A recap of this week's National Freedom of Information Coalition Conference from Tom Kamenick, President of the Wisconsin Transparency Project. Tom discusses conference highlights with WORT-FM producer Jonah Chester as part of their every other Thursday segment, "Transparency Talk."

Kentucky open government/open records nerds will be pleased to hear that we fare reasonably well in some of the areas discussed at this week's conference:

•no mandatory fee shifting to public agencies for successful open records litigants;

•but a reasonable and rapid response to the pandemic to secure (or try to secure) the public's uninterrupted right of access to public records and meetings;

•and a well-established public right to records relating to police misconduct, albeit a right that some lawmakers would like to undermine and some agencies ignore.

Other discussions focused on alternatives to legal action when confronted with a recalcitrant public agency (hint: the answer may be politeness in pursuit of public records coupled with persistence).

I am an unabashed open government/open records need. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed this twelve minute review of the three day NFOIC conference.