The following article was published at Federal Computer Week on July 27, 2010.

by Alice Lipowicz

Social media applications for government are becoming more popular, but significant numbers of federal employees and agencies are not making use of those tools, according to a new Market Connections Inc. research survey of government social media use.

In a recent survey of 321 federal employees, 60 percent said they use social media at home or work, while 35 percent said they were not using social media; 5 percent said they do not know about social media, John Kagia, research director at Market Connections, said at a conference in McLean, Va.

Read more at Federal Computer Week.

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Sean McLaughlin, Executive Director of Access Humboldt

Impoverishing Democracy

Thomas Jefferson once observed, “Information is the currency of democracy.”

That’s never been more true than it is today. We live, after all, in an information age, one that’s seen a virtual explosion in new sources of information — ranging from newspapers and TV to talk radio, cable news, millions upon millions of blogs, even billboards. Today, particularly on the Web, openness is supposed to be the watchword when it comes to communication.

But, oddly enough, rules that govern much of our information currency are being written by regulatory agencies and lawmakers in closed private meetings, accountable to no one. Three recent examples:

• The Los Angeles Times reported on the “redaction” of filings to the Federal Communications Commission by Comcast/NBCU in their move to merge the largest broadband media provider with one of the largest content producers. The full page of blacked-out text makes a clear statement about the information you will not see.

• The Federal Communications Commission disclosed that they are convening closed, private meetings to broker a policy deal regarding future regulation of Internet service in the U.S.

• Congressional leadership staff began convening closed-door meetings to outline plans for an overhaul of U.S. communications law. The public is not invited — until after the agenda has been set.

Secret meetings and redacted filings may serve private interests, which can be expected to look out for their own needs, even if it comes at the expense of the public good. But the real question is why federal communications agencies, and congressional committees charged with overseeing federal communications laws, are acquiescing to this.

Read more at AOL News.

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Googleplex, 1600 Ampitheater Parkway in Mountain View, CA, from Franco Folini on Flickr

The following article by Pablo Chavez, director of public policy at Google, was posted to the Google Public Policy Blog on July 20, 2010.

 Google Vice President Marissa Mayer served as the co-chair of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy from 2008-2009.

Today we submitted comments with the Federal Trade Commission in reaction to the Staff Discussion Draft about the future of journalism in the age of the Internet.

We agree that the Internet has posed challenges as well as opportunities for publishers. Google works closely with publishers to find business solutions so journalism can thrive online, and we’re optimistic about the news industry’s future. But we strongly disagree with a number of policy recommendations set forth in the Staff Discussion Draft, such as the suggestion that Congress enact a federal hot news doctrine — something that would not only hurt free expression, but also the very profession of journalism that the proponents of hot news say they support.

Read more. 

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Blair Levin, Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute

A New America Through Broadband

By Blair Levin and J. Erik Garr

Blair Levin is a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. J. Erik Garr is a partner at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. Both were instrumental in leading the development of the National Broadband Plan at the Federal Communications Commission. The following op-ed, originally published on July 16, 2010 by The Washington Post, presents a vision for how new and creative thinking about broadband and other digital technologies can transform education through the creation of information-rich learning environments.

The Texas State Board of Education voted in May to adopt a controversial set of guidelines for social studies and history textbooks. Countless hours of debate and indignation — and countless words in newspapers and on blogs — were dedicated to such questions as whether Texas schools should teach about the Contract With America and John Calvin.

These issues are important to get right. But the debate misses a more important question: Why are we still using ink-on-paper textbooks, when digital technology offers a much better way?

Today, Johnny opens his math textbook and reads a chapter. He understands parts of it, but not all. He does the 10-question homework on paper and hands it in. Later, he gets the homework back and sees that he answered seven questions correctly.

Envision this: Johnny pulls up a math chapter on his e-reader. When he doesn’t understand something, he clicks a link and watches a video of a great teacher presenting the concept, perhaps using a cool simulation. If Johnny still doesn’t understand, he can chat online with a tutor familiar with the material. When Johnny does his homework on his e-reader, he immediately learns what he got wrong and sees an explanation based on his particular mistake. Johnny’s parents receive a text or e-mail saying that he finished his math homework. The teacher receives a report that evening outlining what the class found straightforward and which problems puzzled students, along with suggestions on how to address the inadequacies. The school board receives data that lead to constant improvement in the effectiveness of course material.

