This in yesterday from Ryan Ozawa, providing an update on the latest data on salaries of public employees.

Aloha all! Hope you had a most fulfilling (in all applicable ways) Thanksgiving holiday. Just wanted to let you know of the latest employee data release, and share a blog post I wrote following the argument between Civil Beat and the city as to whether police officer
names should be protected:

http://www.hawaiiweblog.com/2010/11/29/honolulu-city-salaries-civil-beat

Thanks to Larry (Geller, disappearednews.com) for helping me extract the data the city did provide!

Coming soon, OHA. You can review Civil Beat’s archive of correspondence for OHA’s argument over why some of its employees should be exempt, as well as the OIP’s response that they’re not. 🙂

The translation of the city data into a publicly accessible and downloadable spreadsheet is another great contribution, making the data available beyond the small community of Civil Beat paid subscribers. A big “thank you” to Ryan and Larry.

Still on the issue of public records and transparency…Check out this story–“Brace For The Post-WikiLeaks Information Big Chill“. The clamp-down on information disclosures is already underway, and I’m afraid its impact is going to extend far beyond that zone of internal agency sharing of sensitive information. This kind of backlash will naturally also be felt in areas that have traditionally been public. At least that’s my prediction. We’ll see.

But here’s another view, surprisingly from a Forbes Magazine blog by Adam Gordon, who puts Wikileaks into the context of other digital media, where sharing has gradually overcome protection schemes of all kinds.

As already evident, first response of the authorities will be to try to shore up the system. The Secret internet Protocol distribution (SIPDIS) electronic archive will disappear or be ushered behind much higher security, access clearances will be hiked, and tougher followup and penalties for official secrets violations will be enacted —to make it safe for diplomats to go back in the water. That is, back to the 19th Century gentlemanly art of a quiet word here, a confidential nudge there, far from the public gaze.

But electronic information cannot be contained, and to think that it can is to live stupid. We inhabit a world where the electronic machinations of diplomacy and national interest can be sent anonymously to a drop box at any time. If the forces of national interest close down the current actors and Web sites, others will open (broadly supported by the quality news media.) Digital capabilities cannot be withdrawn and the thought of an anonymous electronic drop box cannot be unthought.

The writing is on the wall, and it says: “This Writing is On Everyone’s Wall.”

So we should anticipate that the public going forward will have a much greater visibility into the diplomatic process no matter what diplomats want or think is best.

The issue for senior government leaders is to choose their response path. Do they, as expected, act furiously to preserve the past; or do they embrace the future of their sector and perhaps even exploit the possibilities in it? Not everything should be made public, that’s what “top secret” is for. But for the rest, bringing the public into a high-quality, two-way sense of what is being done in its name could bear fruit of real political grounding for diplomatic initiatives, therein greater legitimacy.

And another good contribution, “Open government in a Wikileaks world.”

I’d like to posit that phenomena such as Wikileaks are a symptom, rather than the disease itself. Wikileaks exists because of the failure of governments around the world to operate openly enough through out their his tory. Too much is done behind closed doors. Too much is done assuming a veil of confiden­tiality or secrecy without that need existing. Too little is done in public?—?diplo­macy, consultation, policy formation, sharing of knowledge, distribution of data containing social value.