This is a follow up note in reference to Kimo Crossman's suggestion that the public sector does not need records retention -- we could simply turn over all public records to Google who would make them available to the public free of charge.

To prove some context to this suggestion I would direct readers of the list to the following article which describes the source of Mr. Crossman's concerns over access to public records

http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-03-28/news/dark-side-of-sunshine/

I must admit that I no longer live in the Bay Area and do not have an opinion as to this article's accuracy (which may be part of the problem of moving everything over to a repository without any context, organization or taxonomy).

Mr. Crossman does raise a number of interesting issues.  I am especially concerned with the public policy one of why taxpayers should be expected to subsidize the commercial activities of journalists, attorneys, and vendors (who did not win the contract).  I would suggest that it is one thing when citizens are trying to access information about their government and quite another when various commercial interests wants to use information generated at government expense to produce revenue which is not shared with those who paid for its collection.

For readers of the list who have been in records management for a number of years I have seen this suggestion before. I even provided an analysis for a prior employer who wanted to image all paper documents and apply a unitary retention period (operational files?).  Before that it was suggested that nuclear power would be so inexpensive we would not need to meter it and electricity could be provided to consumers without charge.  But I digress.

As others have indicated I believe that there are a number of obstacles to what Mr. Crossman proposes.  But I do not want to be a "killjoy" and I would suggest to him that if he wishes to move forward with this the first step would be to get an opinion from an external law firm that specializes in records management, esi, and privacy issues to assess privacy, data integrity, legal and legal liability issues.  These may include information security, integrity, authentication, identify theft, protection of personal, proprietary, and other confidential information.  Once you have a legal opinion I would submit it to the City of San Francisco for review by their legal department.  Once they were satisfied I would think that you would need to have a contract with Google.  Now it may be that anyone who has set up with Google reader already has a contract.  However San Francisco may for its own reasons conclude that the "out of the box" contract is insufficient.  In addition there is a question -- is the information uploaded to Google government records and what is Google's obligation with regard to preservation of related logs and metadata.  Finally once you get this far -- I would suggest a 3 month test with a small agency where risks are deemed small (although I very much doubt that you would get that far).

Finally -- for my associates who manage the ICRM  -- I would think that Mr. Crossman's proposal might form the crux of an exam question.  It reminds me in a very odd way of the "National Pickle Administration (NPA)" on which I was tested many years ago.

Regards,


David Gaynon, CRM


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