Replacing textbooks with e-readers would create a platform that lets students learn as much as they can, as fast as they can. The teacher is freed from drudgery, such as correcting homework, and given the tools to teach more effectively. Parents and school officials get data that help them guide the educational experience.

And those improvements are just the beginning. Because the learning happens on a digital platform, everything about the experience can be captured. Teaching can be constantly analyzed and improved.

Equipment such as the iPad and technological developments such as 4G wireless and massive computing power mean that the technology needed for such a platform is available today, at costs cheaper than providing material that Gutenberg could have produced.

For the sake of our children, and for the competitiveness of the nation, America ought to be aggressively developing a new category of educational content, delivered using high-speed Internet access.

Unfortunately, America is not grasping the opportunity that broadband presents. As the leaders of the team that prepared the National Broadband Plan that was presented to Congress in March, we have seen that the public debate on broadband focuses too much on how our networks compare with those in other countries. Instead, the discussion should focus on how to use those networks here in America and rethink how we deliver key services.

And it’s not just education. Broadband networks can create ecosystems for health care, such as through remote, in-home monitoring, that can improve patient well-being while lowering costs. In public safety, emergency alerts delivered through mobile devices can be far more targeted and effective than many current practices are in providing critical information in a disaster.

The barriers to shifting the delivery of services to modern technology are many. Outmoded licensing and reimbursement rules create significant disincentives. Incumbent providers often throw up obstacles to new methods.

But perhaps the biggest barrier is the difficulty in shifting to a new type of thinking. In the 1997 business classic “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen showed that successful companies are usually late to employ more efficient, radically different approaches to meet their clients’ needs.

Still, however hard the problem of innovation, we must solve it — or U.S. leadership in the world will be threatened. America invented the Internet and is the leader in developing the applications the world uses to search, to connect to friends, to shop and to do many other things. Our country should also be the leader in using broadband to reinvent how we deliver education, health care, public safety and other government services.

Instead, we appear to be suffering from an innovator’s dilemma: spending all our time debating what to put in the history books, without rewriting history by questioning the need for the book in the first place.

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Blackwater, Missouri Photo credit: KansasExplorer 3128 on Flickr

The New York Times recently ran an article (”High Speed for the Sparsely Wired,” July 9, 2010) reminding us that the September 30th deadline for awarding broadband stimulus grants is approaching. The Times article by Susannah G. Kim highlights the pending impact of federal stimulus money to extend high speed Internet access to rural areas.

Now that grant-winning projects are underway, residents in rural communities from North Carolina to Kansas to remote parts of Alaska are expressing optimism that broadband access will give them the tools they and their children need to compete and prosper in the future.  I hope they succeed. To read several of the public comments in response to Kim’s article, there are people who don’t seem to care if they do. 

One commenter from Troy, New York (recommended by 41 readers) wrote:

Boo hoo hoo. You live in a remote area, and can’t have high speed internet. I’m heartbroken. Have the government spend a few billion…..and send the bill to my grandchildren.

And from Cleveland, Ohio (recommended by 80 readers):

…These folks don’t need no stinkin’ internet to access their Higher Authority. We gave them dial up telephone service years ago, let them live with that until they sign onto the concept of paying for what they get. Ingrates.

And this one from Jersey City, New Jersey (12 recommendations):

Wait. High-speed internet is a widely-available service to anyone living in a city, the suburbs, or the exburbs. How did it become the federal government’s responsibility to provide this service to people who have made the CHOICE to live where the service isn’t available?

There’s no doubt that delivering meaningful affordable broadband access to every community in America presents a great challenge, especially in these tough economic times. But information is not a luxury and never has been, even if some forms of content seem frivolous and diverting. Information is a necessity, as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools and public health. Information is important to help citizens coordinate, solve problems, ensure public accountability and stay connected.

Reasonable minds will differ on how best to pay for the enormous investment that such an undertaking will require. Considering the magnitude of the need, it’s obvious that, like the interstate highway system, rural electrification, and universal childhood immunizations, it won’t happen without a combination of private and public investment (as the Knight Commission has observed). Nor should we discount government’s interest in promoting the diffusion of information technologies, given that information is often a public good and such investments do have significant beneficial educational and economic ripple effects.  

