It’s kind of a no-brainer: journalists with big, heavily trafficked news/community sites stand to get “free content” via increasing “gov2.0″ data dissemination–pure primary source material for newspapers to analyse openly with/for their audiences, if their web teams are up to it.

Just up on DIYcity.org (John Geraci of Outside.in started this super project) …

DIYcity Challenge #7: Open Data!
http://diycity.org/challenge/diycity-challenge-7-open-data

“Lots of city agencies all over the world have data online that is accessible to humans in readable format, yet isn’t accessible to other computers and programs via an API. Some agencies don’t have the means to turn their data into an API, others don’t have the inclination to do so.

Can we help these agencies to open their data?

DIYcity Challenge #7: build a site scraper for the website of a city agency in your city that scrapes data, dumps it into a database, and offers that to everyone in API format.

Do not violate any copyrights for this challenge – please only scrape publicly accessible government data, not data from 3rd party sites.

DIYcity can help host any scraping bots, databases and APIs that come out of this challenge. Or just point us to a dataset you’ve scraped and we’ll make a list in the wiki.”

In my subsequent report, Research as Organizing Tool, I elaborate on these findings for the benefit of those who often feel adrift in a sea of useless information and propaganda. In my essay, The Public Health Model, I explain that the reason useful research is held in such low regard is largely due to the ineffective models of engagement the politically illiterate bring to civic affairs.

Best, Peter

Thanks Donica. That’s the point I tried to make in Part I. And while Amy’s comment remains true that “We’ve largely shifted to (third parties/journalists’) shoulders most responsibility to clue us in when something is brewing in government,” it’s not for no reason that’s happened.

Maybe as a journo I’m just too inside the forest to see anything but the trees. There can be other, more direct ways to connect users to information, but with increased transparency in journalism we can offer more of those connections without inserting ourselves as filters.

…They’re doing this by starting from the question “What kind of information do communities need?”

Sounds right.

If we believe the problem is citizens not getting the right information or it not being delivered in user-friendly ways, we’ll have to make a convincing argument about why and how more information is going to make a difference.

One model of democracy assumes people are interested citizens who seek information to develop rational opinions about public affairs. Other models show that people form emotional and personal interests in a subject and then seek information — not the other way around. As Schudson describes it, they use the media for monitorial purposes — turning to the news when something of high personal interest happens but otherwise paying only enough attention to know if the world is blowing up or not. This sounds a little like the “democracy radar” you describe.

I wonder, given the evolution of networks and groups, whether speaking at the level of “communities” and “people” is specific enough to be useful anymore. It sounds a little like the mass media model, assuming a public “out there” that we only imagine but doesn’t really exist. If publics are becoming more fluid and responsive to specific issues, perhaps we need more journalism that recognizes and supports this development.