Virginia Shines in the Digital Counties Competition

Virginia localities did well in the most recent edition of the Center for Digital Government’s Digital Counties Awards. In the 250,000-499,000 population category Chesterfield County, Virginia came in first and Loudoun County, Virginia second. In the 150,000 to 249,999 population category Hannover County, Virginia won and Roanoke County, Virginia was fifth. In the over 500,000 population category Fairfax County, Virginia came in tied for seventh and in the less than 150,000 population category Franklin County, Virginia came in third and Albermarle County, Virginia came in fifth.

Access in the Courts

It was a busy week in the courts last week for access to government records, and I’m not even talking about the release on Wikileaks of tens of thousands of classified documents related to the war in Afganistan.
Right here in Virginia, three cases in varying stages of litigation were bright on the access horizon.

Read more from the Virginia Coalition for Open Government

A New Way to Track Financial Influence on Elected Officials

A new tool from the Sunlight Foundation embeds campaign finance information right into online news stories. Poligraft automatically exposes financial relationships between people and organizations, a function that would have required deep journalistic digging just a few years ago.

Read more from the Atlantic.

Sunshine Report, August 2010

The latest from the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.