The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation together are exploring public policies that can realize the Knight Commission’s recommendations to promote universal broadband access and adoption. We have commissioned a white paper by former National Broadband Plan Executive Director Blair Levin, who is looking at how existing funds already allocated for various telecommunications, information and community uses can be redirected to meet these needs (this is just one of several policy options Levin’s paper will address). In fact, we’ve commissioned eight white papers, to be published later this year, aimed at offering policy options at the local, state and national levels for implementing the Knight Commission’s 15 recommendations. 

The information issue is everyone’s issue. If some of the public comments to the Times article are any indication, changing individual attitudes about the importance of information and information tools in supporting individual and collective community life may be as challenging in the long run as achieving universal broadband. But I hope not.

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C.W. Anderson, Knight Media Policy Fellow at New America Foundation, on  government’s role in journalism, Ars Technica, June 14, 2010.,

Read more.

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The Knight Commission report’s Appendix I — Taking Stock: Are You a Healthy Information Community? — provided the framework for the group exercise at the workshop.

Following a welcome by LWVUS National President Mary G. Wilson, Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, kicked-off the workshop with an overview of the Knight Commission’s findings and recommendations. A panel discussion and group exercise followed.

Other experts featured at the workshop included Leonard Witt, director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University; Jim Walls, former head of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s investigative team who now runs Atlanta Unfiltered, his own online investigative blog; and  Steven Clift, founder of E-Democracy.org, whose presentation focused on information needs to support open democracy and “Sunshine 2.0.”

Lenn Witt posted a video interview with Charlie following the workshop (”Firestone: Healthy Communities Need High Quality Information“)  in which Charlie points out the importance of engaging community-focused organizations like the League of Women Voters  in a broad, sustained effort to bring communities together around the issue of information health in the same way that community leadership has coalesced around urban renewal, education and other critical issues.

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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 …

Read more.

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Mike Fancher

As part of the ongoing work to promote the Knight Commission’s vision for healthy, informed communities, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program has commissioned a series of policy papers to detail specific steps for implementing the Commission’s 15 recommendations. The research and writing of these papers is now underway, with publication slated for the fall.

We recently invited a small group of forward-thinking journalists, news entrepreneurs, analysts and community leaders to discuss and debate specific proposals for promoting healthy news and information flows at the local level. The half-day meeting centered around a “critique” of the first draft of a white paper on local journalism (recommendation 1) written by Mike Fancher, who for 20 years was executive editor of the Seattles Times.

Len Witt, who runs the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University and participated in our “critique” session, interviewed Mike about the work that he is doing to identify specific actions that can promote the growth of local journalism through marketplace incentives. Here’s a short excerpt of the interview.

Fancher: The themes that I’m working on are essentially experimentation, collaboration, and engagement. Experimentation – nobody knows what’s going to work. So let’s try lots of things. Collaboration – it’s in the DNA of journalists to be very competitive and independent. But in this day and age, with fewer and fewer resources and journalistic organizations, and more and more startups, we need to collaborate a lot more than we ever did in the past. And engagement is that journalism is for the public, and we need to bring the public into this conversation and let them help us create the journalism of the future.

To watch video of the full interview and read the transcript, click here.

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"Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." Oliver Wendell Holmes quote on IRS headquarters, Washington, DC. Photo credit: afagen on Flickr.

A couple of things became clearer at this week’s third and presumably final Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism (“How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” June 15, 2010, at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.). For a good summary of the meeting, see Fiona Morgan’s “A subtle victory for policy interventions in media at the FTC workshop” at New America Foundation.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz made it clear that the commissioners are not inclined to reach for new antitrust exemptions for the news industry or recommend changes to copyright. Leibowitz called the commission “allergic to antitrust exemptions, as well as changes to expand copyright law.” He also stated rather forcefully that the “FTC will not support taxes to subsidize journalism or to fund any particular medium of journalism.”

The commissioners and staff present seemed to agree with nearly all of the speakers participating in the workshop, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and critics and observers elsewhere, that they don’t want government picking winners or influencing content.

Speaking for the Knight Commission, Charles M. Firestone of the Aspen Institute observed that, for local journalism, we are in a time of considerable experimentation and will be for the foreseeable future. In this environment, he said, “the Knight Commission preferred market forces to develop new business models.”

So what role is left as the FTC considers how government might support journalism?

Firestone and other speakers encouraged the FTC to let competition run, but said the commission might consider content-neutral measures that can support an environment for competition. One such area relates to tax treatment of journalistic organizations.

