It is "the single best site for information about Virginia government," a Staunton, Va., editorialist wrote recently. Considering that a great deal of the government you and I live under in our own states was written there, that’s saying something.

The Virginia Coalition for Open Government’s upgraded site is a national model in this peculiar niche of public life, advocacy, and better government.

Within your grasp on the VCOG main page are the current law; a sample open-records request; the five most recent opinions about FOI; current headlines; "ongoing stories" and even those new free-speech stretchers, blogs.

The January 2006 Virginia newsletter that is just a click away has VCOG’s "Pocket Guide to FOI" and its "Kudos" page. For example, the latter praises the Danville police for becoming more open, and the Staunton City Council for moving work sessions out of a cramped caucus room.

Elsewhere around the South, the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government leads its news rail with an AG’s ruling of some importance: Agencies can be held liable for court costs when they lose in FOI actions.

The Texas Freedom of Information Coalition has the 2004-05 "Light of Day" series of articles on FOI written by students on the state’s campuses – an interesting idea for neighboring states to consider copying.

The Brechner Center site at the University of Florida has a March 2006 report on the latest statewide audit of FOI compliance. Florida First Amendment Foundation doesn’t display news or links, seeming to defer to Brechner.

The links on the NFOIC site for organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi aren’t highlighted. This could mean they don’t have live, current sites. Meanwhile, the states of Arkansas and North and South Carolina aren’t in that NFOIC tabulation. This doesn’t mean they lack heroic volunteers who are achieving FOI victories against impossible odds. It just means that so far no groups from there have allied with NFOIC.

A greater crisis of privacy hysteria may never arise in U.S. history than the one raging now. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the parallel alarm about computer ’ invasiveness into our private lives, Americans are in a mood to make things a lot less accessible to each other and media. So here’s a call to the states not now operating open-government web sites through NFOIC: It’s time to get started. If you did this afternoon, you would be late.

For advice on how to accomplish this needed step, we turned to the expert. Frosty Landon is executive director of VCOG. We asked what he would tell anyone planning to go to work electronically on FOI in their state, and here is his response:

"The site (unveiled in November) is the third iteration in a decade. Each has been funded by Knight/NFOIC… Virginia's a big state, and we were simply looking for a niche to fill, complementing what government and media already were doing.

" I was just an English major with limited computer skills, so I looked to Web-site developers to give me ‘templates’ that I could use to paste in fresh text (primarily FOI-related newspaper articles and FOI-related opinions).

"Even with our most recent upgrade, we're working mostly with text, but in a far more sophisticated way than when we started. Now, of course, Google brings folks to the site who've never heard of us or FOI! And Megan Rhyne, our associate director, combines her lawyer and computer skills to help me maintain the site.

"My advice:

"Just do it -- but only if you are committed to keeping the content relatively up to date.

"Identify the desired start-up services and then hire a Web-meister to design the site if you can't do it yourself. (First, though, look at others' Web sites and "borrow" their best ideas!)

"Insist that maintenance tools be user-friendly for English majors! (Fortunately, you no longer need to be a geek who understands HTML coding; open-source software makes Internet work a lot easier than it used to be.)

"Find a niche that will help citizens in your state. In Virginia, we decided to compile and index a searchable archive of more than 300 written interpretations of the state's FOI act by courts, the state's attorney general and, in time, opinions of our full-time ombudsman office. (Government entities had placed their own opinions on line, but at clunky, separate Web sites.)

"Use the site to promote membership, report legislative activity, offer electronic newsletters, capture FOI-related newspaper articles -- and, if you can afford it at the outset, provide a letter generator and sample petition to help citizens seeking access to meetings and records. (If you are really ambitious, consider offering a list serv to give subscribers a daily roundup of links to access-related news articles -- and archive the more significant ones in postings to your site.) You might even want to offer a blog -- something we're just dipping our toes into.

"‘Link’ liberally to other sites (if others are doing something well, what's the point of duplicating what you can reach with one click?).

"Consider offering an electronic hot-line, using an e-mail form similar to our ‘Ask Us a FOIA Question.’ You'll get some bizarre questions having little or nothing to do with Freedom of Information, but you'll also make a lot of new friends for FOIA (if you answer the inquiries in a day or two, folks will be impressed!).

"Be sure to track usage; site statistics are easily maintained (but if you change hosts, as we did, be sure there's a seamless conversion or, as we learned the hard way, some usage history will be lost). Currently we are getting roughly 3,000 to 4,000 ‘unique hits’ each month, and page views range from 2,500 to 4,000 each month.

"If you don't come up with a catchy URL for your Web site, don't sweat it. Google users will find you, whatever your URL.

"Don't tackle too much at the outset -- better to limit the services and keep the content up-to-date."