Internet Legislation

Jones,M.(2003,September) Tarrant County, Texas Selects Public Records Management

After browsing around a list of govtech articles I found one that caught my eye because it concerned a Texas county. The article by Miram Jones described how Tarrant County public records were now going online. Tarrant County is home to over 1.35 million people and over 370,000 public documents each year. With the new public records management system, Tarrant County records can be accessed via the Internet in a matter of hours instead of days. The public will have access to documents at terminals located in the county offices and at various title companies. One thing that I though strange was the article does not say you can access records from a home computer. I can only assume that you can. Tarrant County is obviously very large, I was surprised to read that it took so long for them to get so efficient. This system was implemented in September 2003. I live in a very small county and we have had public record access via the Internet for several years.

Newcombe,T (2003,November 6) Low Adoption Rates Plague Government Web Sites.

This article was about the large percent of national governments around the world who have web sites. The thing is only a minority of people with Internet access use them. According to Todd Newcombe, 173 out of the United Nations 191 members had web sites in 2003 but only 20% of people who use the Internet visit government sites. According to a U.N. report, Canada was named the most advanced country for e-government. The report also stated that most Americans who use government web sites primarily get tourism information and do research for school work. When it comes to electronic participation and willingness to interact with citizens over the Internet, Great Britain takes the cake. Overall, only 15 governments around the world accept online comments on public policy issues and only 33 allow transactions such as filing forms or paying fees. Only 18 countries, mainly in Africa remain completely offline.

I found this article to be very interesting, especially the information about online comments and forms. I thought the U.S. was really good about offering online paperwork submissions. They must not be as advanced as other countries because they did not even make the list in this category. I also found it interesting that the U.S. did not offer a public policy comment section in their government sites.

Filters for LexNet:

Believe it or not, sleepy little towns like Lexington have Internet woos just like the big dogs! My tiny little town has been trying to turn its tobacco chewing farmers into high tech rednecks by introducing high speed Internet into the community. The program is called LexNet and while it is not available for home use yet, we have public "computer labs" set up around town for everyone to use. The computer stations are in church fellowship halls, the community center, post office, movie store and other local hot spots. This program has proven to be successful and has been particularly useful to me and my schoolwork. Its been great, our local movie store owner plays with my daughter while I surf for Library Journal articles! LexNet recently ran into its first gliche when a group of middle school students were seen looking at inappropriate web sites at one of the stations. Most members of the LexNet committee feel that filters are needed to prevent curious youngsters from certain web pages. This is an excellent idea except most users are adults, not children. Other members of the committee feel that children should be restricted to only a few stations that have filters. I think that LexNet has a difficult decision on its hands. I agree with those who think all stations need filters. First of all, most of these labs are in churches where just like in schools, filters are totally appropriate. Also, the movie store, post office and community center stations are not private. Patrons to these establishments are in and out of these buildings all day. I wouldn’t want a child to walk by and see something on a screen that they shouldn’t.