by Nick Judd, techPresident

The keys to a more open and transparent democracy include increased broadband access and a steady flow of government data into online communities, according to two white papers released today by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

The papers, Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government by Nicol Turner-Lee and Jon Gant and Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action, by Adam Thierer, retrace many of the footsteps made in the past few years by open-government advocates. The government transparency report recommends a working group for CIOs, more open state legislative data, and apps contests to spur the use of government data, for example. Thierer’s report describes a variety of models for places where citizens could go to get civic information and participate online, from the closed forum (or the open one) to the email newsletter to the slick blog conglomerate.

Which isn’t to say that the research doesn’t complicate the discussion about participatory democracy and transparent government. Thierer, for example, makes an assertion that will be bad news for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who has staff collaborating with some of the we-government digerati here in New York to create a conversation hub for Manhattan called Speak Up NY.

“The government’s role in creating high-quality online hubs will likely be quite limited,” Thierer said Friday, presenting his research at a roundtable presentation at the Aspen Institute’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.

Government bodies encounter serious problems when they try to host a conversation that could turn political at any time, ranging from legal and First Amendment concerns to political pressure when discussions take an inconvenient turn. But one longtime we-government advocate says that’s a problem that needs solving, not an impossible roadblock.

“If legislatures, councils, etc. can’t host public online participation – with tools for decorum,” Steven Clift, the founder of e-democracy.org, wrote on Twitter during the roundtable at Aspen, “democracy will die. Game over.”

In Thierer’s most robust model, goverments produce data about the areas they govern, and about their own operations, then push them out to whomever will take them — a broad network of listserves, online forums, wikis and blogs, supported through a pastiche of university support, foundation funding and various private business models, as well as more traditional news media.

That premise — echoed Gant and Turner-Lee’s report — hinges on the idea that governments will produce open data and release information online in the first place. Largely left unaddressed are questions of internal organization, data management, and a cultural resistance to openness.

“I’ve been doing this three decades,” OMB Watch’s Gary Bass proclaimed during the roundtable discussion. “I don’t feel like I know what you’re talking about. This has been a battle royale, to get information free from government.”

Questions of privacy and the protection of business secrets have kept a lot of information from public view, he said.

As O’Reilly Media’s Alex Howard notes, Gant described the difficulties in government procurement that stand between government officials and the kinds of technology tools that might help them update how information is stored and managed.

Turner-Lee and Gant also suggested Congress revisit public records laws and earmark support for local governments to migrate their vital services online.

At 45 and 39 pages for the open government and online hubs reports respectively, both reports try to condense years of trial and error into just a few pages. They leave much out as a result — for example, the Open311 project, which is bringing a standardized open-source system for 311 non-emergency issue handling to cities across the country.

They also framed Internet communication in a very centralized way, calling for central data portals, single points of contact between government and constituents. Citizens are called “consumers” in the report, which is an odd choice of word for a group that is onstensibly expected to become more empowered and active in its own governance. And while Aspen Institute Program on Communications & Society Executive Director Charlie Firestone situated the roundtable conversation in the context of a country that was moving from “push to pull” — from a world where information is pushed out to where individuals get what they want to know and share what they think is important — there was little discussion of individual agency.

Panelists at the roundtable on Friday discussed open government “champions,” who become advocates and eventually implementers of transparency initiatives. But the roundtable gave little time to the idea that people outside government might become champions for the change they wished to see and put political pressure on their elected officials to make it happen — nor did anyone consider how whistleblowers within government factored in to a transparent, 21st-century government, except when Howard, from O’Reilly Media, suggested that Wikileaks had a chilling effect on open government initiatives.

“You don’t have to be a hardcore technologist or a geek to push openness of government data,” Participatory Politics Foundation’s David Moore told the panel.

Turner-Lee in particular, however, emphasized that transparency efforts should do more to empower people who are currently left out of public debate. A strategy for a more open and participatory government must include increased access to broadband, she said, and assets uploaded to the web must be accessible to people who are blind.

These reports are two in an extended series that elaborates on the findings of the Knight Commission, an expert panel convened in 2008 and 2009.

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New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs

By Alex Howard · February 25, 2011

Today, the Aspen Institute hosted a roundtable on government transparency and online hubs in Washington, DC. You can watch the archived webcast below.

