Sunshine's chill: Overbroad American Open Meetings Laws and the Limits of Disclosure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[extract] Appropriately enough, symposia on “government transparency” often focus on access to government records, and at the national level. But access to meetings and communications among legislative members, especially local government legislators, has received less attention than it merits. In the United States, all substantive communications (formal or informal) concerning public business among a quorum of any local legislative body must be made in public during a publicly noticed meeting. Unlike other countries (e.g., New Zealand), this “sunshine” requirement applies even if no actual decisions are made. Curiously, while most U.S. states (A) apply this requirement only to meetings or communications among a quorum of a body (as in Canada), and/or (B) give the legislative body discretion to decide to meet in secret to discuss certain sensitive matters (as in Scandinavian and Eastern European countries), a sizable minority of U.S. states (A) apply this requirement to any substantive communication among 2 or 3 members, far short of a quorum, and (B) have few to no exemptions for discussions of sensitive topics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.067 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".