Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide is a guide for adopting civic innovation strategies to spur the development of news and information environments that address real community needs.  Civic leaders, elected officials, motivated citizens, community-based organizations and others can use this guide to understand how to integrate useful practices for assessing and building engaged, informed communities—communities with the civic capacity necessary to deal successfully with today’s many economic, social, environmental and political challenges. (Download PDF or Read Online)

*Watch related Roundtable Discussion*

Author Richard C. Harwood sets forth a set of assessment strategies that go beyond merely counting the information assets that exist in the community. While high-speed broadband, news websites, social media and local online hubs are important for expanding opportunities to participate in public life, in order for these technologies to be truly transformative communities need to create a receptive environment where citizens engage more fully with the spectrum of information and knowledge providers that contribute to the health and stability of a community: schools, businesses, libraries, nonprofits, other organizations and each other.

Harwood proposes a set of nine strategies, governed by four guiding principles, to help people in a community take effective action toward improving their information ecology. The paper also includes a checklist for getting started.

Among the key elements of his nine step plan are the following:

• Engage the community early on and focus on core community needs. Being in the community and hearing people talk about their community can yield valuable insights that lead to refocusing existing efforts, creating new types of content, developing new networks of partners, and building a more useful information infrastructure.

• Actively cultivate boundary-spanning organizations and groups.  Public and commercial media, community foundations, public libraries, and local United Ways are among the groups that bring people together across dividing lines, incubate new ideas and spin them off and reflect the aspirations and concerns of the community. These intermediary organizations should play an essential role in assessing and building healthy information environments.

• Tell the community’s story of change. Told well and over time, such stories can help a community create a “can-do narrative” about its ability to tackle change and invite people to step forward.

• Ensure enough entry points for people to engage. There must be sufficient “on-ramps” for people to participate in the information environment and community life. Technological on-ramps like high-speed broadband are important, but so are a variety of cultural and social access points.

Together, Harwood’s nine strategies and four guideposts will allow communities to focus on building information environments, engaging the community and taking action on what matters most.

This paper is the eighth paper in a series of white papers focused on implementing the 15 recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The white paper series is published by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Richard Harwood is the founder of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation.

Related posts:

1. Roundtable on Assessing Community Information Needs
2. Assessing Community Info Ecosystem and Needs in Southern Vermont
3. Updated: Measuring the Information Health of American Cities

Assessing Public Participation in an Open Government Era, co-authored by AmericaSpeaks’ Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Joe Goldman and David Stern on behalf of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, draws on the authors’ extensive knowledge of what constitutes high quality public participation.  Lukensmeyer, Goldman and Stern present a comprehensive review of federal agency open government plans that have been proposed in response to President Obama’s Open Government Directive, and compare those programs to objective measures of what they suggest “good public participation” should look like.

The report’s eight findings include the following:

• Finding One: The Open Government Initiative and most federal agency plans have failed to offer standards for what constitutes high-quality public participation. While some agencies do include commitments to establish more robust measurements for participation, few plans include indicators that would measure meaningful progress toward becoming more participatory.

  Finding Two: The public engagement activities described in open government plans display an admirable willingness to experiment with new tools and techniques to in- volve citizens with their decision-making processes. Nonetheless, even greater experi- mentation will be required to enable regular, meaningful public input opportunities.
  
  Finding Three: While some agency plans describe how staff will respond to the public and include its input, most plans do not provide enough information to assess whether the public’s input will be incorporated into plans, programs, or decisions.

  Finding Four: Open government plans include participatory activities on a wide vari- ety of topics and programs. Little is included in most plans, however, to ensure that agencies will continue to solicit public input on those issues that the public cares most about. Few clear examples exist of efforts to incorporate participatory activities throughout the agency.

  Finding Five: Agencies appear to be moderately increasing the number of people who participate in public engagement initiatives. However, few plans include strate- gies to increase the diversity of those who participate.

