OpenGovernment.Law exists to determine whether the legal machinery of transparency is functioning now. We select public bodies for current compliance audits, identify the governing duties, explain deficiencies to responsible officials, track corrective implementation, and pursue legal enforcement when voluntary correction does not occur.
That work enforces a principle reaching back to Magna Carta: government must follow its own laws.
Our work is proactive and institutional. OpenGovernment.Law is not a complaint-intake service and does not exist to carry individual grievances. We select work that can determine whether a public institution is presently meeting a legal duty owed to the public as a whole.
OpenGovernment.Law grew from years spent tracing the decisions of a Florida public institution through regulations, meeting records, public-record responses, and litigation. What began as an effort to understand one institutional failure exposed a broader governance problem: important legal duties can remain unenforced because no organization is systematically checking whether public bodies are complying with them now.
That work revealed something larger than individual noncompliance. Many of the legal mechanisms through which citizens observe, participate in, and challenge government are poorly understood by the very public they were designed to serve. The Association therefore has two connected purposes: make those mechanisms function, and make their operation understandable.
When correction restores a lawful public process, the work can become a living civic classroom—showing how a statute becomes public action, where citizens enter the process, and how government remains accountable to law.
Born in Florida, from the public-law tradition that made “government in the sunshine” part of America’s civic vocabulary, the work is being built as a national resource for all 50 states, the territories, and the federal government.
Every conclusion should be traceable to an identified legal duty, primary-source records, material facts, and a reviewable chain of analysis. The objective is not accusation. It is documented compliance, constructive correction, and an enforceable public record when correction is refused.