Public Notices Going Online, Not In Newspapers

An anonymous reader tips a story up on Bnet.com about the growing trend for governments and others to eschew newspapers and post notices of public record on their own Web sites. It's under discussion at local, state, and national government levels, including in the SEC and the states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so far. "If classified ads were a backbone of the newspaper business, then the very center of the spine was the public notice. Mandated by laws and courts, these often long recitations of detail were to give official notification, to any who were interested, of the legal intents and actions of both government entities and companies that found themselves under some appropriate regulation. But a growing number of state and local governments want to move public notices online to their own sites as a cost-cutting measure. Beyond newspaper economics, critics are concerned that the shift would allow government officials to effectively hide their activities from scrutiny."

Comments

"Hide"?

[John Hasler]

Sounds like a remarkably ineffective way to hide anything. Google "public notice"+site:.gov . Should be rather simple to set up publicnotices.org (or .com) if you are worried that such notice will be "hidden".

Publishing in the Pierce County Herald, on the other hand...

Re:"Hide"?

[iluvcapra]

Should be rather simple to set up publicnotices.org (or .com) if you are worried that such notice will be "hidden"

Until the government entity takes down the notice the next day, or rewords it and claims that it was always the reworded way.

A 3rd-party aggregator could defeat this problem by watching the government sites and capturing all the notices, but you won't know if the aggregator has good information... A way you could know a government disclosure was accurate is if a government entity published public keys and signed all of its disclosures. But this already seems too complicated for the average news reporter, let alone the average citizen, who's more likely to a digital signature a "hacker tool."

Good elements and bad elements.

[JoshuaZ]

The concern here seems reasonable. Local government websites are some of the most poorly designed and hardest to navigate. I could easily see this resulting in problems not out out of malice but out of simple incompetence. Presumably regulations and guidelines should be drafted for how governments should do this. The most obvious thing is that there must be actual incoming links not hidden by either nofollow tags or anything in the robots.txt file to prevent search engine indexing. Also, there needs to be guaranteed backups and permanent searchable archives (which will in some ways make this more transparent than tiny, non-searchable notices in local newspapers). There are probably other simple rules that would be needed but those are the ones that come to mind most immediately.

Re:Good elements and bad elements.

[snsh]

I manage a local government .GOV website, and am probably part of the problem. Our main publication path for hearing/meeting notices is a Trumba webcalendar. They also get emailed to neighborhoods, but those lists don't have too many subscribers. Sometimes we get last-minute changes or cancellations, and we lack a tool to formally track those changes.

Worse, it's the government clerks and lawyers who actually author the meeting notices. And they will always tend to post the bare-minimum that they have to. They will post something short like "zoning board meeting. agenda: variance for 10 Elm Street" and leave out the part about how the zoning variance is for building a nuclear reactor at 10 Elm Street. They are not interested in transparency, but in disclosing only what they have to. If they advertise more, they are inviting trouble from pesky constituents against the government leaders who called for the hearing, so they don't do that.

We only recently started posting details/documents along with the meeting notices for our legislative body. One problem is that we had to develop both an internal app and webapp to organize and manage those documents. We have staff to develop that, but I'm not sure how a really small government (like a town with 5000 people) would cope. It would be nice if state government developed tools that local governments could use, but I doubt that's going to happen

I think the solution for smaller local/county governments will have to come from state and federal governments to develop tools for smaller governments to use. I'm not aware of any killer FOSS applications for tracking legislative issues, hearings, meetings, and such. The software tool just does not there.

Re:Good elements and bad elements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 60s (70s?) My grandparents had the government dig them a lake and stock it with fish so they could use it for their drinking water. The stipulation: advertise the fact the lake was there and stocked with fish. Their solution: Advertise in the chicago tribune. They had a small farm about 25 miles southeast of st louis. Like anybody seeing that ad would drive all the way down there for a small lake and fishing. Sounds like something similar.

Re:How to easily catch changes in pages

[Kligat]

To clarify, this works best on pages that Internet Archive would miss--pages that use robot.txt, or that update enough for Internet Archive to miss between scans. I don't know of any feature that highlights changes between versions, but if you have both versions scrolled down at the same point, your eye should catch a difference in spacing that will lead you to the right place.

When the Internet has nearly 100% saturation...

[illumnatLA]

When the broadband internet is treated like a utility and everyone, including deep rural dwellers has relatively easy access to it then government can take post their 'public' notices online.

As it stands right now a good percentage of the population still do not have reasonable access to the internet or are not tech savvy enough to own a computer (i.e. many of the elderly). They should not be punished for their lack of internet access by removing public government notices from newspapers which are still easily accessible by anyone.

Re:Which method would get the most dissemination?

[Dayze!Confused]

There was a problem when I was growing up with the "local" newspaper and public notices. They had to hit a certain number of subscribers in order to count as having put out a public notice, so they gave away their newspaper to the people that lived furthest away, others closer to town paid about $0.35. It was comprised of about 70% public notices. The whole purpose of the paper was for companies to have a small paper that no one reads that meets the requirements for public notice so they can build on protected lands and other such things.

publicnotice.gov?

[DavidD_CA]

Why doesn't the government set up a specific website, such as publicnotice.gov, and require the use of that?

Governments all over are already using internet web services such as BidSync to post their bids in lieu of other methods for public notice.

I'd much rather have a single website to review than classified ads which may never make it online.

Maybe there's a more elegant solution to my 5-second thought above, but we can't keep using local newspapers. It's practically a monopoly-type service for newspapers (public notices run about $200 or more in a small city because there is no competition), and one that will soon fall apart when these organizations die.

It's a good thing if done right, like EDGAR.

[Animats]

This is a good thing, but it has to be done right. Like the SEC's EDGAR system.

EDGAR now has a user-friendly interface and a search engine, but underneath is a huge collection of raw SGML files accessible via FTP. These files stay up forever and their names and contents do not change. Many big services (Bloomberg, EDGAR Online, Google, etc.) grind through that data every day. One of my systems, Downside, does it too. There's no charge for access, bulk downloads are supported, and the raw filings are accessible. That's the way it should work.

What you don't want is something you can only access through a search engine, with some of the information on a pay site. A bad example is Delaware's corporate record system.

So the minimum standards for a public records system that replaces publication should be comparable to those maintained by EDGAR.