Portal:My Government Website
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The My Government Website project evaluates the information governments post on their websites at the statewide, county, city and school district level. We evaluate websites based on Sunshine Review's transparency checklist, which checks for basic information such as meeting minutes, budgets, audits, and how to contact elected officials.
County evaluations completed
This project was recently completed evaluations for all 3,140 counties in the U.S.. Below are the 10 states with most transparent county governments; Arizona ranks highest at 65 percent. The scores reveal that all our communities need more transparency.
| Rank | State | Budget | Meetings | Elected officials | Admin. Officials | Permits Zoning |
Audits | Contracts | Lobbying | Public records | Taxes | Overall transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arizona counties | 87% | 100% | 93% | 86% | 80% | 54% | 14% | 0% | 47% | 94% | 65.5% |
| 2 | California counties | 86% | 100% | 86% | 36% | 83% | 76% | 57% | 3.5% | 40% | 76% | 64.35 |
| 3 | Florida counties | 71% | 91% | 85% | 69% | 76% | 49% | 34% | 1.4% | 4.4% | 82% | 56.28% |
| 4 | Washington counties | 64% | 79% | 69% | 90% | 79% | 41% | 0% | 0% | 59% | 69% | 55% |
| 5 | Maryland counties | 88% | 88% | 83% | 92% | 79% | 29% | 12.5% | 0% | 25% | 29% | 52.55% |
| 6 | New York counties | 82% | 87% | 93% | 98% | 18% | 32% | 5% | 0% | 44% | 50% | 50.9% |
| 7 | Virginia counties | 46% | 51% | 81% | 81% | 77% | 53% | 10% | 14% | 9% | 70% | 49.2% |
| 8 | New Jersey counties | 81% | 86% | 76% | 95% | 0% | 14% | 0% | 0% | 76% | 48% | 47.6% |
| 9 | North Carolina counties | 62% | 84% | 79% | 78% | 51% | 55% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 44% | 45.4% |
| 10 | Wisconsin counties | 59% | 76% | 90% | 88% | 68% | 26% | 4% | 0% | 7% | 10% | 42.8% |
Sunshine Review and advocates believe in the posting transparency checklist items online in order to allow for more informed citizens in the Web 2.0 era, especially in regards to how local government conduct themselves.
Latest members
MGW Progress reports
Below is a chart of our progress on the My Government Website project. Starter articles have little information on them and still need to be ranked according to the transparency checklist. Check out the "Get involved" tab in order to learn more.
| Started | Ranked | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| County website project | 0 | 3,140 | 3,140 |
| City website project | 810 | 821 | Indefinite |
| School district website project | 4,233 | 642 | 13,000 |
Ridiculous postingsSometimes here at SR, we're astonished at what local websites take time to post while leaving the transparency checklist items behind. A few we have spotted include:
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Perfect scores!Also check out local government website's that received a Perfect score! |
Project vision
The goal of the My Government Website project is to produce evaluations of the websites of every city, county, school district and state agency in all fifty states. There are four subprojects:
- The county website project. There are 3,140 counties to assess. These were completed in March of 2009.
- The city website project. There are lots of cities whose websites should be assessed.
- The school district website project. About about 13,000 school district websites need evaluating.
- The state agency website project.
Current project
Contributors at Sunshine Review are working to standardize all the county articles so they could have that nice, polished look. A few things you can do is:
TOC nest right template
This template is typed as {{TOCnestright}}
It is added at the beginning of an article. It should be added to:
- Every individual county article (all 3,140 of them).
- Every article about a state's counties (all 50 of these articles).
"Official website"
The standard way to link to a county's official website in an "external links" section on Sunshine Review is like this:
In other words, the description should refer to "official website" as opposed to just "website" or "Shelby County".
How do I evaluate a website?
The basic idea is to review the website of a city, county or school district you're interested in to see if it includes the basic information you need to be an informed citizen. You can compare what you find on a particular website to this Transparency Checklist or to the more specific ideas shared here about what should be on city websites, what should be on county websites and what should be on school district websites.
Ultimately, it's up to you to decide what information you'd like to be able to find on any particular government website, so if those checklists don't cover everything you'd like to see covered, please expand them. Read more on how to evaluate government websites.
- If you are new to working on Sunshine Review please read our introductory tutorial.
