City of Austin enhances transparency with new social media archive

AUSTIN, Texas - Nov. 12, 2013 - PRLog -- Austin, TX – Austin continues to honor its commitment to an open and transparent government, becoming the first city in the nation to provide a free and open archive of thousands of its social media records.

The interactive archive is available to the public at http://austintexas.gov/social, and contains more than 35,000 public, social media records from departments and programs across the City. Social media is continually being captured and indexed, and additional accounts will be included in the future.

“The City of Austin is committed to open and transparent government,” said Doug Matthews, City of Austin Chief Communications Director. “With this new resource, residents now have the ability to search multiple social media accounts all from one search.”

Austin’s effort to archive social media records is driven, in part, by the need for governments to comply with the Texas Public Information Act “that each person is entitled, unless otherwise expressly provided by law, at all times to complete information about the affairs of government and the official acts of public officials and employees.” (Texas Government Code Chapter 552).  All government information is presumed to be available to the public, although certain exceptions may apply.

Austin’s social media archive was developed by ArchiveSocial (http://archivesocial.com?utm_medium=pr&utm_source=prl...), a company that specializes in social media record keeping for government, regulated industries, and businesses – and a 2013 participant in the Code for America Accelerator program. Austin continues to provide leading examples of the best practices in open government, said ArchiveSocial CEO Anil Chawla.

“We are honored to have Austin select our Open Archive technology to provide centralized, open access to social media records,” Chawla said.

View Austin's social media archive here - http://austintexas.gov.archivesocial.com

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About ArchiveSocial

ArchiveSocial (http://archivesocial.com) enables public entities to safely and effectively utilize social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. ArchiveSocial is the industry’s first social media archiving technology providing 100 percent authentic capture of social media for compliance with state and federal records laws. It provides a legal safety net, and eliminates the time and effort required to respond to public records requests. ArchiveSocial is completely hosted and requires zero IT deployment. It serves as a cost-effective offering for any sized public entity, and provides a comprehensive solution for managing records of social media. ArchiveSocial is based in Durham, N.C.