Transparency Tales IIIa ... ...
If you live in Maryland, there's a free Open Meetings Act training website.
The University of Maryland and the Open Meetings Compliance Board have had it running for several years. It's one of the two ways an individual sitting on a public body can satisfy the state requirement to have Open Meetings Act training.
(At the moment, the law only requires a member or staffer have training; a bill setting out mandatory training was watered down by the famously watery Maryland Gen Assy. It's not clear if the watered down law means that each year another one or two members have to take the training, or if it's just one person getting trained one time).
What that means is you'll know more about the law than the typical elected official or appointed public body member.
You'll be able to boast you're better-trained than most of the state's Assistant Attorney Generals. AAGs are notorious enablers of secret meetings. I've encountered some who simply did not know the law.
Yes, state-paid attorneys ignorant of state law.
You can go to parties and tell people you're smarter than Josh Sharfstein, the soon-to-be-ex cabinet secretary of Health and Mental Hygiene and Harvard grad. Josh has set a record for the most Open Meetings Act violations by a single public body during his tenure as the chairman of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange Board of "Trustees." **
If you're monitoring local government ... just do it. It takes about 90 minutes, but you can stop at any point and come back later to continue. You don't have to go back to the beginning.
http://www.igsr.umd.edu/...
** The Fine Print
To be perfectly accurate, Josh eventually took the mandatory training, but not until he'd presided over dozens of illegal secret meetings and been taken to task through Open Meetings Act complaints.
We can't guarantee that taking the training will get you a job offer at Johns Hopkins, where Josh is headed after Md Gov. O'Malley's crew is turfed by the new governor, but you'll still be way ahead of your town and county officials.