  Finding Six: Open government plans provide few descriptions of programs that educate the public regarding policy issues under consideration, although this may simply reflect a lack of detail in the plans themselves.

  Finding Seven: Agencies use a variety of online and face-to-face forums. However, deliberative processes, in which citizens learn, express points of view, and have a chance to find common ground, are rarely incorporated.

  Finding Eight: Many agencies are taking important initial steps to embed a culture of participation into their organizations, including recognition, training, and the cre- ation of new units and positions. These efforts should be celebrated, replicated, and expanded.

Read the full report here.

The Sunlight Foundation, which provides an amazing array of resources related to government transparency at the federal, state and local level, offers advice for the Obama Administration as it prepares to release a National Action Plan on government transparency as part of the international Open Government Partnership. Read John Wonderlich’s blog post today on what the U.S. plan should include as it seeks to push “the country beyond current practice” and move toward “the active engagement of citizens and civil society.”

Related posts:

1. Major Milestone Reached in Open Government Initiative
2. Knight Foundation to Support Open Government Groups
3. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

Here is a sampling of some of the award-winning projects, as described in the Knight Foundation’s news release:

The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce: To experiment with a new funding model for local journalism, The Awesome Foundation: News Taskforce will bring together 10 to 15 community leaders and media innovators in Detroit and two other cities to provide $1,000 microgrants to innovative journalism and civic media projects. By encouraging pilot projects, prototypes, events and social entrepreneurial ventures, the News Taskforce will encourage a wide swathe of the community to experiment with creative solutions to their information needs.

Associated Press’ Overview Project: Overview is a tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or freedom of information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read. There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and key words, but that doesn’t help find stories journalists are not looking for. Overview will display relationships among topics, people, places and dates to help journalists to answer the question, “What’s in there?” The goal is an interactive system where computers do the visualization, while a human guides the exploration – plus documentation and training to make this capability available to anyone who needs it.

Adaptive Path’s iWitness Project: To bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media, iWitness will create a web-based tool that aggregates user-generated content from social media during big news events. Whether a parade or protest, election or earthquake, iWitness will display photos, videos and messages in an easy-to-browse interface. Created by a premier web design firm, iWitness will make it easier to cross-reference first-person accounts with journalistic reporting, opening up new avenues for storytelling, fact-checking and connecting people to events in their communities.

Media and Place Production’s Zeega Project: To help tell rich multimedia stories, Zeega will improve its open-source HTML5 platform for creating collaborative and interactive documentaries. By using Zeega, anyone can create immersive, participatory multimedia projects that seamlessly combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio and maps from across the Web. With this grant, Zeega will expand their experimental prototype to work on Web, tablet and mobile devices and pilot a series of collaborative and interactive documentary projects with news organizations, journalists and communities across the globe.

 The Miller Center Foundation’s The State Decoded: The State Decoded will be a platform that displays state codes, court decisions and information from legislative tracking services to make government more understandable to the average citizen. While many state codes are already online, they lack context and clarity. With an improved layout, embeddable definitions of legal terms, Google News and Twitter integration, and an open API for state codes, this project aims to make important laws the centerpiece of media coverage.

Matthew Ingram writes about the ”data as journalism” theme running through many of this year’s winners in, “When big data meets journalism” at GigaOm.

Learn more about all of this year’s winners here.

Related posts:

1. New Round of Knight Community Information Challenge Now Open
2. Re-imagining News & Community in Pacific Northwest
3. Progress Announced on Key Recommendations of “Information Needs of Communities” Report

Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans, Blair Levin, Former Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative of the Federal Communications Commission and currently Communications and Society Fellow at the Aspen Institute. The paper analyzes how to diminish second-class digital citizenship by assuring access by all to broadband services. Universal Broadband author Blair Levin rigorously and repeatedly engaged the broadband community and other, more general audiences from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, Nevada.  His in-person debates were reported in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and in the PBS space.

