Sunshine Week: San Diego CityBeat Leads Effort To Create Online Transparency Tool
march 14, 2011 05:34 pm
In concert with
Sunshine Week,
San Diego CityBeat has collaborated with a local organization to launch
Open San Diego Flashlight, an online bookmark collection which makes government records and public databases more accessible.
The project
is being spearheaded by CityBeat reporter Dave Maass, who led similar efforts
in Tucson, Ariz. and
Santa Fe, N.M.
"With this new project for San Diego, the starting point is 248 links and growing every day,"
Maass writes. "Flashlight has the links categorized so that you can conveniently click a button to zip right to the relevant links, whether that's Census data, court records, lobbyist disclosures or parcel ownership."
Maass says that the project's goal is to empower members of the public to become watchdogs.
"The more eyes, the better," he says. "The more fish swimming through the data, the better."