January 19th, 2025 Conference

Schedule

Time	Session	Speaker
9:00am-10:00am	Setup
10:00am-10:15am	Opening Address
10:15am-11:00am	How to navigate your local government	Steve Revilak
11:00am-noon	Protect your privacy
noon-12:30pm	Lunch
12:30pm – 1:30pm	Planning for after January 20th
1:30pm – 2:30pm	How to help make Massachusetts more transparent	Maya Shaffer
2:30pm – 3:30pm	Running for local office
3:30pm – 4:00pm	Closing Address
4:00pm – 4:00pm	Clean up

Notes

Planning Discussion

Where to focus?

The hunting/gathering of PII. - real privacy law

• Opt-in
• Reach out to seniors
• Cost of entry - need hours to read the fine print, you don't have
• The good and bad of technology documentary - on PII, google and others

Look at the transparency laws as they are the weakest or almost weakest

• Tie to state police overtime scandal
  • IA knew of a trooper doing overtime, gave slap on the wrist
• State police drug lab
• Need informed voters they don't have the receipts about what gov. is doing
• Democracy doesn't function without transparency.

Focus on pharma drug prices, reduce marketing and preying on people

• Shkreli awards - fun tongue and check way to go after people
• We pay for them, but
• Same with science papers

State gov, esp. legislature are impenetrable

• Not subject to open meeting law
• Votes are secret, but should be public records
• state records revamp in 2016 required legislature to have a committee to see how the legislature could be more public. It was to report back in a year, but never met first year so there was no report. Legislature extended the deadline by a year. The committee met a few times, but never issued a report.
  • look at 2016 law for name of committee

Attending

• James
• Steve
• Joe
• Karen & friend
• Maya & friend
• Norm

Media

• WBZ NewsRadio 1030 interviewed us