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action

Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

Re-

Assessing Local Information Needs: A Practical Guide

Related posts:

1. Aspen Institute to Advance Recommendations of the Knight Commission
2. Groups Advancing Knight Commission Recommendations Submit Comments to FCC’s Future of Media Inquiry
3. FOCAS10: News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities

Click to download PDF

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 policy and regulations can be more “in sync with the information needs of communities and the fluid nature of modern local media markets.” The central issue at hand, the report states, is the shortage of “local, professional, accountability reporting”.

The report early on explains the origins of the study and its relationship to the challenges posed by the Knight Commission’s Informing Communities report:

That sense of the vital link between informed citizens and a healthy democracy is why civic and media leaders grew alarmed a few years ago when the digital revolution began undercutting traditional media business models, leading to massive layoffs of journalists at newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV stations. Since then, experts in the media and information technology spheres have been debating whether the media is fulfilling the crucial role envisioned for it by the Founders. In 2008 and 2009, a group that was both bipartisan (Republicans and Democrats) and bi-generational (“new media” and “old media”) studied this issue at the behest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The group, the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy…posed a bipartisan challenge to the FCC, whose policies often affect the information health of communities. The chairman responded in December 2009 by initiating an effort at the FCC to answer two questions: 1) are citizens and communities getting the news, information, and reporting they want and need? and 2) is public policy in sync with the nature of modern media markets, especially when it comes to encouraging innovation and advancing local public interest goals?

The Knight Commission’s series of white papers has been moving into action the recommendations of Informing Communities. Later this month a white paper by Michael Fancher will offer actionable steps on the issue of local journalism and community information needs.

Read: The Information Needs of Communities: The changing media landscape in a broadband age

Related posts:

1. Waldman Appointed by FCC to Explore Knight Commission Recommendations
2. Knight Commission Report Presented to CPB Board
3. Knight, Local Foundations Partner on Community Information Needs

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.

CC BY-NC-ND-2.0

Related posts:

1. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs
2. Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs
3. Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

The Toolkit derives from the checklist appearing in Appendix I of Informing Communities, and has been developed under the leadership of Mayur Patel of the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Monitor Institute and the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The unveiling of the Community Information Toolkit is a major breakthrough in the implementation of the recommendations of the Knight Commission, as it provides a competent means to assess a community based on one of the Commission’s core premises–that information is as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets and good schools. Of course, this is only Version 1.0, and the Knight Foundation is encouraging communities to share their experiences to help innovate a future version 2.0. To begin, go to www.infotoolkit.org. Or you can download the toolkit as a PDF here.

Mayur Patel introduces the Community Information Toolkit at the Media Learning Seminar:

Community Information Toolkit from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, also discusses it:

Lee Rainie, of Pew, on Community Information Toolkit from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Free Webinar: Knight Foundation’s New Community Information Toolkit
2. Assessing the Flow of Local News and Information
3. Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide

The Six Strategies include:

1. Convene a working group of chief information and technology leaders to determine more effective technical and operational procedures that mitigate change environments for open government;
2. Create opportunities for developing public goods applications that are sustainable through public-private partnerships or philanthropic investments;
3. Establish more flexible procurement procedures, off-the-shelf purchasing and easier contracting for the technologies used to disseminate government information;
4. Improve broadband access to community anchor institutions;
5. Create government content that is relevant and accessible to all populations regardless of ability, language or literacy level; and
6. Promote public-private partnerships for professional development to enhance skill-building, technical expertise and forward-thinking processes within government.

“The purpose of these strategies is to provide a framework for facilitating these activities and placing government entities on the proper pathway toward the full realization of the benefits of information transparency,” note the authors in the paper. Adopting these strategies will enable state and local governments to tap into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public to create new “public goods” apps and community information resources. The authors further observe that “to focus exclusively on the one-way push of information by government to the public is to miss the promise of innovative e-government techniques designed to transform this dynamic into a mutually beneficial, two-way collaboration.”

