By Jason Murphey

I recently received some great news. A report entitled "State Open Data Policies and Portals" was released by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Data Innovation and ranked Oklahoma as one of the top six top-scoring states for its open data policies.

This is just the latest in a series of national recognitions of the transparency advancement for which we have spent years working towards.

According to the report, state governments can show their commitment to open data in two principal ways: by establishing open data policies and by creating open data portals. Open data policies specify what data the government will publish and how it will do so. Open data portals bring data from multiple government agencies onto a single website.

The report ranked Oklahoma's open data policy and portal and placed us in a tie for first place in the nation.

The foundation for the section of law which created Oklahoma's open data infrastructure was established by House Bill 1086 for which we won approval in 2011.

This area of law now contains various transparency features including the data.ok.gov portal which features thousands of data sets; documents.ok.gov, allowing access to thousands of state government documents; forms.ok.gov, which provides several hundred government forms; and cars.ok.gov, which enables the online renewal of vehicle tags.

It's my hope that this section of law will continue to be utilized as the foundation for transparency initiatives for years into the future.

I am encouraged by the fact that lawmakers have already started using these transparency portals as outlets for their various transparency initiatives and hope that they will continue to do so.

I have often spoken in favor of term limits. It's a healthy process for new and energetic elected officials to replace those who have become acclimated to the status quo. Last year I observed one of these new officials make a difference simply because he asked very basic but important questions which challenged a key pillar of the very inefficient status quo.

As the newly elected official met with his constituency, he faced questions about Oklahoma's education budget. He wanted to honestly answer these questions but determined that the education budget documents routinely shown to most legislators aren't in fact reflective of the actual budget. Instead the legislative documents simply detail the amount of money appropriated each year by the Legislature. This reflects only a fraction of actual state government spend.

The new legislator wasn't content to just see the appropriated dollars. In order to answer the constituents' questions he needed to see the entire budget. That's when he exposed what has for many years been an unfortunate status quo: the entire budget for state agencies isn't readily accessible to the public and is rarely requested by most legislators.

The new legislator subsequently sponsored one of our most important modernization initiatives of this year. He proposed that each budget document should be placed online through one of our most successful transparency projects: the state's omnibus government documents transparency portal located at documents.ok.gov.

Our modernization committee approved the proposal; however, it became unnecessary to advance the legislation beyond this point as our transparency allies within the state's Office of Management and Enterprise Services ( OMES) had taken note of the idea and proactively posted the budgets of the largest state agencies at documents.ok.gov. This avoided the need for writing a new law while still accomplishing the goal of transparency.

Better still, this is just the tip of the iceberg. At this moment, OMES is implementing a new statewide budgeting system -- known as Project Encore -- which should allow for real time public access and purview to all state agency budgets as just one of numerous other advantages.

Additionally, I strongly advocate the complete reshaping of the process by which the Legislature appropriates funds. The Legislature must transition to a system by which all state spending is examined. It's an absolute indictment of the current system that it takes a freshman representative to expose the lack of budget purview exercised by Oklahoma lawmakers. The advancement of technology will provide the tools by which legislators can finally attempt to exercise proper budget oversight.

This wasn't the only proposal to utilize the documents' transparency portal. Another bill sought to place the agency-to-agency memorandums of understanding (MOUs) online at documents.ok.gov for everyone to see. This bill, though not successful, became one of the very few legislative proposals to be signed out of a House committee after the chairman of that committee refused to hear the bill.

Our transparency effort is just getting started and in the upcoming years I believe we will see more of these types of proposals.

You may view the Center for Data Innovation report at hd31.org