Tag Archives: Public Records

4/21/2010: President Lariviere is apparently going to implement a system whereby all faculty will have access to the BANNER accounting system, and he is going to remove authority over public records requests from Melinda Grier and Doug Park’s office, and give it to the UO Archivist or to Media Relations. This will be a huge step forward in restoring trust and faith in the administration. Which will make this blog pretty boring.

The other news of course is that Lariviere has begun sending the tuition money from all our new students back to the academic departments, to use for hiring, raises, etc. Last time UO got new tuition money Dave Frohnmayer gave it to VP Frances Dyke, who spent it remodeling Johnson Hall. Which meant we didn’t meet federal expectations on research spending, so we lost millions more in ICC money.

I am beginning to think Lariviere may be the person to turn UO into the university it should be, and that’s pretty damn exciting.

4/14/2010: From Insidehighered.com

Controversy is growing over an invitation by the foundation of California State University at Stanislaus to Sarah Palin. Jerry Brown, the attorney general of California, is starting an investigation into the foundation and whether it is appropriate for it to use funds to bring the former vice presidential candidate to campus, the Los Angeles Times reported. Meanwhile, students say they have found in a trash bin shredded documents — which the university failed to turn over to legislative committees — about the visit. Brown said his inquiry would include the issue of the documents’ authenticity and — if they are real — how they ended up in the trash.

11/11/2009: CJ Ciaramella has an article in the ODE on a motion in the UO Senate that would set up a process for a faculty committee to review public records requests, if the UO General Counsel’s office delays or otherwise obstructs them. There is more in Peter Gilkey’s extremely well organized and transparent UO Senate pages.

Click here for a link to Carl Malmud‘s 10/23/2009 talk on Open Government – courtesy of the UO Libraries. Or here for his 10/22/2009 talk at Lewis and Clark Law School. (UO’s video is higher quality, and open source.) This guy gives a great talk!

Should America’s Operating System Be Open Source?
Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org
Friday, October 23 at 11Am, Studio A, Knight Libraries
(Enter through STEM door on the RHS of the library).

Who owns the law? A thicket of copyright restrictions has arisen around the primary legal materials of the United States. Statutes, regulations, hearings, Attorney General Opinions, building codes, and the other materials that make up the raw materials of democracy all face restrictions. In this talk, Carl Malamud will look at the question of who owns the law, tracing the issues back to early Supreme Court decisions, looking at how the law of the law has been applied in the modern era, and will pay particular attention to a set of issues regarding ownership of the law in Oregon.

Carl Malamud is the President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has been instrumental in placing over 90 million pages of primary legal materials on the Internet. They were in the lead in the effort last year to convince the Oregon Legislative Committee to waive copyright on the Oregon Revised Statutes, and have been particularly at the federal level, conducting audits of PACER, helping the Government Printing Office publish the Federal Register in XML, and convincing C-SPAN to waive restrictions on use on their footage of government proceedings. Malamud was previously Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress, and prior to that created the Internet Multicasting Service – which ran the first radio station on the Internet, and put the SEC and U.S. Patent Office on the Internet.

9/19/2009: From openuporegon.com:

Carl Malamud has now sent Oregon Attorney General Kroger this letter, stating that he has posted the Oregon Public Records manual online for free access. He also tells Kroger he will soon do the same for several of the other law manuals that the DOJ trys to sell, including the Administrative Law Manual, Public Contracts Manual, and Core Mediation Training Manual. Malamud’s letter to Kroger says:

… I’m sure you will agree that “the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or statute.” Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244, 253 (1888).

Malamud’s work is described in this NY Times story. His efforts to “make public law public” are funded by the Omidyar Foundation (ebay) and endorsed by Larry Lessig – one of Kroger’s old law professors at Harvard. These are serious people – if they weren’t, could they afford to boast that they are endorsed by the “Great Seal“?

9/17/2009: According to this post at openuporegon.com, and this and this, a UO Professor is in trouble with Oregon Attorney General John Kroger, for illegally posting a copyrighted version of the “Oregon Attorney General’s Public Records and Meetings Manual.” Now slashdot.org, a hotbed of open source information and activism, has put up a post. Last I looked there were 200 comments, and multiple mirrors of the illegal manual. When the open source guys decide your information should be public, it will be public.

7/9/2009: The Commentator and the Emerald are writing about Pres Lariviere’s blog (which is actually run by UO staffer Tim Beltran). It’s a little too slick for our taste Tim – but maybe we’re just jealous of that fine Borsalino. Still wouldn’t hurt to post some documents – feel free to borrow any of our pdf’s – here’s a good one. Before long people are going to want to see content – and we’re not talking video. Hey – we linked to you, netiquette now requires you to link back to UO Matters.

Oregon Attorney General John Kroger may – eventually – make good on his campaign promises to improve enforcement of public records law. UO has been notoriously bad at providing public access. One of the reasons we started this blog was to make the records Melinda Grier tried to hide public.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – Attorney General John Kroger says he’ll review Oregon’s open government laws to see whether they’re being applied correctly and whether he should recommend changes to the Legislature. Kroger says Oregonians tell him they value transparency in government, but he hears from journalists that it’s gotten more difficult to get public records. Oregon open government laws date to 1973. Critics say they’ve been weakened by exceptions the Legislature has approved, narrow interpretations from state lawyers, agency foot-dragging, and high fees charged to prepare data for release. Kroger met Tuesday with journalists in Portland. He says the review will be lengthy and include a look at laws in other states.
Associated Press – July 7, 2009 4:15 PM ET

Also see this Editorial. Meanwhile, the UO Senate is ahead of the curve, having passed Nathan Tublitz’s transparency motion, calling on UO to start providing open access to accounting documents.