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government explores the evolution of transparency and open government policies and the important role that broadband technologies play in moving beyond analog-era notions of transparency. It also addresses the practical barriers that stand in the way of realizing the full value of open government, including design flaws in open government tools, inadequate broadband access and adoption among the public, misunderstanding public demands for information, and legal constraints.

Dr. Jon Gant is a Fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a leading scholar in the field of information systems and public administration, and has advised governments in the U.S. and developing countries on building geographic information systems.

Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee is Vice President and Director of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. She has produced path breaking research on broadband adoption among minority and disadvantaged populations and regularly engages city, state and federal legislators on issues in telecommunications, open government and the emerging technology innovation sectors.

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government is the fourth policy paper released by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation aimed at implementing the 15 recommendations by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. (See other published papers on Rethinking Public Media, Digital and Media Literacy, Universal Broadband and Creating Local Online Hubs). The Commission released its landmark report, Informing Communities, in October 2009 to help promote healthy informed communities across the country.

Government Transparency
Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

A White Paper by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee

Download | View on Scribd

Table of Contents
From Report to Action
Executive Summary

The Knight Commission Recommendation
Open Government and Transparency in the Broadband Age
Beyond Mere Transparency: How Broadband Technologies Impact Openness and E-Governance at the Local, State and Federal Levels
Barriers to Realizing the Full Value of Open Government
Call to Governments: Six Strategies for Enhancing Transparency and Community Information
Who Should Do What
Conclusion
References

Appendix
Websites promoting Government Transparency
About the Authors
The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program

Related posts:

1. Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs
2. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs
3. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs

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 the power of video storytelling with raw personal experience and the strong will to overcome obstacles, Information Stories highlights the critical importance of information to the healthy functioning of communities and the ability of ordinary Americans to live happy and healthy lives.

But make no mistake: there is nothing ordinary about the extraordinary people at the center of these stories, or the efforts they have made to improve the quality of information–and the quality of life–in their communities.

For example, we meet Loris Ann Taylor, Arizona-based executive director of Native Public Media, who explains how she went from growing up on a reservation that relied on a town crier to give the news to working, as an adult, to proliferate broadband availability and public radio stations throughout Indian country. See her video here:

The Information Stories series was conceived by law professor Peter Shane, who served as executive director of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and filmmaker Liv Gjestvang. Professor Shane wanted to find a way to make the Knight Commission issues more compelling and concrete for the everyday public.

“The Commission explained why ‘second-class information citizenship is looming’ for many Americans,” said Professor Shane. “I hoped to motivate activists around the country to pay attention to their local information ecologies.  I want them to ask whether everyone in their communities gets the information they require to meet both their personal and civic needs.” (Peter gives a great overview of the entire Information Stories project in his Huffington Post blog announcing the launch of the series and website, Digital Stories Dramatize Information’s Role in the Lives of People and Communities.)

Other storytellers we meet are:

• Martin Macias, Jr., a young Latino radio reporter and organizer from Chicago, who explains how he learned what it takes to really hear his own community;

• Maureen Mann, a New Hampshire state legislator who tells how her move to a media-poor part of the state led her to create an online newspaper that turned neighbors into journalists;

• Brenda Jo Brueggeman, a “hard-of-hearing” writer and professor of English, who explains how she came to understand the struggle of deaf people to be part of the flow of information around them – and the life-and-death stakes of being excluded; and

• Joshua Chisholm, a faith-based community organizer from Camden, New Jersey, who explains how he works to help people overcome the sense of powerlessness that arises when they live “in an information vacuum” generated by people and institutions that benefit from the public’s “lack of understanding.”

These Information Stories expose personal experiences with information deficits, obstacles to the free flow and exchange of information and other hurdles that are all too common in communities across America today.  The good news, as each of the Information Stories shows, is that motivated, committed citizens can use a broad array of relationships, resources, tools and technologies to create positive and lasting change in their information environments and communities.

