If you didn't make it down to Galveston on Friday, you missed a great program and a great turnout for the open government seminar put on by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and the state attorney general's office. Texas Watchdog was proud to co-sponsor the seminar with the Galveston Daily News.

We had three great speakers, First Amendment attorneys Charles Daughtry of Austin and Joe Larsen of Houston, both of whom are FOIFT board members (I'm a board member, too, but I won't claim to be as knowledgable as either of them), and Hadassah Schloss, the cost rules administrator for open records division of the state attorney general's office and past winner of FOIFT's James Madison Award. They each talked and took questions from the audience, and at the end of the sessions, they talked with the audience about the ins and outs of some real-world open government scenarios. We just about had standing-room-only attendance in the meeting room for the Galveston County commissioners' court.

The Galveston Daily News -- which last week had written that some of its local officials really needed to go to Friday's training -- had a great piece over the weekend pegged to something Schloss said: There's no provision in the law that specifically bans elected officials from disclosing what transpired in an "executive," or closed session of an otherwise open meeting. Sometimes, however, those officials are legally barred from disclosing information from executive sessions if that information is covered by attorney-client privilege, she told the audience.

See what all you would have learned if you had been there?

About half the audience Friday were government employees; the other half were press folks and average citizens who just wanted to know more. If you were there, we appreciate you coming out, and we hope you'll tell your friends to come to another FOIFT session sometime.

We also live-tweeted the day's events, so if you're looking for what was said, you can find it in our @texaswatchdog Twitter feed. You can also find those tweets, and others about open government in Texas, by searching hashtag #txfoi. And if you're tweeting about open government in Texas, we hope you'll use #txfoi as well, so we can easily find those tweets, too.

Jennifer Peebles can be reached at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or at 281-656-1681.