The roundtable focused on the release of two new white papers. The first, “Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action,” by Adam Thierer, discusses scenarios where community leaders, citizens, media, technologists and — critically, local government — can work together” to create local online hubs where citizens can access information about their governments and local communities.” Creating such high-quality online information hubs was one of the 15 key recommendations of Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. “Just as communities depend on maps of physical space, they should create maps of information flow that enable members of the public to connect to the data and information they want,” said the Knight Commission. (Download PDF or Read Online)

“Governments need to get more information out and make it more accessible, said Thierer today. “This shouldn’t be controversial.” Thierer said that government can do well to catalyze and support this development simply by doing a better job of making such information easily available in easy to use formats. While open government data stores have grown, Thierer noted that this has not trickled down. He cited the example of Manor, Texas as one example of where one local champion (former CIO Dustin Haisler) got help from Stanford and other external resources to get the local open data repository online.

Continue reading at http://gov20.govfresh.com

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Pubcasters on the ropes

Stations fend off funding hook

By Ted Johnson

…The new Republican majority in the lower house of Congress, emboldened by sweeping victories in November, has called for across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending. And although they’ve been criticized for a lacking specifics, it didn’t take long for a few conservative lawmakers to offer them, including Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), who introduced a bill his month to eliminate all federal funding for the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, the org charged with distributing funds to public stations, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and another bill that would more narrowly restrict any tax dollars going to NPR.

“Government-funded broad-casting is now unnecessary in a world of 500-channel cable TV, satellite radio and cell phone Internet access,” Lamborn wrote in an op-ed in the Hill on Jan. 12 after introducing the legislation. (CPB has an appropriation of $430 million this year.)

Public broadcasting’s common defense, that federal funding contributes only about 15% of the total public-media budget, generates a counter-argument: Why can’t private institutions fill the gap?

In other words, it’s not about forcing public television to become more efficient; it’s about its very existence.

Read more at Variety.

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Cochran’s paper recommends both ways in which public media can engage its audience more deeply, and also how the U.S. government should be strengthening its support of those efforts. “Only public media leaders can convince government and philanthropic supporters that they have a new vision worthy of their investment,” she writes. And together, industry leaders and government agencies can work toward the goal of making public media “more local, more inclusive, and more interactive.”

For instance, Cochran wants a join investment (from government, private and philanthropic sources) of $100 million to add 1,000 reporters to public media rosters. She recommends more partnerships between media organizations and area schools, in order to increase diversity of coverage and to promote digital media literacy with local youth. The paper also stresses …

Read more at Columbia Journalism Review.

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Tossing money at technology in K-12 schools is hardly the answer to promoting students’ media and digital literacy. So says a new report from the Aspen Institute, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action,” written by Renee Hobbs, a professor at Temple University’s School of Communications and Theater.

The study found that students need a deep, thorough program in digital literacy, and that must start with developing competency among educators themselves.

Hobbs says that education budgets often allocate 85 percent of funding to technology with a small amount to training. “Nothing is going to mindware, and we’ve got to reverse those numbers. We are struggling with this,” she says.

The many teachers and school librarians who are already crafting best practices in teaching media literacy should be leading this training, according to Hobbs.

“Librarians are at the heart of that enterprise,” says Hobbs. “And they’re at risk. I recognize [their role] is something that gets knocked off the policy agendas and gets trivialized at higher levels of decision-making.”

Read more at School Library Journal

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Blair Levin, Communications and Society Fellow, Aspen Institute

This article by John Eggerton appeared in Broadcasting & Cable on September 29, 2010.

Levin Outlines Broadband Deployment Formula

Approach posits deployment to 97% of unserved homes in ten years for $10 billion

by John Eggerton

Former FCC broadband czar Blair Levin says he has a formula for deploying broadband to 97% of the country in ten years for $10 billion.

The government has just finished allocating almost $7 billion in stimulus funds to promote deployment to unserved and underserved areas, but Levin says that infusion “will not be sufficient to ensure that all people in the United States have access to and can enjoy the benefits of universal digital citizenship.”

Levin, who exited the FCC last spring, outlines his approach in a new paper for The Aspen Institute, where he is a fellow. The paper is being presented as part of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans.

Read more at Broadcasting & Cable.

See Levin’s presentation.

Read Levin’s white paper.

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This article by Juliana Gruenwald appeared in the National Journal Tech Daily Dose on September 29, 2010.

A former FCC official who played a critical role in the development of the commission’s national broadband plan released a report Wednesday that argues that the federal government should establish a $10 billion fund over 10 years to help ensure all Americans have access to affordable broadband service.

