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The devil is always in the details. The most recent skirmish between secrecy and transparency waged by Council members Bynum and Kawahara define three main goals on kauaiinfo.org. They are:
- Goal # 1 - Allow all Councilmembers to place
items on the Council agenda for consideration.
- Goal # 2 - Make key public documents
readily available to the public on the County's web site.
- Goal # 3 - Circulate Council Service
documents equitably to all Council embers in a timely manner.
Goal #2 "make key public documents readily available to the public on the County web site is laudable but not sufficient. These documents should also not only be accessible (readily available) but useful as well. By useful I mean the ability to efficiently copy and paste portions of the document from the website into another document. Let's say a citizen wants to submit testimony on an upcoming issue. In the preparation of such testimony it would be nice to copy and paste quotes from the county document into the citizen's testimony (as opposed to having to retype everything). Retyping takes time and mistakes can and are made. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just cut and paste such quotes into your testimony? Of course it would. It would be much faster and with have less tyops.
Imagine Goal #2 became law. What if (heaven forbid) there were people in government who wanted to limit citizen participation, and yet had to comply with the Goal # 2. Here' is a road map to create a dilatory process to limit citizen participation:
- print out a hardcopy of the document, and
- scan it into the computer as an image file, then
- convert that image file to a PDF file, and
- upload it to the internet
The result of this process would be a PDF file containing a nontext searchable, non-text copyable and non-pastable PDF document which citizens could access (look at), while still making it very difficult for citizen's use in the creation of testimony .
Conspiracy theory? paranoia? Not at all. I didn't create this dilatory process out of whole cloth and suit suit up a evil government strawman bent on preventing citizen participation. Unfortunately such a scenario has been, and is deployed daily in many sectors of Hawaii State government. Need proof? check these links:
Yes, there are other ways to keep citizens hunting and pecking as a barrier to citizen participation, such as password protecting a document, and requiring a password to cut or paste paste, but the process articulated above serves to show the extent and amount of work government functionaries will do in an effort to prevent (or at least make difficult) citizen participation in government.
I hope Councilmembers Bynum and Kawahara will flesh-out Goal #2 to prevent the dilatory tactics already deployed by other government sectors to circumvent the intent of their laubable struggle for citizen transparency and access.
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