Our story this morning -- and the accompanying Google map -- showing some public records questions posed to the state attorney general gives us a good chance to remind everyone of an important part of our mission at Texas Watchdog: open government.

We're a nonprofit journalism venture on the Internet. We're nonpartisan and independent. We're looking for good stories about state and local government, no matter who they involve. We want to be objective and fair. But we freely admit we have a bias in one regard -- we're in favor of the intertwined ideals of freedom of information and government transparency.

No matter what your political persuasion is, whether you're Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green Party, or no party at all, freedom of information is important to you. You can't make informed decisions about who your country, city, county, school board or political party should elect into public office if you don't know what the government is up to, good or bad.

That's why Texas Watchdog has been trying to post public records on the Internet whenever it can. Our first such project was to post online the personal financial disclosure forms of all the Houston city council members. Then we posted online the same forms for all 181 state legislators, the governor and several other top state officials -- and we tied those digital files to an interactive Google map to make them easier to wade through. And we plan to keep posting records online.

And we've been working to keep tabs on freedom of information issues and disputes going on across the state, and to raise public awareness of them. We try to blog every time we hear about (or get sent a link about) someone being denied a public record or shut out of a public meeting.

We're also here to help. In the three months since our launch, we've been glad to field questions from bloggers and average citizens from across Texas who are trying to get public records. We're also working to offer training sessions to bloggers, citizen journalists and anyone else about how to use FOI laws here to keep tabs on City Hall and the state capitol -- watch our site for more details.

We want to hear from you. What records should be our next project for posting online? What can we do to help make government more open in Texas? Are you a blogger or citizen who has an open-government problem or question? Would you be interested in coming to a training session, or even an informal "meetup" sometime? See a link online about someone being turned away from a public meeting or being turned down for a public record? Feel free to comment below, or shoot me an e-mail. I'm jennifer@texaswatchdog.org.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us or friend us on Digg and send us links to stories you think we ought to see, join our network on de.licio.us to see what we're bookmarking, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader to get our updates delivered right to your desktop. We're also on NewsVine, tumblr, FriendFeed and YouTube.