While the Knight Commission did not endorse any specific tax proposals aimed at sustaining journalism, Firestone presented three possibilities for equalizing or otherwise improving the tax  treatment not-for-profit journalistic enterprises. The proposals come from “Taxes,  Local Journalism, and Transition to the Public Sector,” a discussion paper prepared for the Knight Commission by Ohio State University law professor Stephanie Hoffer.

1.    Allow a full or partial (50%) deduction for the contribution of a journalistic enterprise to not-for-profit organizations. This would ease the transition of news businesses from a for-profit to a not-for-profit business model.

2.    Allow deferral of gain in the acquisition of a for-profit journalistic enterprise by a not-for-profit. Currently, tax law prefers exchanges between corporations over donation to a not-for-profit by allowing significant tax advantages for trading ownership interest in a news organization for ownership interest in another organization (aka, a stock swap). Allowing a deferral of taxable gain if the news organization goes to a journalistic nonprofit would put nonprofits on the same footing as for-profits.

3.    Allow tax exempt or reduced bond financing for the nonprofit acquisition of a news enterprise. Because a for-profit entity can deduct interest payments from its gross adjusted income, the overall cost of borrowing money is lower. Finding a way to lessen the cost of borrowing by not-for-profit news organizations would put them on more equal footing with their for-profit peers.

It’s not clear whether the FTC will include these or other proposals for tax changes in its final report, which is due out in the fall. And the issue of not-for-profit ownership of news enterprises should not downplay the vital role served by a vibrant, diverse and competitive for-profit journalism sector in American democracy, as the Knight Commission has recognized. However, addressing structural impediments in tax policy, through these or other measures, would recognize the growing role of nonprofits in the emerging media marketplace.

What do you think about these proposals? Would more permissive tax treatment for journalistic nonprofits have an appreciable impact on serving the information needs of communities? Is it a fair approach toward reforming media policy?

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To address this urgent need, we at the National Black Programming Consortium, an organization with a 30-year track record of increasing capacity in minority communities to create and use public media, are launching the Public Media Corps, using a service core model to encourage and support healthy, hyper-local twenty-first century community information ecosystems, using public media assets and tools as a driver of demand.

“We need to tackle the challenge of connecting 93 million Americans to our broadband future,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at the release of the National Broadband Plan. “In the 21st century, a digital divide is an opportunity divide.”

The Fellows chosen, representing a range of professional skills from experienced veteran journalists and educators to recent college graduates with training in the latest media technologies, will work to close that opportunity divide by connecting schools, museums, libraries and other important hubs in underserved communities to public media tools and assets that include technology-rich teaching curricula and materials, relevant and timely public interest content and technology training to increase the capacity of local non-profits as well as to increase the digital skill set of the community at large.

On Friday, June 25th as part of the Silverdocs Film Festival, the official launch event, a panel moderated by Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and taped live to air on his public radio show, will introduce the class of 2010 and the thirteen partners in the beta phase of the project. The partners include three at-risk high schools, a community museum and neighborhood library, three community centers serving predominantly African American and Latino residents of DC, and five public broadcasting entities including WHUT Howard University Television, WETA, WEAA-FM and PBS.

And, now, introducing the 2010 inaugural class of the Public Media Corps:

Kibwe Chase-Marshall – video and digital producer and designer
T. Je’Nein Farrell – former adjunct professor, producer, videographer and director
Brennan Gerald – virtual brand and marketing consultant
Khalil Gill – illustrator, web designer and educator
Robin Hamilton – freelance writer and television reporter
Ivana Jackson – recent journalism graduate
Mike Janssen – writer and public media professional
Molly McDonnell – journalist and web designer
Gerardo I. Medrano, former researcher, curator and education specialist
Ashley Mosley – video producer and community organizer
Selina Musuta – radio producer and DJ
LaToya Peterson – blogger and new media entrepreneur
Olivia Rubagumya – journalist and human rights media programmer
Danielle Scruggs – photographer, writer and blogger
Ariel Valdez – journalist and musician with public radio experience

For more information on the project, the partners or the Fellows, please visit: www.publicmediacorps.org.

