Conclusion

Conclusion

Recommendation 15 of the Informing Communities report operates at such a high level of abstraction that it is difficult to know what the contributors envisioned for these high-quality local hubs. The good news, however, is that incredible things are happening on this front in communities across America. “Countless civic groups already use new communication and information-sharing tools to promote political action, operate an opposition movement, or mobilize community activism,” noted Beth Simone Noveck, who served from 2009 to 2011 as the U.S. deputy chief technology officer for open government (Noveck, 2009). The Benton Foundation has observed, “Communities across the country are taking control of media, adapting new technologies to the social, economic, educational, cultural, and information needs of their residents” (Johnson and Menichelli, 2007).

This paper has attempted to show, using evidence culled from real-world experiments, that government websites, community wikis and local media portals are evolving rapidly and offering citizens a wealth of informational inputs about their local communities. Indeed, there is reason for optimism here. The future of informed local communities has never looked brighter.

With this optimism in mind, I offer the final general conclusions on the creation of online community hubs:

There is no one-size-fits-all, best approach to designing high-quality local online hubs. A thousand flowers are blooming in today’s information marketplace and that is a wonderful thing. The more experimentation, the better at this point. But we should not assume that a hub model that works well in one community will automatically work for another. Models that catch on in some communities may flounder in others. Some communities may be served by multiple hubs that specialize in serving various informational needs, while other communities might get all those needs served by one portal.

Our primary concern should be underserved communities. Unsurprisingly, local online hubs tend to flower in large and mid-sized communities before smaller ones. Thus, we need to put a lot more thought into how to deal with those communities who have nothing in place today. That can be facilitated by the next few steps.

• Create a “toolbox” that could help underserved communities. While there is no one best model for each community, a “toolbox” approach should be developed to help underserved communities. It should include a variety of tools and useful advice to help residents access information about their government and local communities. For example, universities [see discussion above], foundations, and others could help package some of the tools and models discussed throughout this report and find ways to get them out to other communities. This is partly what the Knight Foundation has sought to achieve with its Knight News Challenge, although not specifically aimed at underserved communities.

• Create metrics and measure demands and needs. A needs assessment should be conducted within each community to determine what its informational needs are and what kind of hub(s) can address them. We need to think about how to accomplish that, who is in the best position to conduct such a survey and what questions to ask. The Knight Foundation, working in collaboration with Monitor Institute, is developing a Community Information Toolkit designed to address this need. The Toolkit will include a Community Information Scorecard to help a community assess its information ecology and use this information to guide action to strengthen the community’s information ecosystem. Additionally, the Harwood Institute is preparing a white paper (part of the same Aspen/ Knight series as this paper) that will lay out a process for community leaders and members of the community at large to assess their local information ecology.
• Do not set the benchmark for success too high. Regardless of the metrics we choose, we should be careful when establishing baseline expectations about what constitutes success. The effectiveness of online community hubs should not necessarily be measured solely by the number of people visiting those sites on a regular basis. Availability and usability should trump actual site time in terms of effectiveness measures.

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