Status update on open government and social media

by Steve Earley

When North Carolina's Public Records Law received its last major update in 2005, Facebook still hadn't graduated from college and Twitter hadn't even been hatched. Today both social media tools are regularly used by state government employees.

"The technology's kind of outpaced the law," said Will Polk, deputy general counsel for Gov. Beverly Purdue.

Expect the pace to only quicken.

Philips Wood, a new media press aide for the Democratic governor, said social media have proven an effective way of communicating with younger citizens, who he said are becoming harder to reach through traditional outlets. His boss has accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

Proving bipartisanship isn't dead, House Republican leader Paul "Skip" Stam has also embraced social media, although his Twitter feed, Facebook page and blog are political vehicles not used for legislative business, and therefore not subject to open records law, according to Chad Barefoot, who maintains the accounts. Barefoot said that as the minority party, Republicans "don't get all the press that we deserve." Social media, he said, let them bypass mainstream media and talk directly to voters.

Social media's rapid ascension doesn't necessarily mean that existing public records law can't accommodate status updates, tweets and whatever comes next. One of the law's strengths, the North Carolina Open Government Coalition's Dale Harrison said, is that it does not attempt a laundry list of communication tools.

"Absent poor decisions by public officials," said Harrison, Assistant Director of the coalition's Sunshine Center at Elon University, "what the law says is that any communication involving the carrying on of public business is considered a public record." (Personnel files, security plan details, trial preparation materials and trade secrets are among some of the exceptions.)

Without a public accounting of official deliberations, it would be difficult for citizens to meaningfully participate in the political process. They can't comment on a debate they don't know about and they can't evaluate a decision if they don't know what led to it.

Logging phone calls and office memos has long been a part of this accounting. If it's to be considered complete, logging newer, sometimes less formal seeming exchanges needs to become just as routine.

Pointing to the speed of both technological change and of political turnover, stakeholders said that educating officials of these new responsibilities is paramount.

"Education is probably more important than rewriting laws," Harrison said.

Polk, the deputy general counsel, also advocated education. Asked what social media questions his office fields most, he said users weren't familiar enough with the technology to be asking many nuanced questions. Mostly, he said, people are seeking general guidance on how to get up and running.

That social media are so new in a way makes things easier on teachers like Polk. Their pupils are yet to develop bad habits.

To help state workers develop good habits, the governor's office, state information technology officials and state archivists put together a social media handbook (pdf). The eight-page document, published in December, outlines best practices for the use, security and preservation of social media messages.

It states that communications sent and received by state employees are public record and instructs officials to check "public" for all privacy settings. Officials can manually archive messages or automate the process using software from the Department of Cultural Resources.

How long a record stays archived is determined by broader public records rules. More substantive messages are subject to prescribed retention schedules, some requiring records to be kept forever, others for three or five years.

Communications considered less substantive may be removed much sooner. Harrison said that parties creating the records have too much discretion over what falls into this category.

For instance, records with "extremely limited value" can be deleted as soon as those generating them no longer find them useful. E-mail guidelines list notes like "Call me when you return to your office." and "Can you meet on Thursday?" as examples of such records, but leave it relatively open as to what else these could include.

"You get some abuses of the law where e-mails are deleted right away when they ought to be retained," Harrison said. He considers this area one of the weakest parts of the state's open government laws, which typically rank somewhere in the middle of the pack when their effectiveness is compared with other states'.

The degree to which governments have embraced social media is less closely tracked, but the Perdue administration has to be among the leaders. Its social media handbook is as much policy paper as manual, calling social networks "a hallmark of vibrant and transparent communications" and encouraging all state agencies to join them.

That North Carolina officials are learning social media sooner than a lot of their national peers should benefit the relative openness of their government as the new tools become more widely embraced.

While citizens who track public officials on social media might be known as followers, true to the pull-not-push nature of new media, to a large extent, they are leading officials into this new frontier. Perdue alluded to this in remarks to local government managers earlier this month, suggesting that the modern ubiquity of information heightens expectations of transparency.

"In this kind of day and age, everybody understands that the work you do and I do is public business," she said, according to The Herald-Sun. "There is no 'behind closed doors.' There are no more dinners. All of that is history. We live in a different time."