Public Input: How Do You Get Local Information?

PBS Engage is partnering with the Knight Commission to seek public input and offer an interactive experience at www.pbs.org/publicinput from Tuesday April 21 – Friday May 8, 2009. Here are the questions and my responses to them. Please add your input even if it is only to answer one or two of the five questions.

1. Where do you find your information? Newspapers? Online? Television? Radio? What kinds of information do you wish you could find more easily?

I use National Public Radio and internet news sites (mostly the New York Times and Washington Post) for national and global news. I use town newspaper (South County Independent) and regional newspapers (Providence Journal) and some internet blogs for local news. However, regarding local news I do not have a general sense that I am informed about what I need to know.

2. In your local community, what kinds of information do you need to inform the decisions you make, and improve your understanding of the community in which you live? (For example, information about local election issues and candidates, the quality of schools, social services, tax assessments, etc.) Is it difficult to find the information you need?

There are many notices of public events and actions but no single means of discovering them or aggregating them. The municipal legal notices are published in a newspaper I do not read. I have no children in the public schools and so school events and actions are not communicated to me. Municipal meetings are limited to in-person participation; there is no means of effectively communicating one's position due to the 48 hour meeting notice lead time and no means of timely reviewing meetings after the fact -- minutes are not posted online for weeks, if ever, and there is no video/audio. Facebook and blogs help but notice of events and actions is very fragmented.

3. Local newspapers have always been distributors of information and catalysts for civic involvement, but as traditional forms of media evolve (and in some cases close shop), how can local governments improve public access to the information communities need?

I have written about this in the blog http://southkingstownrinow.blogspot.com/. The best way is to require all activities and digital artifacts of municipal and school administrations be created and maintained online. There they automatically can become open records. Administrative action is then necessary only to redact records. With the raw data available, community members can use the existing internet tools to assemble news and events feeds for themselves and others.

4. Do you think everyone in your community has access to the networks they need (online or in-person) to find important information? How would you improve the skills of people of all ages to take advantage of online information tools and networks?

Everyone has a cell phone. This is an information device. This device is becoming more capable every year. The cell networks are further reaching every year. It is this mobile platform that should be used for current awareness. A desktop/laptop computer should be used for long term awareness.

5. How would you improve the quality of information available to the general public? (For example, do you have ideas for making government more transparent or strengthening institutions that help distribute information, like libraries or news organizations?)

Having the information online is inevitable. What is less obvious is how we will make it discoverable and usable. The discovery can be addressed, in part, by search but without good cataloging a found item's context will be unknown. If the found item uses a data format not accessible to me (because I lack the tools) then it is useless. Further, if the data does not speak to me in my context -- poor and functionally illiterate and only able to use the most basic of diagrammatic, numerical, and written narratives vs the author of this posting -- then it continues to be useless. There needs to be public and private support for a new societal role of data librarian -- one part cataloger, one part arbitrator, and one part translator.