Have you heard of theSunshine Review?
It's a non-profit organization that rates the websites -- more than 6,000 so far -- of state and local governments for how transparent and helpful they are to residents.
Quite simply: is your government website adequately serving your needs?
Next American City editor Julia Ramey Serazio helpfully pointed out this week that the Sunshine Review recently relaunched its own website in a wiki format -- to boost community and indeed make it easier to find the information they offer, including grades for counties, cities, school district and state agencies, as well as the salaries of public officials.
You know, all the helpful information that's already in the public domain, yet oddly often impossible to find online. (Where you're actually looking for it.)
It's a tragic irony that in such a digital age, information transparency is so difficult to achieve.
After all, how can you accurately asses your city's government without the data to back it up?
Among the things that the Sunshine Review takes into consideration for its grades:
The umbrella term for this transparency is called "Open Government" or "Government 2.0," simply defined as the use of telecommunications to improve governance by making all this information much easier to access -- internally and externally.
The theory: with a publicly-accessible website, information can be posted in a centralized place, reducing the cost of individual requests often required to be made in person. Plus, simplified systems internally should save money and boost efficiency.
(Eagle-eyed SmartPlanet readers know that we often cover this subject on the Business Brains blog -- because government is, in many ways, a big business.)
Unfortunately, theory is often not practice, and Sunshine Review has issued failing grades to many states and counties.
For example:
How does your town, city or state stack up?
Related on SmartPlanet:
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com