I'm working at the Conference of Court Public Information Officers annual meeting in St. Paul, Minn. The theme this year is the use of Social Media by Supreme, Trial and Misdemeanor Courts to reach out to legal, community and media audiences. I'm leading a couple of the sessions focusing on the growth of social communication media and how they might be used. One of the sources I linked to earlier in the conference was a survey by Sysomos that tracked the growth of Twitter. This communication media is no longer possible to ignore. People are talking about courts and sharing news about courts.

So the need to monitor this channels is seen as a given by the majority of the Court PIOs. However, the need to engage in them is not as obvious. There are restrictions and limitations on how much a court can release. There are questions of appropriateness. And then there is the question of how candid can a person be without appearing to be undermining the court system. All very good questions. For instance, my use of @lvcourts is seen by some as too candid and too revealing. Others are intrigued by my use of voice to make the courts seem more transparent and open. It's a balance and I'm not even sure what the right answer is for any of the courts, including the court system where I serve as the Cour t PIO.

A hands-on project led by myself and Laura Click gave everyone a more comfortable feel for the tools out there and their various uses. We linked to Seesmic, Tweetbeep, Tweetdeck and a few useful monitoring tools, including Techrigy and StartPr. By the end of the meeting, quite a few courts were talking about adding Twitter accounts and looking at other tools, such as Facebook. Conversations were popping up all over the banquet hall as people threw out new ideas about how to reach new audiences, whether through social media or just by the usual outreach methods. I would be curious to see how these efforts pan out and whether or not they lead to more transparency.