Government of the Student Body Finance Committee, take note: Appearance is everything.

Word is circulating that the Finance Committee violated parts of Iowa open-meetings law in its student group allocation meetings in late February and early March — via an online instant messaging service.

Whether the committee actually did violate open meeting and records statutes by conversing silently using AOL Instant Messenger depends on one’s interpretation of a law that makes no explicit mention of the technology employed and just what information was transmitted through typed messages rather than through spoken and recorded words.

Given the haziness of the law in regard to instant Internet communication services and the Finance Committee’s insistence that instant messages were used only to clarify procedure and stay abreast of the myriad online resources it uses, we’re willing to believe no law was broken in this case.

But that doesn’t let the committee off the hook.

A government body must be aware that the appearance of wrongdoing is just as damning as actual wrongdoing. Everything communicated among committee members in a meeting, must be committed to the record or not said. Transparency is everything in government, and instant messages, innocuous or not, just aren’t transparent enough.