Students of California government will already know about the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. An IGS librarian has created a nifty policy report service called California Policy Box. The newest featured report creates the lead story for the day, older posts move down one position. Each report gets a general topic assigned, and a link to reports on the same topic is provided. In the left frame you can go directly to the general topic of choice, examples include Crime and Punishment, Healthcare, and my favorite, Resources and Economy.
As The Count would say "Wonderful, but wait there's more." Waay doown in the left frame is a link to Organizations. The Organizations page is no link farm, rather the best list I have found for groupss that do research and issue policy reports about California. So if you want to get early word of a new report, point your Web alert service at the sites enumerated on this list.
While some useful and highly respected governmental sites like Little Hoover Commission and the Legislative Analyst make the list, other California agencies or commissions do not. Among the missing, the Air Resources Board, and the California Energy Commission, and an interesting hybrid page, the California Climate Change Portal. If all the CEC or the ARB did was issue government reports that would be reason to drop them off the list, but the climate and energy research that shows up in support of administrative law decisions or to supplement witness testimony at public hearings by those agencies makes them worthy of inclusion. Perhaps a second group of governmental organizations that publish policy reports could include those entities. Differentiating a private sector think tank from a government site might be a useful way of accomodating state agencies without diluting the strength of the IGS organizations list.
Those nitpicks aside, this is a good page to bookmark. The layout of the Policy Inbox is clean, lean and intuitive. BiblioRati gives it two thumbs up.
