I would have liked to have time to draft up these changes myself, but alas, I haven’t found the time yet. That said (these are pretty much just the changes I mentioned in my last post, which I guess nobody has opposed but also nobody has really voiced support for):
Upon further reflection, “the institution which makes the decision to take deliberate action or inaction” is kind of vague. I think an ‘order of precedence’ has grown on me as an alternative formulation.
I lifted the “inner working area” language from the current Sunshine Act but don’t love it. What do you call a working area accessible to multiple institutions? I am starting to think it’s cleaner to just refer to deliberate public action or inaction.
I’ll happily leave it to you, I was just trying to keep the ball rolling!
Alternatively, just say that any inner working area has to normatively belong to a specific institution. So, for example, the JSR would normatively belong to the CRS, even though Cabinet/CitComm are in there as well (assuming things haven’t changed since I was last part of JSR). That avoids the sticky situation where an order of precedence is invoked to lift the discussion to an institution that is really just more of an observing party to something.
Then you preclude things like the Private Halls, which aren’t public but are “beyond [the] working area” of, say, Cabinet. I’m not married to that language, though, and whatever gets the point across well is fine with me.
I think it’s a bit odd to release discussions to the public if the decision made isn’t public. In this example, wouldn’t it effectively be disclosing discussions in the Private Hall? Maybe there’s some phrasing that could capture the idea of decisions becoming public. That way, you can’t just avoid releasing something by making it not public initially, but instead you release it when the decision actually becomes public.
I appreciate having those who order the delegate to act be responsible for those disclosures.
The delegate does not ordinarily have any private areas it maintains (aside from what remains of the DAC thread), so forcing them to release orders made by other institutions would be potentially troublesome.
I can support the proposal as currently presented.
I’m sure I will have more comments on this, but I’ll wait for the next draft to review comprehensively. In the meantime, I’m curious why the decision was made to limit releases to discussions that resulted in decisions, rather than discussions simpliciter? Wouldn’t the transparency and record-keeping interests that the Sunshine Act is meant to promote be served by ensuring that all substantive discussions are released, even if they didn’t ultimately result in a specific decision to take or refrain from taking an action?
That originates from my original rewrite in 2018 and was written with Discord in mind. The Cabinet Discord channel (and most channels, to be fair) will inadvertently at times have fluff conversations that have nothing to do with Cabinet work per se but might be about e.g. weather, or an aside rant about Tolkien canon, maybe some musings about Cards, who knows. This phrasing was meant to separate the fluff conversations from those that relate to actual Cabinet business in a somewhat waterproof way.
I think it’s equally important to see what was planned, but ultimately decided against, as it is to see what was actually done. Additionally, it could be a useful starting place for later if someone decides to pick the idea back up again, and saves those unfinished plans from being buried or lost
We don’t have the luxury of mandating that everything be released, because frankly the number of people who want to do that job is single digits, at best, and nobody at worst. At least as it relates to releasing discussions that result in decisions, that number is much less and is much more impactful on what we have actually done as a government and a region.
Perhaps, I was reading the part that stupilates the “significant discussions” must lead to a decision, whereas if it’s left incomplete that’s not really a decision that was reached, or if there’s a discussion on something that does not reach fruition