The videos are available on the Information Stories website at http://informationstories.org and on the InfoStories Channel on YouTube. Information Stories was produced with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The storytellers attended a July 2010 Digital Storytelling Workshop at Ohio State University where they learned how to produce their narratives.

The Information Stories website includes both captioned and non-captioned versions of the individual stories. DVDs containing both the individual stories and the “full reel” version of the documentary series can be ordered from the website. Perhaps most importantly, the site links to resources that explain how anyone can produce his or her own “information story” and encourages feedback on the site by viewers to explain how they used Information Stories in their local communities.

Information Stories does a brilliant job of driving home the closing message of the Knight Commission’s Informing Communities report: “The ‘information issue’ is everyone’s issue.”

Related posts:

1. New America Foundation: Info Ecosystems in Five U.S. Communities
2. Personal Stories of Broadband Highlight Digital Inclusion Summit
3. News Leadership 3.0 — Community info building blocks: What do you already have?

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

Related posts:

1. Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action
2. Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs
3. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

The strategies posed in the report include reforming existing federal, state and local programs and institutions that could make significant contributions to the information environment and health of local communities through a Civic Information Corps; engaging young people in building the information and communication capacity of their communities; realigning incentives in higher education to turn these institutions into local information hubs; investing in public deliberations; and mapping the civic networks that exist in communities.

Adopting these strategies will enable communities to tap into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public to create public knowledge and culture that benefits the whole community.

Levine is the director of CIRCLE: the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement and research director of the Jonathan Tisch School of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. His paper is the sixth in a series focused on implementing the Knight Commission’s 15 recommendations for creating healthy informed communities across the country released in 2009 in a landmark report, Informing Communities.

Civic Engagement and Community Information:

Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

A White Paper on the Civic Engagement Recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy

by Peter Levine

Download PDF | View on Scribd

Introduction
Strategy 1
Strategy 2
Strategy 3
Strategy 4
Strategy 5
Who Should Do What
Relationship to Knight Report
References
About the Author
The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program

Related posts:

1. Chicago Roundtable to Launch New Report on Reviving Civic Communication
2. Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government
3. Norm Ornstein on Creating a New Public Square

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action, a new policy paper by Adam Thierer, explores three scenarios under which community leaders and other stakeholders can work together to create local online hubs where citizens can access information about their governments and local communities. Ensuring that every local community has at least one high-quality hub is one of 15 key recommendations made by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.  (Download PDF or Read Online)

“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. In his paper, Adam Thierer takes a considered look at the many excellent online hubs already in place in American communities and explores how they can serve as models for online hubs in other communities. He proposes three general models for online hubs:

• Model 1: A Community Government Information Model, including such resources as government data feeds, civic information and events calendars;
• Model 2: A Community Connections Model, including all the information in Model 1 plus local forums and community e-mail listservs; and
• Model 3: A Community News and Commentary Model, including Models 1 and 2 plus local media and local blogs.

In addressing how to get these hubs built, Thierer cautions, “We should keep in mind the great diversity of local communities and realize that there is no one-size-fits-all, best approach to designing high-quality local online hubs. We should not assume that a hub model that works well in one community will automatically work for another.”

“Building effective local hubs will require coordination among local governments and universities, libraries and other community organizations, local businesses, local media and other supporters,” notes Thierer, who outlines specific tasks for each of these stakeholders. Notably, Thierer says that government’s role in creating high-quality online hubs “will likely be quite limited and primarily focused on (a) opening up its own data and processes and (b) providing limited funding at the margins for other local initiatives.”

Adam Thierer is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He previously served as President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation and is well-known for his extensive writing and public appearances on issues spanning technology, media, and Internet and free speech, online child safety and digital privacy policy.

