Use this page to describe articles you'd like to see written or add links to articles you have written on hot button issues, complex questions, emerging concerns, gray areas, and controversies in the sunshine community.

We're interested in collaboratively building a list of transparency reforms to suggest to cities, counties, school districts and state agencies.

Examples:

• Open Records and the red/blue divide. Hopefully, the question of access to public documents will always be non-partisan, but sometimes human nature gets in the way. We are offering a new award to those citizen activists able see beyond party lines: Margaret Fell Honorees. Do you know of some one that deserves the honor? Let us know.

• Where do Adoption Records fit into the world of public access to records? There are many individuals out there campaigning both for and against making adoption records readily available to the public.

• Public Employee Salaries: An issue that has gotten a lot of people's attention is that of access to state salary databases. A newspaper in New Jersey has filed a request for municipal salary data. Even California (where there are hundreds of exemptions to public records access) the courts have ruled that the public has a right to know details of public payrolls.

• Public records vs. personal information. Is identity theft a real threat that public records carry? Some genealogists chime in on the question.

• Why the December 2006 new Rules of Federal Procedure apply to you. The Center for Digital Government published this paper (link to the pdf) relating to the question.

• Shades of Gray, a blog by David Murray about communication issues in personal and business life, offers two interesting conversations about transparency: Sensible Translucency and one more thing about transparency.

• Declassification & Reclassification: once a document has been opened, must it stay that way?
  • Is Scrooge plotting against Santa? Government says it's a secret

• When government employees use private email addresses on government computers, should those emails be FOIAable? what have different courts said? When email violates open meeting laws The Tacoma school district in Washington is running into this issue, written up in the News Tribune here: Milligan’s records from his review become a bit of a mystery. (July 13, 2007)

• Should demonstrably private emails (for example, regarding affairs of the heart) be FOIAable? Different courts have ruled differently. Maverick's opinion here.

• To what extent should concealed carry permits be FOIAable?

• Nice mainstream press sunshine advocates versus pesky malcontent citizen sunshine advocates. Do our interests and incentives coincide or diverge?

• Are agencies FOIAable that are partially or entirely funded by tax dollars (perhaps because they receive all or most of the their funding from one or more government agencies) but are registered as private corporations? See our page on Private organizations funded by government dollars for links and discussions of this cutting-edge concern.

• Genealogy and Public Records