Welcome to the Sunshine Coalition Listserv

This is a venture of the newly-formed Florida Sunshine Coalition, a loose-knit collection of journalism and First Amendment organizations who have joined together to pursue special projects to protect and expand the public's access to its government, primarily through open records and meetings.

Among our first projects is to improve the exchange of information about public access issues through this listserv -- a cross between water cooler debates and an electronic Paul Revere.

How it works

• To subscribe, unsubscribe, get this as a digest, visit http://mail1.electronet.net/mailman/listinfo/sunshine
• To post a message, e-mail it to sunshine@electronet.net.
  Important: If you want to reply to the entire list, you must hit reply to all. If you just simply reply, it will likely go to whoever sent the message.
• If you have problems subscribing or unsuscribing, e-mail your e-mail address to Wm. F. Hirschman at muckrayk@aol.com.
  Do not mail messages to this address for posting!

We hope you will use it to

• Alert others of access problems, no matter how small, that you're experiencing or have heard about. Pass on stories written or broadcast about the problem, preferably through links to online stories. We'll compile them for future reference. While we want to focus on Florida, major national issues or incidents may be germane.
• Request help or advice on handling problems.
• Spread examples of any stories, past or present, that rely on access. We want to collect as many examples as possible to serve as future ammunition. Quantity, in this context, is as important as quality.
• Discuss any issues and problems. Anyone can initiate a topic, but again, limit this to access issues and avoid pure ethical discussions that do not touch on access. While we want to focus tightly on Florida problems, examinations of major issues on the national stage would be allowed.
• Announce professional developments seminars on access issues. Share available resources such as new pamphlets and websites.
• Discuss actions the coalition should take to respond to challenges.

A few obvious guidelines
Please no spam; keep profanity to a minimum; respect each other's right to express differing opinions; limit the topics to access issues.

And especially: There are only three secrets in a newsroom and one is what the other two are. Even if we wanted to keep private what is written here, it would leak out. Therefore, while we want this to be as free and frank a discussion as possible, keep in mind that what you say here could find itself in the public domain.

Please spread the word of our existence. Post this at work on your electronic bulletin board or on the more traditional variety. Most important, please e-mail this to everyone on your e-mail lists and print it in your newsletters even if the next issue doesn't come out for several weeks.