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action is the fifth policy paper released by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation aimed at implementing the 15 recommendations by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. (See other published papers on Rethinking Public Media, Digital and Media Literacy, Universal Broadband and Government Transparency). The Commission released its landmark report, Informing Communities, in October 2009 to help promote healthy informed communities across the country.

Creating Local Online HubsThree Models for Action

A White Paper by Adam Thierer

Download | View on Scribd

Table of Contents
From Report to Action
Executive Summary

The Knight Commission Recommendation
Tempering Expectations: If You Build It, They Might Come
Scope Considerations for Local Online Hubs
Three Models for Online Hubs
– Model 1. Hubs Focused on Community Government Information
– Model 2. Community Connections: Local Forums and Community e-Mail Listservs
– Model 3. Community News and Commentary
Linking Hubs to Increase Visibility and Usability
Some Thoughts on Financing Online Hubs
Who Should Do What
Conclusion
References

Appendix
About the Author
About the Communications and Society Program

Related posts:

1. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs
2. Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs
3. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs

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 Open and Participatory Government” by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee (here), and “Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action” by Adam Thierer (here)—outline specific steps that community and elected leaders need to take to enact the Knight Commission’s recommendations to expand government transparency and create local online information hubs.

To formally launch the white papers, the Institute convened a high-level roundtable discussion among a select group of leaders, innovators, advocates and critics from the national, state and local levels. 

Please watch the event and share your thoughts on the site. You can also join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #knightcomm.

Featured Roundtable Speakers

Dr. Jon Gant, Fellow, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a leading scholar in the field of information systems and public administration.

Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Vice President and Director of the Media and Technology Institute for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. She has produced path breaking research on broadband adoption among minority and disadvantaged populations and engages city, state and federal legislators on issues in telecommunications, open government and the emerging technology innovation sectors.

Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow, Technology Policy Program, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, having previously served as President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation.  His work spans technology, media, and Internet and free speech with a focus in online child safety and digital privacy policy issues.

Roundtable participants include:

Gary Bass, Executive Director, OMB Watch
Ben Berkowitz, Founder, SeeClickFix
John Bracken, Directory of Digital Media, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Jerry Brito, Senior Research Fellow, George Mason University
Kevin Curry, Co-Founder, CityCamp.com
Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Charlie Firestone, Executive Director, Communications and Society Program, Aspen Institute
Feather Houstoun, President, William Penn Foundation
Alex Howard, Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent, O’Reilly Media
William Kellibrew, IV, Deputy Director, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation
Alex Kreilein, Legislative Assistant, Office of Congresswoman Jane Harman
Ngoan Le, Vice President of Programs, The Chicago Community Trust
Blair Levin, Communications and Society Fellow, Aspen Institute
David Moore, Executive Director, Participatory Politics Foundation
Philip Neustrom, Founder, Davis Wiki
Steve Pearson, Publisher and Chief Technologist, Project Virginia
Lee Rainie, Director, PEW Internet and American Life Project
Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer, Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment, New York City
Daniel Schuman, Policy Counsel, Sunlight Foundation
Nancy Tate, Executive Director, League of Women Voters
Tracy Viselli, Community Manager, ACTion Alexandria
Marijke Visser, Assistant Director, OITP, American Library Association
Eric Wenger, Policy Counsel, US-Legal-Government Affairs, Microsoft Corporation
Harry Wingo, Senior Policy Counsel, Google, Inc.

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy was a blue ribbon panel of seventeen media, policy and community leaders that met in 2008 and 2009. Its purpose was to assess the information needs of communities, and recommend measures to help Americans better meet those needs. Its Report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, was the first major commission on media since the Hutchins Commission in the 1940’s and the Kerner and Carnegie Commissions of the 1960’s.

The Commission’s aims were to maximize the availability and flow of credible local information; to enhance access and capacity to use the new tools of knowledge and exchange; and to encourage people to engage with information and each other within their geographic communities. Among its 15 recommendations the Commission argues for universal broadband, open networks, transparent government, a media and digitally literate populace, vibrant local journalism, public media reform, and more local public engagement.