In the paper, Blair Levin, the former executive director of the FCC’s broadband initiative, noted that “current government programs to assure communication networks are available to all Americans will neither ensure that such networks are available nor encourage adoption.” Levin wrote the paper for the Aspen Institute, where he now works as a communications and society fellow, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Read full article at National Journal Tech Daily Dose

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Pasadena City Hall 2.jpg from Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared in the September 2010 issue of Western City, the monthly magazine of the League of California Cities. 
 

Local officials know that communities depend on credible and accessible information. As technology continues to affect and change how information flows, local officials face a dizzying array of opportunities to inform — and be informed by — their communities. This information grid is arguably just as important to a community’s vitality and success as its physical infrastructure.
 
According to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, the digital age is creating an information and communications renaissance; however, it is not yet serving all community members equally. The commission recommended in its 2009 report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, that communities pursue three ambitious objectives:
 
1.Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities;
2.Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and
3.Promote individual engagement and the public life of the community.
 
The commission notes that informed communities have an “information ecology” where personal and civic information needs are met. In such communities, people have access to the news and information they need to take advantage of life’s opportunities and participate fully in systems of democratic self-governing.
 
Technologies for acquiring and disseminating this information have been changing rapidly and present a number of opportunities. This includes the opportunity to use technology to create a more connected and transparent democracy. On the other hand, local journalistic institutions that have historically been a central part of communities’ information infrastructure have been buffeted by financial, technological and behavioral changes. The report concludes, however, that the old forms of journalistic institutions do not need saving so much as new journalistic organizations need to be created.
 
Local officials can play a leadership role in addressing their communities’ changing information needs. Doing so involves pondering a number of questions: 

• What constitutes informed democracy in the digital age?
• How can local agencies best meet the challenges of an information revolution and the ever-changing media landscape?
• How can technology assist local officials in promoting informed and engaged communities, as well as agency transparency and effective communication?

Learn More at Luncheon Symposium
 
These issues will be explored in the Institute for Local Government’s Sixth Annual Luncheon Symposium and follow-on session at the League’s annual conference this month.
 
The symposium will feature Professor Peter M. Shane, speaking on the topic of “Informing Democracy: Local Leadership and the Changing Information Needs of Communities.” Professor Shane served as executive director of the Knight Commission in 2008 and also as lead drafter of its Informing Communities report. Professor Shane teaches at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and is the editor of Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal Through the Internet.
 
The session following immediately after the symposium will explore elements of a robust information infrastructure in more detail. Local officials will have an opportunity to share their own communities’ experiences and hear from journalists about other information dissemination models.

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The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program is organizing an event focused on News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities on August 16, starting at 10:30 a.m. eastern time, which will be an interactive livestream.  The Twitter hashtag for this event is #FOCAS10. Their aim is to ‘develop a set of actionable steps to improve the information health of communities.’ This builds on work of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and renewed focus in the UK on the role of the Internet and the media in local communities…

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“Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy & Citizen Participation in the Digital Age” was the opening workshop at the June 11-15 League of Women Voters National Convention in Atlanta Georgia attended by three members of the LWV of Montgomery County.

An overview of the conclusions and 15 recommendations by The Knight Commission on the “Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy” was presented by Charles M. Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program.

The three major conclusions of the commission are: people need relevant and credible information to be free and self-governing; people need tools, skills, and understanding to use information effectively; and to pursue their true interests, people need to be engaged with information and …

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[Here is an insightful local perspective on integrating digital literacy into the learning environment from the

I n 1900, a girl consults her McGuffey Reader and traces out letters on a small piece of slate as the teacher in her one-room schoolhouse checks her work.  In 2010, a boy leans over his laptop computer, preparing to type out a story about his dog; his teacher shows him how to insert a picture into the document. The technology has changed, but the scene is the same: A child learns to be literate.

Today, computer education is part of literacy. The term digital literacy, which describes that combination of traditional reading and writing with computer skills, is about more than learning to type on a keyboard. “The most direct way of fostering digital literacy is to have our students write and produce in digital environments,” says Mark Sample, a professor of English and new media at George Mason University. “It’s not until students produce their own digital texts that their digital literacy can really expand.”

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Article originally published in The News Media & the Law, a publication of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Winter 2010 (Vol. 34, No. 1), page 23.

