Shelby Sebens
Northwest Watchdog
Washington is sunnier than Oregon – when it comes to government transparency.
Washington fares better than its neighbor in terms of making data publicly available, according to an evaluation of state legislatures’ websites compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, an open government advocacy non-profit organization. In honor of Sunshine Week earlier this month, a national movement aimed at the importance of open government, the Sunlight Foundation graded state legislatures on how open they are with their data. Washington rose above other states, getting an A while Oregon is just average, getting a C.
The grading focused on six criteria: completeness, timeliness, ease of access, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence. Ore-gon was marked down on timeliness because the state updates its data online weekly.
“Legislative information is most relevant when it happens, and many states are publishing information in real time.” according to a post by the Sunlight Foundation in explaining the grading process. “Unfortunately, there are also states where updates are more infrequent and showing up days after a legislative action took place. States were dinged if data took more than 48 hours to go online.”
Oregon was average in every other category except permanence where it scored high, meaning the data is available in a permanent location and dates back a reasonable amount of time, according to the organization.
Washington scored better than most states in timeliness, machine readability and permanence.
The Sunlight Foundation gave out mostly Cs (8 As, 11 Bs, 20 Cs, 6 Ds, and 6 Fs).
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