The Knight Commission is a project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Related posts:

1. Sensible Strategies for Open Government and Online Hubs
2. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs
3. Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action

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 and civic data more open and accessible to the public, and create local online hubs that provide maps for a community’s information resources.

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government, by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee, urges state and local governments to adopt six strategies that are particularly important for accelerating the trend toward open government at the state and local levels. The strategies focus on enhancing government expertise and transparency, educating citizens regarding the availability and utility of government information and e-government tools, expanding efforts to support greater adoption of broadband Internet access services and devices, and forging public-private-citizen partnerships in order to enhance open government solutions. Adopting these strategies will enable state and local governments to tap into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public to create new “public goods” apps and community information resources and ultimately enhance government accountability.

Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action, by Adam Thierer, explores three scenarios under which community leaders and other stakeholders can work together to create local online hubs where citizens can access information about their governments and local communities. Government information, requiring real transparency of public information, should form the foundation for building local online hubs according to the three models proposed by Thierer.

Promoting greater government transparency and ensuring that every local community has at least one high-quality hub are two of the recommendations made by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. These papers are the fourth and fifth in a series focused on implementing the Knight Commission’s 15 recommendations for creating healthy informed communities across the country released last year in a landmark report, Informing Communities. This bipartisan blue ribbon commission called for universal broadband, open networks, transparent government, a media and digitally literate populace, vibrant local journalism, public media reform, and more local public engagement. The first three papers in the series cover universal broadband, digital and media literacy, and public media.

“Local online hubs can serve as maps of information flow that enable citizens to connect to the data and information they want, much as communities depend on maps of physical space,” said Charles M. Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program.

“Building effective local hubs will require coordination among local governments and universities, libraries and other community organizations, local businesses, local media and other patrons and supporters,” notes Thierer, who outlines specific tasks for each of these stakeholders. Notably, Thierer says that government’s role in creating high-quality online hubs “will likely be quite limited and primarily focused on (a) opening up its own data and processes and (b) providing limited funding at the margins for other local initiatives.” Thierer’s three models include:

• Model 1: A Community Government Information Model, including such resources as government data feeds, civic information and events calendars;
• Model 2: A Community Connections Model, including all the information in Model 1 plus local forums and community e-mail listservs; and
• Model 3: A Community News and Commentary Model, including Models 1 and 2 plus local media and local blogs.

Gant and Turner-Lee explore the evolution of transparency and open government policies and the important role that broadband technologies play in moving beyond analog-era notions of transparency. They also address the practical barriers that stand in the way of realizing the full value of open government, including design flaws in open government tools, inadequate broadband access and adoption among the public, misunderstanding public demands for information, and legal constraints. The six strategies they recommend for more open and participatory government include:

1. Convening chief information and technology leaders to determine more effective technical and operational procedures for open government purposes;
2. Create sustainable public-private partnerships for developing public goods applications;
3. Establish more flexible procurement procedures, off-the-shelf purchasing and easier contracting for the technologies used to disseminate government information;
4. Improve broadband access to community anchor institutions;
5. Create government content that is relevant and accessible to all populations; and
6. Promote new partnerships for professional development that leverage industry and university knowledge within government.

Both papers were featured today in a high-level roundtable discussion among a select group of leaders, innovators, advocates and critics from the national, state and local levels at the Aspen Institute headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The release of these papers comes just ahead of Sunshine Week 2011 (March 13-19), a national initiative to promote a national dialogue about open government and freedom of information.

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The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy was a blue ribbon panel of seventeen media, policy and community leaders that met in 2008 and 2009. Its purpose was to assess the information needs of communities, and recommend measures to help Americans better meet those needs. Its Report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, was the first major commission on media since the Hutchins Commission in the 1940’s and the Kerner and Carnegie Commissions of the 1960’s.