By Nadia Tamez-Robledo

Amongst the news organizations, journalism schools and media foundations engaged in back-and-forth dialogue about how to save the news industry, two government bodies — the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — have recently injected themselves squarely in the middle of the debate.

The FTC in December held a two-day conference on emerging business models that could help journalism survive in the Internet age. The FCC in January launched its Future of Media project that will prepare a report on how journalism can best thrive in the digital marketplace.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, aware of the concerns government involvement in the press might raise, was quick to point out that the commission developed the project at the media’s behest.  “We’re at a pivotal moment in the history of media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn,” Genachowski said in a release when the project was announced in October. “Highly respected entities have called on the FCC to assess these issues . . . while recognizing the government must be scrupulous in abiding by the First Amendment and never dictating or controlling the content of the news.”

The call to action came last October in reports issued by the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Knight report asked the government to “direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.” The Columbia report, authored by communications professor Michael Schudson and former executive editor of The Washington Post Leonard Downie, Jr., urged the FCC to divert money from its telephone surcharge, which generates $7 billion per year, to “finance a Fund for Local News that would make grants for advances in local news reporting and innovative ways to support it.”

Read more at The News Media & the Law.

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by Eric Newton

Newton is vice president of the journalism program at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

When a big newspaper goes bankrupt — or shuts its doors for good — what’s really at stake?

This year, great American cities asked themselves that question. In Philadelphia and Chicago, papers filed for bankruptcy protection. In Seattle and Denver, the “second daily” closed.

But what does it really mean, for the city in question, for the greater community, for us, as consumers of news? Does it matter?

An august body of experts, everyone from a First Amendment lawyer to a software engineer, traveled the nation to answer that question.

Their conclusions constitute the recently released 118-page report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

The commission says:

• Information is as vital to our communities as good schools, safe streets or clean air.
• The current financial challenges facing private news media could pose a crisis for democracy.
• Journalism does not need saving so much as it needs creating. That makes sense to us here at the Knight Foundation. The Internet has thrown our longtime news delivery systems — tree to paper to press to truck to your driveway — into a state of economic chaos.

But rather than try to turn back the clock, we’re trying to help create what’s coming next.

COMMUNITY ACTION

We have seeded more than a hundred community news experiments — and have been surprised by how many have quickly taken root. At EveryBlock.com, you can find news from 133 neighborhoods in Miami, by block. At Printcasting.com, you see how people can become publishers, starting their own magazines in just five minutes. At Spot.Us, you can see how people donate $10 or $20 to pay for the kinds of news stories they really want to see.

Traditional news organizations also are using digital technology to their advantage. They’re reaching greater numbers than ever, working with local bloggers and citizen journalists, interacting with — rather than talking at — their communities.

The Herald, to its credit, is moving in these creative directions.

What can a community do to help? The Knight Commission offers 15 ideas, from championing news literacy in the public schools, to making public libraries centers for digital training and access; from creating public broadcasting that is more local and more interactive, to building city hall websites that actually make public information easy to understand.

But my favorite is this one:

America needs universal, affordable broadband access. Everyone, no matter their age, race, income or neighborhood, should be able to go online to get whatever they want — video, audio, photos and text — from anywhere in the world as fast as anyone else can.

A NEED FOR ACCESS

In the digital age, countries without high-speed broadband will become second-class nations filled with second-class citizens, able to vote but not knowing why they should; able to work but not knowing how to find a job online.

This isn’t the first time we’ve faced a need to connect the nation. In the 19th century, we linked East and West with the transcontinental railroad. In the 20th, we linked driver to destination with the United States Interstate Highway System.

Today, we need to link people and ideas. Nearly two dozen other nations now rank ahead of the United States in high-speed broadband. That just won’t do.

Locally, the Miami-Dade Broadband Coalition is making a good start on this issue. In a diverse community like this one, they have much to do. They deserve support as they seek stimulus funds to expand broadband here.

Digital cities will be the best markets for local news products, the most interesting laboratories for new ideas, the perfect places to chase the American Dream.

Source:

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Leaders, Citizens Gather at Knight/FCC Forum to Discuss Recommendations in FCC’s National Broadband Plan

Washington, D.C. (March 9, 2010) – A diverse group of citizens and leaders gathered Tuesday in support of strategies that will provide 93 million Americans who have been left behind in the digital age with the tools they need to seek jobs, stay informed and connected, and pursue economic opportunity.

