it really
quickly on request, so I see no reason why all papers referred to in the
minutes can't be published with the minutes as a matter of course.

That way I wouldn't need to make so many requests (with the apparent
danger of being classed as vexatious!)



Tony

PS there's an interesting opinion piece by ex-president Jimmy Carter in
today's Washinton Post championing the case of FoI:
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/02/AR2006070200674.html

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