It isn’t always easy to navigate through government workings and determine on your own what information the public is entitled to and what information is private, and when it comes to the Freedom of Information Law, I’ve found that no one seems to have all the answers.

This week is Sunshine Week, a celebration of open government. In the past, The Evening Sun has celebrated Sunshine Week by exploring the sunshine laws, which dictate how to hold open meetings, what information can be discussed in an executive session and what documents need to be available to the public. We have also spent the week looking at local governments and trying to determine how open they are.

This year, we decided to do something a little different. Instead of interviewing individuals and writing about the sunshine laws, we decided to get involved and see the process in action. The results were interesting and diverse, and although most of the local agencies contacted complied with the request for information, the things we discovered along the way, were more interesting than the information compiled at the end.