Recently fired state PR flack Debbie Crane spoke to the North Carolina Open Government Coalition the other day.
Among Crane’s insights:
Public officials should understand that it isn’t a matter of what Internet provider is being used to talk about public business. If it is public business, then it’s public record, whether it is sent on a Gmail, Roadrunner, Hotmail or state email account. Some officials believe that if they use a personal email account, then they aren’t creating public records. That’s clearly breaking public records law, and it is happening now with little consequence to the lawbreaker. Anyone using a personal email account to do public business should be required to report that use and to properly archive public business produced in that fashion. With the advent of personal digital assistants like Blackberries, more and more business is being done electronically and on the fly.
I’d add the wrinkle that when any of these services are paid for by the state, everything which transpires on them is a public record. One thing we need to start doing right now is benchmarking the email traffic on public accounts. That way if and when everyone understands that the email is an official record, a sudden drop off in volume would indicate that state business had merely been shuffled to “private” non-reporting networks.
