The House Judiciary Committee today unanimously voted to advance a bill that would remove the sunset provision in Hawaii’s so-called “Journalist Shield Law,” otherwise known as Act 210 (HB2557) from the 2008 Legislative session. The law gives the press (“journalists and newscasters”) some protections against being forced to reveal sources or unpublished information gathered in [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Government'
Journalist Shield Law Extension Advances
February 22nd, 2011 · 1 Comment · Blogs, Government, Media, Politics
Tags: journalism·Media·shieldlaw
City Salaries and Civil Beat
November 29th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Government
Today, Honolulu Civil Beat continued its coverage of government transparency and public worker salaries with its latest data set: employees of the City & County of Honolulu. As in the past, the data isn’t entirely easy to access, so as before, a friend has helped me make most of it freely available. But what may be [...]
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Adventures in Open Data
September 14th, 2010 · 13 Comments · Government, Hawaii, Technology, The Web
Local news startup Civil Beat today posted a piece on the names and salaries of state House and Senate members and staff. As before, they posted a watermarked PDF on Slideshare with the download feature disabled, and invited people to become “full members” to use their searchable database. But if you’d like to download and [...]
Tags: civilbeat·opendata·publicdata·publicinformation·publicrecords
Hawaii Roads Ranked Among Worst in Nation
September 5th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Government, Hawaii, Travel
“State highway conditions are the best they’ve been in 19 years,” proclaims the Reason Foundation in its 19th Annual Highway Report. Unfortunately, the Aloha State was ranked 47th overall, ahead of only California, Alaska, and Rhode Island. In fact, while Hawaii — perhaps unsurprisingly — has the fewest state-controlled highway miles (1,005 miles, versus 80,214 [...]
Data Request Denied, Now Plan B
September 2nd, 2010 · 50 Comments · Government, Media, Technology, The Web
I had a nice conversation this afternoon with Marie Laderta, director of the state Department of Human Resources Development, in response to my request to secure the same data her office prepared for Civil Beat (and which Civil Beat hid behind its paywall). She was professional, articulate, and demonstrated that she understood the background and [...]
Tags: access·civilbeat·data·government·information·publicdata
Hawaii Government Sites Earn National Acclaim
September 1st, 2010 · 3 Comments · Government, Hawaii, Technology, The Web
Two Hawaii e-government initiatives received national recognition for excellence today. The Center for Digital Government announced the latest Digital Government Achievement Awards and the Best of the Web Awards. The state’s eBench Warrant system received a Digital Government Achievement Award in the Government-to-Government category. Meanwhile, the official site for Maui County took 4th Place in [...]
