activism and internet

In this week’s Honolulu Weekly, Ian Lind’s Honolulu Diary has a brief outline of some of the tools available to citizen activists for keeping up with state decision-making–everything from members of the Legislature to individual Commissions and Boards. Resources include the state calendar at www.hawaii.gov. And the campaign spending records at www.hawaii.gov/campaign/.

He also points out numerous problems:

“A check of the calendar last weekend listed meetings of the Land Use Commission on Maui on Thursday and Friday, February 7-8, with an agenda that included an item with staff recommendations regarding LUC’s position on land use bills pending at the Legislature. A quick check of the LUC’s own website, initially to see if more information about the agenda items might be available, turned up a notice that the Maui meetings have been canceled. Other agency meetings, such as the Board of Land and Natural Resources, are missing from the central calendar, and with well over 100 state boards and commissions, it’s difficult to know whether agencies ignore the main calendar or provide only the minimum six day notice required by law.”

The end result being, it seems to us, that while more information than ever is available via the internet to individual citizens, the system of posting and providing information on the web has a ways to go before it really meets its potential for making decision-making at the capitol truly accessible to the public it serves.