The Commission’s aims were to maximize the availability and flow of credible local information; to enhance access and capacity to use the new tools of knowledge and exchange; and to encourage people to engage with information and each other within their geographic communities. Among its 15 recommendations the Commission argues for universal broadband, open networks, transparent government, a media and digitally literate populace, vibrant local journalism, public media reform, and more local public engagement.

The Knight Commission is a project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. The Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote informed and engaged communities and lead to transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

The Aspen Institute mission is twofold: to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues. The Aspen Institute does this primarily in four ways: seminars, young-leader fellowships around the globe, policy programs, and public conferences and events. The Institute is based in Washington, DC, Aspen, CO, and on the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and has an international network of partners. For details, see www.aspeninstitute.org.

Related posts:

1. GovFresh: New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs
2. Video: Roundtable on Open Government and Local Online Hubs
3. Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Professor Peter M. Shane, the Knight Commission's Executive Director, 2008-2009.

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 the privilege of addressing over 100 local government officials from throughout California at the Sixth Annual Symposium of the Institute for Local Government (ILG) .  My topic was, “Informing Democracy: Local Leadership and the Changing Information Needs of Communities.”

My talk was largely a call to action for local governments to tell their stories more effectively, to share more openly both public records and government data, and to engage the citizenry more thoroughly in active public participation.  I spoke of community information needs largely within the frame provided by the Knight Commission.  I stressed the imperative for enhanced government initiative at a time when (in my view) a reduction in professional reporting resources at the local level was leaving many communities worse off in terms of the circulation of local news.

I advanced this message with a little bit of trepidation.  Local governments in California are under tremendous stress.  Public finance in California is in shambles.  One could imagine mayors, city managers, and city council members thinking, “We need another mission on our to-do list like we need the proverbial hole in our head.”  Yet, when I said to this audience that the public cannot support what it does not know about, heads nodded affirmatively.  When I suggested that the opponents of government would give voice to disenchanted citizens if government itself did not engage them, no one dissented.  When I provided examples of the many steps forward local governments are taking around the country, I received thanks and enthusiasm.  The message I got from my audience was, yes, this is something we have to address.

The second is that the report offers a model of community information needs that is innovative and compelling.  I understand that model as comprising four key propositions:

• To speak meaningfully about the information health of a community, you have to look at the community’s total information ecosystem – its people, their information assets, and the way they interact.
• An information ecosystem is healthy if it helps a community to achieve coordination, accountability, problem-solving, and connectedness.
• A community intent on improving the health of its ecosystem has to attend to three things.  It has to pursue an ecosystem that either contains or assures access to the relevant, meaningful information that people need.  It has to promote people’s capacity – by virtue of both their skills and access to technology – to work with information effectively.  It has to provide community members with opportunities and motivation to engage with information and with each other.
• What makes the ecosystem democratic is the values with which these three goals are pursued.  Democratic communities require a spirit of openness, inclusion, participation, and empowerment, and a dedication to the common pursuit of truth and the public interest.

To be candid, both the Commissioners and their staff had some anxiety that this model might seem too complex.  But this model draws together conversations about journalism, community organizing, media, technology, human capital and civic engagement that too often occur in isolation from one another.  It does so in a completely accessible and commonsensical way.  And, as I think audience reaction to my ILG talk suggested, it provides a frame within which to understand and evaluate what might otherwise seem like an overwhelming deluge of specific issues and proposals.

People working to solve community problems on the ground find the Knight Commission frame helpful.  A year from now, I bet it will have helped catalyze even more dialogue and more action to help communities become better informed.

Peter M. Shane is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. Professor Shane served as the Executive Director of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Shane and colleagues at Ohio State University will release a video series next month that dramatizes how various storytellers identified and responded to information shortfalls in their communities.

Related posts:

1. Public Engagement – SeeClickFix as Model
2. The Community Information Toolkit, Version 1.0
3. Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide