Instead of focusing on the intricacies of open-records laws, David Cuillier and Charles Davis write about the social dynamics between people who ask for records, and the gatekeepers who decide whether to release them. Cuillier says:

It’s crucial to understand the constraints agencies work under to be more effective in getting what you need. Those folks don’t come to work with horns and cloven hooves. There is a whole bureaucratic world that thinks differently than requesters. Understand that world, and you’ll navigate around it much better.

One technique the pair discuss on their blog is checking the job postings at government agencies to understand the agency’s attitude towards open government.

By coincidence, the same week I learned about this open-records blog, there was local news about BexarMet’s ousted gatekeeper T.J. Connolly, who pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations. We had written many stories about Connolly, one of which detailed his efforts to delay an open-records request at BexarMet. “I want to be as uncooperative as possible … without being obvious,” Connolly wrote to BexarMet officials.

How did we learn about these stonewalling tactics? After Connolly and his supporters left the agency, we asked for their e-mails under the Texas Public Information Act. Under the new leadership at BexarMet, the agency was eager to appear more open, and handed over thousands of e-mails.

So the authors of The Art of Access are making a very important point: The culture of an agency plays a huge part in determining how much access you get.

Reporter Karisa King and I have written several stories about the problems at BexarMet. One of our methods was pouring over thousands of e-mails that BexarMet officials mistakenly thought were private.

I plugged some of the e-mails into Wordle, and the result is a thing of beauty.

These are e-mails between BexarMet’s spokesman, T.J. Connolly, and other officials at BexarMet discussing how to “slow-boat” an open-records request. The requested records should have been made public, but they contained damning information. Here’s our story about it, and here and here are links to the actual e-mails.

Here’s another cloud from this story about Connolly trying to set up real estate commissions for state Sen. Carlos Uresti, after Uresti joined a committee that held the fate of BexarMet in its hands.

For the last few months, we’ve written about an obscure public agency that spied on its employees, spent millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers, and awarded multi-million dollar contracts to insiders.

San Antonio Express-News Reporter Jerry Needham has a new story about the troubled Bexar Metropoiltan Water District. Two officials resigned in protest from an oversight committee investigating BexarMet, which has struggled to provide clean, affordable water to a quarter of a million customers. Here are pdfs of the resignation letters from Bexar County Commissioner Sergio “Chico” Rodriguez and Joe Aceves.