America’s Digital Inclusion Summit at the Newseum focused on the need to break down barriers to broadband as high-speed Internet service becomes increasingly vital to citizens and the nation. The U.S. can meet an ambitious goal – home broadband use by 90% of Americans by 2020, compared to 65% today – by starting with recommendations contained in the National Broadband Plan being developed for Congress by the Federal Communications Commission, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said.

“In order to ensure long term American competitiveness and prosperity, we must not leave one-third of the nation behind,” Genachowski said. “The National Broadband Plan provides a vision for federal, state and local leadership and partnerships with the private and non-profit communities that will bridge the digital divide and transform America into a nation where broadband expands opportunities for all.”

Knight Commission Co-Chair Ted Olson speaking at the Digital Inclusion Summit

The Summit was co-hosted by the FCC and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said, “Broadband access for all is essential to meeting the information needs of communities in a democracy. Without it, we’ll end up with a new category of second-class citizens. With it, everyone will be able to harness the social and economic opportunities of the digital age.”

Others participating in the Summit included U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan; FCC Commissioners Michael Copps, Meredith Attwell Baker, and Mignon Clyburn; Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.); Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.); Xavier Becerra (D-Cal.); Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA); Ted Olson, co-chair of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities; Rhonda Locklear, a housing specialist with the Lumbee Tribe in Pembroke, N.C.; Garrison Phillips, a writer and Korean War veteran from New York; Alex Kurt, an Americorps Volunteer in St. Paul; Irvin Aviles, a technician with Time Warner Cable in Baltimore; Florence Pearson, Educator, New York N.Y; and Joey Durel, City-Parish President of Lafayette, La.

In addition to hundreds in attendance at the Newseum, many participated via webcast from fcc.gov/live. In Akron, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Philadelphia, people gathered to watch the national webcast and convene local discussions about accelerating broadband adoption in their city or state.

Tuesday’s summit focused on ways to help people take advantage of broadband when it is available to them, known as broadband adoption. A comprehensive survey by the FCC on broadband adoption found that key barriers include the cost of computers or connections, lack of online skills, and lack of understanding about the relevance of broadband applications, with issues for people with disabilities cutting across and beyond those barriers.

The FCC will deliver its National Broadband Plan to Congress on March 17, which will detail strategies for expanding affordable, world-class broadband throughout the county. This will be a strategy for U.S. global leadership in high-speed Internet to create jobs and spur economic growth; to unleash new waves of innovation and investment; and to improve education, health care, energy efficiency, public safety, and the vibrancy of our democracy.

The draft broadband plan makes a number of recommendations on increasing broadband adoption to FCC, Congress and other branches of government and the private and non-profit sectors. They include:

• Improve digital literacy for all Americans:
  • Public funding for a Digital Literacy Corps to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption, while building workforce skills for Corps members
  • Increase the capacity and knowledge in libraries and community centers to provide digital literacy training
  • Creation of an Online Skills Portal, containing free, age-appropriate lessons from the technology and education sectors that users can access and use at their own pace
• Show how broadband is relevant:
  • Public funding for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to support public-private partnerships
  • Private and non-profit partnerships in national outreach and awareness campaigns
  • Targeted support for seniors
• Make broadband more affordable:
  • Expand to include broadband in two FCC programs that currently help make voice telephone service more affordable, known as Lifeline and Link-Up
  • Consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service
• Improve focus on measurement, best practices and state and local initiatives:
  • Use remaining Broadband Data Improvement Act (BDIA) funds to enhance state and local broadband initiatives and planning
  • Augment this with increased focus on evaluation and assessment of all adoption programs
  • Creation of a Best Practices Clearinghouse for practitioners to share lessons on how to improve broadband access, adoption and utilization

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Steven Waldman

The FCC announced it is responding to the calls by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy for “new thinking and aggressive action” by appointing Steven Waldman, an online pioneer and journalist, to explore the information needs of communities and “promote a vibrant media landscape.”

In a press release, the FCC quotes the Knight Commission’s Report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, announcing the appointment of Waldman “to lead an agency-wide initiative to assess the state of media in these challenging economic times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape.” According to the press release, Waldman will join the Office of Strategic Planning and serve as Senior Advisor to Chairman Julius Genachowski, and “work with the relevant FCC bureaus and lead an open, fact-finding process to craft recommendations to meet the traditional goals of serving the public interest and making sure that all Americans receive the information, educational content, and news they seek”. Read more: FCC Press Release.

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