The Commonwealth Foundation (which provides support for this blog) sponsored a fine symposium this morning, “Opening Pennsylvania Government.” I came away encouraged — psyched up, actually. I expect to be writing a lot of follow-up notes on this, and I’ve added the following three sites to the “Links and Blogroll” section on the right of this page.

1) If there’s one must-know-about resource for school board members and people who want information about public school spending and policies, it’s the new PA Office of Open Records. The law creates a presumption that most records are to be available to anyone who asks. (That would include a school district’s contact with its local union.)

2) PennsylvaniaVotes contains plain-English descriptions of every single bill, amendment, and vote that takes place in the Pennsylvania legislature. It’s searchable several different ways. It’s also sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation. The only problem I have with the site is that it spoils my excuses that keeping track of what the General Assembly is up to is just too time-consuming. Check it out.

3) This one isn’t new — just one I should have mentioned sooner. The Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition was formed in 2005 by a bunch of journalists, librarians, attorneys, educators and others committed to open government.

Some of the panelists (including me) fretted about remaining obstacles to openness. But the overall tone was upbeat, especially since the new law is a big step forward and the online resources are so impressive. Many school board members are old enough to recognize the “good news tonight” reference in the subject line of this post, but it may be lost on some the bright geeks who are designing and sharpening the tools we’ll all use. They can go to Wikipedia to check out Gabriel Heatter.