The Minnesota Coalition on Government Information (MNCOGI) is pleased to present this year’s John R. Finnegan Freedom of Information Awards to the partnership of Mapping Prejudice & Hennepin County and also to directors of Minnesota House and Senate information services. The awards ceremony will feature a presentation on the Mapping Prejudice project. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required.Time

Mar 15, 2021 07:00 PM in Central Time (US and Canada)

Public is invited to a virtual award ceremony featuring a presentation on the Mapping Prejudice Project.

The Minnesota Coalition on Government Information (MNCOGI) is pleased to announce that two teams will receive this year’s John R. Finnegan Freedom of Information Award: 

The Mapping Prejudice Project and Hennepin County, working in partnership, documented the widespread use of racial covenants in property deeds restricting ownership to Caucasians from 1910 to 1955. The Project raised awareness of deep-seated past prejudices and led to significant changes in public policy. Project leaders, based at the University of Minnesota, and thousands of volunteers used a wide range of technology to extract data from more than one million scanned deed images and make the findings publicly available via maps and other resources.  “It was shocking for people to see the extensive use of covenants and read phrases like . . . ‘said premises shall never be occupied by a colored person or for any immoral use’,” wrote Will Craig and Steve Brandt in nominating the Project for this award. Other covenants offered explicit lists of those to be excluded – for example, “premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent.” Mapping Prejudice staff has made 300 public presentations, and its website attracted nearly 200,000 unique visitors. Strong public response included a state law enabling homeowners to legally discharge prejudicial language from their property records. Now, local governments across Hennepin County are taking steps to make it easier for owners to learn about covenants. The Project has expanded to Ramsey County and beyond. As the eyes of the world turned to Minneapolis in May of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, national media organizations drew on the Project’s maps and contextual historical framework to help foster understanding of the factors leading to the ensuing social movement.  

Barry LaGrave, Director of Minnesota House Public Information Services, and Steve Senyk, Director of Minnesota Senate Media Services, made significant contributions to open government in Minnesota by leading their respective offices to provide legislative information as the pandemic forced reductions in physical public access to state government. In 2020, the state House and Senate adopted rules to allow for remote hearings. These two directors of non-partisan legislative offices quickly adapted during the middle of the 2020 session, making it possible to record and process such meetings. Their challenge demanded scrambling to add resources, including hardware, staff, and additional contracted resources. “The past year has required quick thinking, sudden adaptations, creativity, attention to detail, teamwork, and expanded infrastructure, all of which Barry and Steve brought to bear in their work,” wrote staffers of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library in nominating LaGrave and Senyk for this award. “As the 2021 legislative session approached, both media offices upped their game and increased the streams available on the Internet… to address the committee structures that had been put in place to better adapt to the realities of COVID-19 and remote committee hearings.” Beyond timely public access to the workings of Minnesota government, those efforts also led to audio and visual files that are archived for use by legislative researchers, the media and the public. 

Award ceremony: When: Monday, March 15^th, 7 pm

How to join: The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Please use this link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DM4xJp7WR0mC6L_mkF.vi9A

On November 17, 2020, MNCOGI hosted a virtual 2020 Finnegan award ceremony, followed by a panel discussion that featured APM Reports “In the Dark” team members, and was moderated by Professor Jane Kirtley. Jane Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, and a MNCOGI board member.

View the event here.

https://vimeo.com/twelveplus/review/480957142/6107d1276a

MNCOGI’s John R. Finnegan Freedom of Information Award honored APM Reports “In the Dark” team of host Madeleine Baran, producers Samara Freemark, Natalie Jablonski and Rehman Tungekar, and reporters Parker Yesko and Will Craft for outstanding work on podcasts aired since 2016. One series scrutinized the law enforcement system in the case of the kidnapping and killing of Jacob Wetterling.  Another examined the case of Curtis Flowers, who had been convicted in Mississippi for a 1996 murder but won six retrials and a favorable U.S. Supreme Court ruling due to flawed prosecution. The APM team arduously dug into public records, assembled sophisticated data analysis and creatively deployed the narrative podcast form to deliver powerful and compelling exposures of injustice.

MNCOGI’s Lifetime Achievement Award honored First Amendment attorney John Borger (posthumously) for a significant body of accomplishments that helped to advance and preserve the public’s right to government transparency. Borger, a long-time MNCOGI board member, worked for decades to protect Minnesota’s sunshine laws. His dogged commitment to allowing facts to be uncovered and published has benefited all Minnesotans. In landmark public access cases and dozens of everyday open-records and open-meeting battles, Borger fought to assure that public officials lived up to the demands of data practices law. Borger died on December 16, 2019. MNCOGI’s future Lifetime Achievement Awards will be named in his honor.

