You are here: Home » Open Government

Category: Open Government

Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide

Posted by Amy Garmer on Oct 17, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Digital Literacy, Local Journalism, Open Government, Public Service Media, Spotlight, Universal Broadband, White Paper Series

Free flowing news and information is essential to the health of democratic communities, but not all information environments are equally effective at meeting community information needs. What can a community do to measure the quality of its information environment, identify its information needs and take steps to build a more robust news and information ecosystem?
Assessing [...]

Report Cites Need for More Public Engagement in Open Government Proposals

Posted by Amy Garmer on Aug 31, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Open Government

A new report out this month finds that, while President Obama’s Open Government Directive has been a catalyst for thinking about new ways to engage the public in governance and experiment with new tools and techniques to do so, the plans proposed by most agencies lack important elements and key features to fully and meaningfully [...]

2011 Knight News Challenge Winners Announced

Posted by Amy Garmer on Jun 22, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Local Journalism, Open Government, Public Service Media

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts today. Sixteen ideas that push the future of news and information will receive a total of $4.7 million to foster innovation at “the intersection of journalism and technology,” according to Knight Foundation President Alberto [...]

Implementing the Recommendations of the Knight Commission

Posted by KnightComm on Jun 22, 2011 in Civic Engagement, Digital Literacy, Featured, Local Journalism, Open Government, Public Service Media, Universal Broadband, White Paper Series

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy released its report “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age” in 2009 with 15 recommendations to better meet community information needs. Immediately following the release of “Informing Communities,” the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. [...]

FCC Releases Knight Commission-inspired Report on Information Needs

Posted by KnightComm on Jun 09, 2011 in Local Journalism, Open Government, Spotlight, Universal Broadband

Today the FCC released the findings of its inquiry into the Future of Media, a project begun in early 2010 in response to the Knight Commission. In a report over 450 pages long, author Steve Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities inspect the shifting media landscape and lay out how relevant [...]

The Future of Democracy, According to Knight Reports

Posted by KnightComm on Mar 17, 2011 in Local Journalism, News, Open Government

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 by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

The Community Information Toolkit, Version 1.0

Posted by KnightComm on Mar 04, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Digital Literacy, Open Government, Public Service Media, Spotlight, Universal Broadband

At the 2011 Media Learning Seminar, an annual gathering hosted by the Knight Foundation, hundreds of community foundation leaders and journalism and technology experts previewed the beta version of the Community Information Toolkit, a set of tools and steps designed to help communities take stock of their news and information flow and take actionable steps [...]

Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Posted by Amy Garmer on Mar 04, 2011 in Civic Engagement, Open Government, White Paper Series

Americans are demanding more transparency and accountability from their governments at all levels, goals that are easier to achieve when governments have made a commitment to operating transparently and making public information truly open and accessible to the public. Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government, a new policy paper by Jon [...]

Information Stories tell of personal stakes in healthy info communities

Posted by Amy Garmer on Mar 03, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Local Journalism, Open Government, Spotlight, Universal Broadband

“What’s at stake when local news and information flow doesn’t serve all members of a community equally well? How can people respond?”
These questions lie at the heart of Information Stories, a riveting new series of twelve three-to-five minute videos that show how people can overcome the powerlessness caused by living in an information vacuum. Combining [...]

GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs

Posted by KnightComm on Mar 01, 2011 in Civic Engagement, News, Open Government

Alex Howard, Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Radar, provided a good wrap-up of last week’s Roundtable on implementing the recommendations for government transparency and creating community hubs.
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 [...]

Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

Posted by KnightComm on Mar 01, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Open Government, White Paper Series

Promoting greater civic engagement and investing in the capacity of citizens to engage with civic information and one another to solve public problems are among the recommendations made by the Knight Commission. Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication, a new policy paper by Peter Levine, calls on community and elected [...]

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action

Posted by Amy Garmer on Feb 25, 2011 in Civic Engagement, Digital Literacy, Local Journalism, Open Government, White Paper Series

Access to relevant, high-quality information about the community is a key ingredient to a vibrant civic culture and, as the Knight Commission observed, a necessary element for fostering robust civic engagement. Finding that information can be difficult in a fragmented media environments that often fluctuate between extremes of too much or too little information, and [...]

Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

Posted by KnightComm on Feb 25, 2011 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Events, Open Government

On February 25th the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released the fourth and fifth in a series of white papers aimed at implementing the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The papers—“Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More [...]

Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs

Posted by KnightComm on Feb 25, 2011 in Civic Engagement, Open Government

New Policy Papers Call For Adoption of Strategies to Expand Government Transparency and Create Online Hubs
Washington, D.C.—Today the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released two policy papers that call on community and elected leaders to adopt sensible strategies to expand government transparency, make public records [...]

A Compelling Model of Community Information Needs

Posted by Peter Shane on Sep 29, 2010 in Blog, Civic Engagement, Local Journalism, Open Government, Open Networks

The Knight Commission released Informed Communities a year ago with an exhortation for both “dialogue” and “action.” Both are happening, and the Commission’s report has helped. There are at least two reasons why.
The first is that key people in local communities throughout the country are hungry for the Knight Commission’s message. Two weeks ago, I had [...]