We applaud last week’s Iowa Supreme Court ruling concerning the relationship of open-records laws and the ISU Foundation. The opening of Justice Michael Streit’s opinion in the decision was a succinct and encouraging nod to the principle of presumed openness:

“We hold the Iowa State University Foundation … is performing a government function, and therefore its records are subject to disclosure,” he wrote.

The Foundation’s argument that it should be considered private for the purposes of open records had merit. The Foundation is quite clearly a private entity. But what’s important is that “government function.”

The court opinion is rife with language we find encouraging in the pursuit of governmental openness: public records rights should be “interpreted liberally to provide broad public access”; Iowa’s Freedom of Information Act is intended to “prevent government from secreting its decision-making activities from the public.”

In other words, when there is legitimate dispute about what should be open and what should not, we feel — and the law provides — that custodians of records and courts should err toward allowing public inspection. This case is a great example of that liberal interpretation taking place.

It’s also important to point out that this would not have happened without Iowa residents Mark Gannon and Arlen Nichols. (They have other titles, but for our purposes being citizens is sufficiently relevant.)

Media, by nature, are advocates of openness in government — so much so that it’s easy to dismiss our squawking about it after a while. A letter writer in Thursday’s Des Moines Register encouraged the paper to “get over yourselves” in its quest to push the Iowa Department of Public Safety to release more information regarding accidents and investigations.

That’s why it is so refreshing to see people like Gannon and Nichols take on the issue of openness themselves. It seems obvious, but it’s worth spelling out: Open government is the business of the people, not the media.

Gannon and Nichols’ suit, filed way back when, now becomes a success story to hang up next to the “Cass County Seven” (James Tyler, Carol Wilcox, Donald Henningsen, Duane Acker, Peggy Roland, Jayne Thielen and Raymond Underwood), citizens who successfully petitioned to remove County Attorney James Barry and Sheriff Larry Jones from office after it was revealed that they arranged for citizens to plead down traffic charges by donating money to the sheriff’s office.

Iowans fighting for free and open government is a beautiful thing.