On November 17, 2020 at 7:00pm, MNCOGI will host its virtual 2020 Finnegan award ceremony, followed by a panel discussion featuring APM Reports “In the Dark” team members, and moderated by Professor Jane Kirtley. Jane Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, and a MNCOGI board member.

To attend the event, join from a PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android device, and Click Here to Join

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Or join via telephone:Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):US: +1 669 900 6833 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 312 626 6799 or +1 929 205 6099 or 301 715 8592Webinar ID: 891 6450 7394

MNCOGI’s John R. Finnegan Freedom of Information Award will honor APM Reports “In the Dark” team of host Madeleine Baran, producers Samara Freemark, Natalie Jablonski and Rehman Tungekar and reporters Parker Yesko and Will Craft for outstanding work on podcasts aired since 2016. One series scrutinized the law enforcement system in the case of the kidnapping and killing of Jacob Wetterling.  Another examined the case of Curtis Flowers, who had been convicted in Mississippi for a 1996 murder but won six retrials and a favorable U.S. Supreme Court ruling due to flawed prosecution. The APM team arduously dug into public records, assembled sophisticated data analysis and creatively deployed the narrative podcast form to deliver powerful and compelling exposures of injustice.
MNCOGI’s Lifetime Achievement Award will honor First Amendment attorney John Borger (posthumously) for a significant body of accomplishments that have helped to advance and preserve the public’s right to government transparency. Borger, a long-time MNCOGI board member, worked for decades to protect Minnesota’s sunshine laws. His dogged commitment to allowing facts to be uncovered and published has benefited all Minnesotans. In landmark public access cases and dozens of everyday open-records and open-meeting battles, Borger fought to assure that public officials lived up to the demands of data practices law. Borger died on December 16, 2019. MNCOGI’s future Lifetime Achievement Awards will be named in his honor.

Please note: The virtual FOI Award ceremony replaces the in-person ceremony previously scheduled for March 16, 2020 and was cancelled due to COVID-19.

The Minnesota Coalition on Government Information has joined over 130 organizations in signing the below statement, affirming the importance of government transparency during the coronavirus pandemic.

As state, tribal and local governments across the United States take measures to respond to the COVID-19 epidemic, executive orders and legislative proposals are calling for the suspension of normal operating procedures including, at times, compliance with open-meeting and public-records laws. We strongly urge government branches and agencies to recommit to, and not retrench from, their duty to include the public in the policy-making process, including policies relating to COVID-19 as well as the routine ongoing functions of governance.

Government bodies should not opportunistically take advantage of the public’s inability to attend large gatherings to make critical decisions affecting the public’s interest if those decisions can reasonably be postponed. Just as citizens are being asked to defer nonessential travel and errands, so should government agencies defer noncritical policy-making decisions until full and meaningful public involvement can be guaranteed. Where postponement is not realistic, every available measure should be taken to (1) notify the public of meetings of government bodies and how to participate in those meetings remotely, (2) use widely available technologies to maximize real-time public engagement, and (3) preserve a viewable record of proceedings that is promptly made accessible online.

We understand that government agencies will struggle with staffing and time constraints during this period of exigency, as employees transition into working from home, attend to personal and family health needs, and become focused on crisis-response duties. Some agencies undoubtedly will have difficulty meeting their legal obligations to process requests for public records promptly and thoroughly. This predictable difficulty counsels strongly in favor of affirmatively disclosing as much as is legally permissible without waiting to receive a request for records. Members of the press and public often resort to freedom-of-information requests when decisions are made secretively. It should not be necessary to reconstruct critical decisions about public health and safety by piecing together email trails. The fact that a government decision involves public health and safety is a reason for more, not less, transparency.

As government employees begin transacting more public business off-premises on personal devices, it is important that they faithfully observe records-retention protocols so that messages about core governmental functions are retrievable and reviewable just as on-premises correspondence is. All official-business communications — regardless of where it occurs, and whose devices and accounts are used — should take place over channels that allow for messages to be easily archived, produced and read. When possible, all electronic communications and information sharing should be transacted through official email accounts and government-issued communication devices.

At all times, but most especially during times of national crisis, trust and credibility are the government’s most precious assets. As people are asked to make increasing sacrifices in their daily lives for the greater good of public health, the legitimacy of government decision-making requires a renewed commitment to transparency. Open government is not “bureaucratic red tape.” We encourage the custodians of information at all levels of government to take this opportunity to leverage technology to make governance more inclusive and more credible, not to suspend compliance with core accountability imperatives in the name of expediency.

This statement, and a list of all 132 signing organizations, is available for download as a PDF.