Crunch time for Open Missouri

David Herzog, 2010-2011 Fellow

These next few months will be busy here in Open Missouri-land.

Mizzou J-School master's students who are working on the project will be stepping up their efforts to collect inventories of databases held offline by state government agencies.

How's that going, you ask? It depends on the agency.

Some, such as the Missouri Ethics Commission, have happily told us about the public data they collect. So give them a  gold star for openness; the commission clearly gets its obligation to the public. Gold stars go to the departments of Conservation and Natural Resources; both of them provided detailed information in the spring, during a pre-Open Missouri pilot run. 
Other agencies say they're working on compiling the information. We're learning that many agencies lack internal inventories of their databases and need to create them for us. The Missouri Secretary of State's office has a set of records retention schedules for state agencies that's crazy detailed, but there's nothing specific about electronic records. Which is a bummer.