Good and bad news for Colorado open records and open data this session, and also a "good" reminder about working for open data through other channels.
Good news: HB 16-1368 passed! I know, does that sound exciting or what? No, if you'll remember, that was the bill addressing the operation of the Colorado State Archives. You can read the whole confusing mess, from the draft submission, to the votes, to the amendment, to the report of it passing the House and Senate, through the General Assembly's website. (The website is terrible; you have to be sure to go to the drop-down in the middle of the page, where it says "select bill range" and choose "House Bills 1351-1400" and click "Go" to get to the page where you can access all the relevant PDFs.
So that is excellent news! The Archives' just-passed bill did not fix everything (like emails), but it did smooth out a lot of processes and invest the Archives with more capacity to make decisions pertaining to records management, cutting down the bureaucratic maze that used to be part of the records management process. That means more product with less time, and thus money, wasted. Clearly more improvements are needed (e-records!), but this bill was an important step in the right direction, for enabling the State Archives to function more efficiently and to regain some control over the state records for which they are responsible.
But one hand giveth and the other taketh away, so now for bad news: I feel like Rocky Mountain PBS News' article's headline pretty much sums it up: Colorado Legislature Mostly Misses in Improving Government Transparency. It's particularly disappointing with reference to the Judicial branch: notice anything funny about the sentence "State courts have ruled that Colorado’s judicial branch is not covered by CORA[...]?" That's right: "We decided that we are not subject to the law." You can't exactly blame them, but you can blame the other branches of government (particularly the legislative) for not doing their job of checking-and-balancing. But kudos to Sen. John Kefalas (D-Fort Collins) for sponsoring SB 16-037, which attempted to bring up-to-date at least some of the CRS' treatment of digital/e-records. It sounds like Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition is continuing to work on similar compromise legislation for next session, so hopefully that will continue to move forward.
And here's a reminder: even though the legislature is, in many ways, dragging its feet about open records and freedom of information, some other branches of the government are really doing their best to make data available. First and foremost among these is GoCodeColorado, which operates out of the office of the Secretary of State. They run a neat coding challenge annually (hopefully next year I will have advanced enough in programming to participate!). What's particularly interesting and relevant to open data, however, is that the coding challenge involves use of publicly-available government data sets. It's different from open government records, obviously, but also similar. So because GoCodeColorado has an interest in having these data sets available for their coding challenge, they have been working with a number of other agencies to get those agencies' data sets up and freely available, as well as finding and linking to other data sets through nonprofits and the like. So it's a great program, and you should definitely check it out!
Also, shouts-out to OpenColorado (which doesn't look particularly active right now?) and Colorado Data Engine.
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