From the Editor: For The Bee, 'Sunshine Week' is every week

On the eve of national Sunshine Week, which focuses each year on freedom of information and open government, we've been through a rousing debate here in Sacramento about basic elements of citizen access.

The furor was brought on by The Bee's posting of a searchable database of names, salaries, job titles and agencies for state employees, hundreds of whom called or e-mailed me to object.

Again and again, from our reader family and even in my own family, I heard versions of a basic question: Why did you include all the workers' names?

My answer isn't just "because they're public record." I see the names as fundamental to the record and to the transparency that citizens should expect from government.

In essence, the salary databases are part of the state's checkbook register, where transactions are recorded.

The owners of the checking account are California's taxpayers.

They have a right to see the records of all the checks: the payee, the amount and the service rendered (in this case, the job performed) in exchange for their money.

In the information age, government information is housed electronically. This has greatly expanded citizen access in many places, but our state lags.

The Bee published the database for the same reason it reports so aggressively on government: to connect people with information.

As the criticism rolled in over the past two weeks, we listened and talked over the themes.

For instance, we hadn't anticipated the level of concern we heard about potential abusers being able to track people down. The database doesn't say where people work, it just lists the agency.

We have sought out domestic violence victim advocates and others to learn more and are considering what steps, if any, we should take.

We didn't see the information as an identity theft threat. After considering the protests, we still don't.

Most of all, we didn't anticipate the level to which rank-and-file workers would feel targeted or attacked.

We regret that effect.

We also heard from workers who cheered The Bee for posting the database and said they were glad to have a way they could explore their questions about pay equity.

The criticism included several good suggestions for improving the database as a research tool. So a little more than a week after the original was published, we launched version 2.0 of sacbee.com/statepay

We added fields to search by job title and pay range. We added links to comparative information for public-sector and private-sector jobs.

We also linked to a number of other searchable government employee pay databases, including one that includes federal workers.

The Bee's posting of the salary database was not done in isolation. It's part of our push to share as much searchable information as possible.

I doubt that most of the other databases we post will be controversial, at least not on this level.

But objections to public records often have rested on privacy worries. This goes back to homeowners who didn't want the addresses of burglaries published in the newspaper.

The addresses remain public, as they should, and as state salaries and names must.

Sunshine Week, which runs from today through Saturday, was begun a few years ago to draw attention to such issues and to open government as part of democracy.

Look for coverage in The Bee's editorial and news pages this week, and read more at www.sunshineweek.org.

About the writer:

• Reach The Bee's editor, Melanie Sill, at (916) 321-1002.