Jacquie Jones is Executive Director of the National Black Programming Consortium (NPBC) and a guest blogger for Knightcomm.org. She can be e-mailed at jacquie-AT-nbpc.tv

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By Charlie Firestone

The journalism industry is in turmoil. The digital revolution has hit content providers of all kinds, changing their business models and in some cases altering the nature of the underlying content itself. Music has seen this most starkly. But print content, most particularly newspapers, have also faced significant disruption. Digitization and the communications revolution have placed in the consumer/user the tools to access the content they want, when they want it, at little or no cost.

But there needs to be something to access: content needs to be created and paid for at some level.

We are in a period of enormous experimentation in the quest for revenue models. In the past music companies and newspapers aggregated content to appeal to a broader audience. Consumers would pay for that aggregation usually just to have access to a small portion of it. The CD album bundled a number of pieces from an artist. Yes, many enjoyed the full album, but more often bought the album for one or two favorite tunes. iTunes disaggregated the album as a revenue model. Today, the consumer may still pay close to the same amount per song as it cost on the CD, but he/she does not have to purchase the aggregated product, and can select the artist and tunes to pay for.

Similarly in the newspaper, there are many sections that a consumer pays for: local, national and international news, weather, sports, arts, business, health, life style features, obituaries, marriage announcements and the like. Furthermore, the functions of gathering the news, sourcing it, contextualizing it, suggesting what to think about it, and distributing it are all performed by the same entity.

With its near monopoly distribution channel for delivering news and information to the home, newspapers had their heyday into the 1990s. Yes, radio and then television posed some competition. But ironically, the evening news on television spelled the demise of the evening newspaper, resulting in winnowing the field to a monopoly newspaper entity in most cities.

With a monopoly distribution system, the economics of bundling make sense. The consumer will want access to some of the content, and will pay for more in order to get that access. The bundler gets more per customer and will have lower costs delivering a single product that has wider appeal, than if it had to customize to each customer’s liking. The cable television business is a modern example of this.

But as new digital tools and enterprises emerge, they disrupt the monopoly aggregator model. One can now purchase the song, not the album. As video becomes more common on the Web, people will move to view and in many instances purchase individual shows “over the top,” not the cable channel or television network. Former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin waged a battle against the cable industry seeking to change their business model to a la carte, allowing the subscriber to choose and pay for only those channels he or she actually wanted. He did not succeed as a regulator, but the digital revolution may disaggregate even the cable channel if the unit of consumption is the show, or series, and becomes available over the Net.

As it is happening in other content industries, it is apparent that the journalism business is unbundling. The functions that a newspaper performed alone can now be undertaken by new, nimble entrants, by repurposed other players, or by the public itself.

Let’s take a typical life cycle of a news story. (1) Someone digs up the facts, and (2) composes a story. There are (3) sources for the story, the (4) facts are verified and (5) authenticated. The story, if well written, (6) contextualizes the facts, and either inherently in the story, or in a separate editorial, the entity (7) analyzes the consequences. It also either makes a bundled news provider through (8) filtering or curating processes, and then is (9) distributed to the customer.

These functions have been performed by single news organizations, newspapers, and television stations most notably. But today there are many different entities that can pick off one element or another and contribute to the news value of the story. So, there are people and entities, such as environmental organizations, that dig up the facts but do not develop the story. There are new entities such as ProPublica or the Center for Investigative Journalism that are developing the story, but not distributing it, sending it instead to other established distributors like newspapers and television stations. There are bloggers who verify and authenticate without being in any other part of the story – for example, the people who revealed the phoniness of the National Guard memo about George W. Bush that Dan Rather reported on CBS’s 60 Minutes. And there are now aggregators or curators on the Internet, e.g., Google News or Huffington Post, who highlight and link to news stories that they have not written.

Just about all of these functions have been performed in the past. Whistle-blowing is not a new phenomenon, and newspapers have long published news wire stories. But the extent of disaggregating is much greater as the opportunities for niche players in the news business become more vibrant.

Juxtaposed onto this trend of disaggregation is the search for new revenue sources for journalism. Revenues have been streaming away from the print media in recent years in huge amounts. But the expected savior, online journalism, has not delivered the cash flow that publishers expected. The good news is that audiences for journalistic organizations have vastly increased. But the value to advertisers of those visiting their sites was about one-tenth the value of a reader of print media. The cost per thousand rates (CPM) just did not hold up in the latter half of 2008 and into 2009.

The question arises, then, how will journalism, so necessary to our daily public and private lives, sustain itself? This is a broader question than sustaining any one journalistic organization or even type of distribution system. Though, some would argue with some credence that since newspapers have large experienced staffs with ingrained journalistic values, and have usually served as the news agenda setter for all media in a locality, they should be protected in some way.

I am not alone as seeing the next five to ten years as a period of experimentation for a sustainable revenue model. Clay Shirky analogizes this period to the century following invention of the printing press, described by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press 1979).

The good news is that there are many revenue streams for news and information visible today. These include the staples of customer subscription and advertising. A news organization can charge fees for carriage of its content. It can enter into barter or cooperative arrangements. For non-profit entities and L3Cs (low profit corporations), there is the possibility of philanthropic grants. Of course an endowment is always helpful, and other philanthropic models are emerging such as the Sandler arrangement with ProPublica. Tip-jar or voluntary contributions have worked very well for public radio. And David Westphal and Geoffrey Cowan have catalogued a history of government subsidies through tax breaks, government subsidies through cheaper postal rates, or requirements for governments to advertise legal notices in newspapers.

The matrix below places the disaggregating functions of news on one axis with the various sources of revenue on another. The point of this is not to be exhaustive of the categories of each of the axes. Some might find other functions or other sources of revenue.

The point is that as new entities emerge, or older ones transform, they will undertake bits and pieces of the journalistic chain. And they will find revenues from a variety of sources in new and strange combinations. As the squares in the matrix light up, e.g., philanthropic sources and fees to support investigative journalism that does not editorialize or distribute themselves, the different combinations are limitless. The chart becomes a pixeled picture of the journalism business going forward.

Journalists serve as watchdogs to the effective operation of government, and provide much of the information a citizen needs to exercise his or her functions of citizenship. They also supply much of the day-to-day information necessary for an individual to get along in civil society. As the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy so aptly describe, these functions are all essential to a thriving democracy. So too is the quest for finding sustainable models for the functions of journalism, however they are realized.

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by Bill Densmore, Media Giraffe Project, June 8, 2010

“Media literacy” concepts are generally part of a major effort to push adoption of voluntary “Common Core State Standards” for English and literacy in history, social, studies, science and technical subjects, an initial line-by-line comparison of drafts shows. But do the standards go far enough?

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LWV 2010 Convention

 The League of Women Voters will feature the work of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy at its annual convention in Atlanta this month. The 2010 Convention, with the theme “Making Democracy Work,” will be held June 11-15, 2010.

Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, will lead-of the first convention workshop with an overview and presentation of key Knight Commission recommendations related to LWV’s mission. The workshop, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy and Citizen Participation in the Digital Age,” is designed as a training opportunity for LWV members to explore what role the national and local LWV organizations can play to bring about healthier, more informed communities.

 The workshop will feature a panel of experts and a small group exercise adapted from Appendix I in the Informing Communities report. Participants will be asked to rate their own communities’ information health, identify challenges, and suggest what role the League can play is resolving those challenges.

Information about the convention is available on the League of Women Voters website. Follow the convention on Twitter (#LWVAtlanta2010).

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Photo Credit: gennaro cicalese.it on Flickr

Since the release of the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, we’ve seen efforts in communities across the country to take stock of their unique information needs and assets. One of the great things about these case studies is that they are bringing a discussion that has raged largely in professional and academic circles at the national level into the mainstream of public conversation at the community level.

In some cases, the Knight Commission’s call to action inspired the community assessments as part of the process of addressing the overall health of the community. In others, the inquiries are part of the broader movement concerned with the future of media and journalism at a time when both local and national media systems are undergoing massive restructuring. Regardless of origin, these case studies are available to other communities as potential models for engaging in similar assessments toward creating informed communities, addressing community affairs and pursuing common goals.

Each community has a unique blend of interconnected networks of people, organizations, institutions, technological infrastructure, content, habits and values that make up its information ecosystem. Taking stock of the information resources in your community and identifying what information-resources the community needs to remain strong, healthy and dynamic are the first steps toward building a healthy, informed community.

This is the essence of the Knight Commission’s Recommendation #5: develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.

The problem at the moment is a lack of good tools for communities to assess the quality of local information ecologies. The Commission noted:

There are no widely accepted indices for comparing different communities’ ecologies or determining whether information flow within a particular community is improving or degrading. Communities need measure of both kinds. If activists, policy makers, and the general public had more concrete ways of describing, measuring and comparing the systems of community news and information flow, it would be much easier to mobilize public interest around community information needs.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the Knight Commission and continues to sponsor its ongoing work to implement the 15 Commission recommendations, is currently at work to develop better tools to measure the information health of communities. (As a precursor to Knight’s current work, see Esther Thorson & Eric Newton’s paper, “Indexing Community Information Needs in a Democracy,” which contains a checklist outlining some basic requirements for community information needs.) The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, which provided the institutional home of the Knight Commission, has commissioned a series of white papers on various aspects of  building healthy information communities. (These will be published in Fall 2010.) In the meantime, KnightComm.org is collecting information about and links to community information case studies and updating the list here.

Our aim is to use crowd sourcing and collaborative methods to tease out a template that will be a useful resource for hosting public conversations and community information summits and assessing the information resources available. Because this is only a starting point, we need your help to grow this list. Post information and links about community information assessments in the comments section below, or send me an email at garmer@aspeninstitute.org with sample documents, links or  other resources for assessing community information resources and I’ll add the information.

The Community Information Ecosystem Assessments below highlights published case studies of projects that have inventoried all or part of the information and media-related resources that exist in the community.

Additionally, there is a growing number of local and regional conversations about strengthening  the information environment and creating more engaged communities, such as those convened by Journalism That Matters in Seattle and Detroit. These convenings–billed as summits, conferences, “unconferences”,  gatherings, conversations or other titles–can be invaluable to the understanding of the community’s information ecosystem and lay the groundwork for more rigorous, detailed case studies. Thus, I’ve started a second list below of Community Information Summits and Conversations.

This is most certainly a work in progress, not a finished product. Neither list is intended to be exhaustive and I’m sure there are many endeavors which we’ve missed that deserve to be included. This is why collaborative technologies and crowd sourcing techniques are so important–please join our effort to build up this database of information!

Take a look at what others are doing in their communities to mobilize public interest in creating more informed communities. Share with us what’s happening in your own community. And join us in highlighting new and ongoing projects that measure and improve the information health of America’s communities.
Community Information Ecosystem Assessments (by state)

Illinois | Chicago
The New News: Journalism We Want and Need
Community Media Workshop commissioned by The Chicago Community Trust, June 2009.
Economic pressures on one hand and continuing democratization of news on the other
have already changed the news picture in Chicago, as elsewhere in the U.S.

Maryland | Baltimore
How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, January 11, 2010.
The study suggests that while the news landscape has rapidly expanded, most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media—particularly newspapers.

Oregon | Portland
City of Portland Social Media Conversation Audit
Jamie Beckland, White Horse (digital marketing agency), Portland, Oregon, December 2009.
Study finds local blogs beating legacy media on substantive policy discussions.

Pennsylvania | Philadelphia
Exploring a Networked Journalism Collaborative in Philadelphia
Jan Schaeffer, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, April 2010.
The city is awash in media and technological assets that can pioneer a new Golden Era of Journalism.

Pennsylvania | Scranton
An Information Community Case Study: Scranton
Jessica Durkin and Tom Glaisyer, New America Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative, May 2010 (release 1.0).
An industrial city with a media ecosystem yet to take advantage of digital opportunities.

Washington | Seattle
An Information Community Case Study: Seattle
Jessica Durkin, Tom Glaisyer, Kara Hadge, New America Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative, May 2010 (release 1.0).
A digital community still in transition.

Community Information Summits and Conversations (by date)

Re-imagining News & Community in the Pacific Northwest, Journalism That Matters, Seattle, Washington, January 7-10, 2010.

Meeting the Information Needs of Southwestern Vermont, Shires Media Partnership, Inc., Bennington Free Library, Bennington, Vermont, January 24, 2010.

Creating an Online Community Hub, Bill Densmore and Gail Burns, Williamstown, Massachusetts, March 1, 2010. See http://williamstownbeat.org/.

Informing Scranton: Gauging Community News and Information Needs, Jessica Durkin/University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania, March 3, 2010.

Create or Die, Journalism That Matters, Detroit, Michigan, June 3-6, 2010.

Related posts:

1. How ‘healthy’ is Scranton’s news and information system?
2. How Will Comcast Ruling Affect the Information Health of Communities?
3. Close-up on Seattle: Local Blogs and Community Collaboration