> As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. There shouldn't be any legal issues since it's

> As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. There shouldn't be any legal issues since it's already all public, but regardless there is some possible middle ground here: - All conversations regarding public policy and/or the allocation of public resources get published on the web by default. (With the possibility of making redactions on anonymizing folks, at the discretion of the public official.) - Things like emails from constituents asking for advice about personal issues and bulk newsletters would stay private unless FOIA'd. - Anything redacted or anonymized at the discretion of a public official can still be FOIA'd, and in the FOIA'd version of the email things would only be allowed to the redacted or anonymized to the extent allowable by law. This is similar to how NYC's proposed algorithmic transparency legislation would have worked, where software involved in allocating public resources needs to be public but the rest of the software does not.