YES YES and YES: “Use sex to fight sexually transmitted diseases by redefining how people have sex. Instead of having a traditional information campaign or continuing to hand out condoms, actually arm people with a tool to be able to make informed decisions. Even better, give them a tool to allow them to do something they’re already doing, a little bit better. By encouraging people to make informed decisions with actual data, you’ll see them get laid more often while getting fewer STDs and getting tested more frequently5. And, most importantly, it requires essentially no change in current behavior.”

There’s really something about the attitudes that people have that really gets to me, on one occasion I remember hearing of people who respond to MGDPA requests talking about how there are some requests that “we don’t like to process” (this might have been someone at Minneapolis City Hall, or MPD). I personally interacted with one person at the U of M while developing a website that informed me when I asked about making certain types of data available on their website (just trying to be helpful!) that they really didn’t like having those things so easily available.

It seems like there’s work to be done even with people who understand what FOIA and MGDPA are. I guess I wonder, is it really education that will make these people less defensive, or do weird views like these just need a little more sunshine to fix them up nice and good?

I think two changes would be helpful: training for government employees on the requirements of sunshine laws (i.e., the questions I asked in the Planning Council meetings should not have stumped anyone, every public employee should know the name of their Data Practices Compliance Official and Responsible Authority), and more enforcement of those laws.

The fact that a public employee attempted to take action against me for making a MGDPA request is absurd. That is time and energy spent on trying to discipline someone (for exerting rights allowed by law) when they should have been responding to the request and moving forward. A better understanding of the utility of sunshine laws, as well as an understanding of what happens when you willfully violate them, would have prevented that from occurring.

I also think that more information being made available on the internet would also encourage more openness. If public bodies were able to point to all the information that’s public, then it would put elected/appointed officials in a completely different mindset. It wouldn’t just be a hypothetical… so, there’d be no way a public official could assume they have an undue level of privacy.

Those are just a few of my thoughts — I’d love to hear if you have any ideas about this also…?

Information only comes when the public has access to data, and that can only occur when the government is compelled (willfully or legally) to provide it.

First off, a thousand times yes. Second: everything you’ve documented here sort of shows that even with compelling laws, there are certain attitudes amongst public servants that are basically negative toward open data. I guess what I’d want to know is what can be done to change this attitude? Previous encouragement (having laws, hoping that maybe people will see the light that open records are a positive thing) seems to not work for some people– do there need to be more penalties for those obstructing public processes, or what?

Figuring out a way to promote responsible sexual practices would ultimately benefit everyone, and not just from an HIV standpoint. Unfortunately, that’s not very simple either … and would require our society to move past our “moral” hangups.