Today at the Knight Digital Media Center, I wrote about new advocacy/awareness tool from Sunshine Week: a model proclamation that news orgs and other activists/advocates can customize, publish, and challenge specific government officials and agencies to adopt. It gets into specifics, at least to some extent.

See: Sunshine Week shows how to call for open government

It’s a good start, but here’s what else I’d love to see from Sunshine Week…

I’d really love it if they called for no more pdf-format publishing of government documents with arcane meaningless titles and no useful metadata. (City of Oakland, are you listening? Nah, I didn’t think so….)

…OK, personally I’m skeptical of the value of proclamations, even ones that call for specific actions. What I’d really love to see from Sunshine Week is an online interactive database where people and groups could file public incident reports about specific examples of government opacity or obstructionism, so we can track this issue better.

President Obama announced this initiative last week. The intent is to bring wireless broadband to 98% of Americans. That’s great, but my point is: What if most of the people in range of those networks can’t afford to use them fully, or at all?

This is likely, since the new Open Internet Rules passed last December by the FCC largely exempt US wireless carriers from key net neutrality requirements. This leaves the door open for wireless carriers to charge mobile customers extra to access just about any site or service at an acceptable speed.

In my article, I explain how that might happen, and what it could mean for people who can’t afford to take full advantage of those networks.

‘The Social Strip’ – Nic Adler on Social Media for Community Development

We’re approaching this from the perspective of empowering Oaklanders to be able to wield influence on how police operate in their neighborhoods. There’s been a lot of friction and violence, and community members have often felt powerless on this front.

So here’s what I’ve written so far on this topic:

• Police misconduct in Oakland? How to file a complaint (includes embedded forms, which can be a bit hard to find on the City’s site)
• Experts, community discuss how to combat race bias in Oakland policing

Also, today Eric Arnold published an excellent overview of what Oakland’s Citizens Police Review Board is and how it works:

• Inside police accountability: An interview with Oakland CPRB Acting Manager Patrick Caceres

Much more to come on this front. Stay tuned!

Got accessibility? Mobile-friendly sites also help disabled users

It was sparked by a new Pew report on problems that people with disabilities have with accessing the net. I found a couple of interesting twists.

1st: US DOJ has proposed new ADA regs for web sites, including “public accommodations” (hm, could include news sites?)

2nd: Making a site mobile-friendly goes a long way toward making it more accessible.

This subject is near and dear to my heart since one of my best friends, who is mostly blind, has faced significant struggles in getting access to services, information, education, and opportunities online and elsewhere. That has definitely hurt not only his quality of life, but his health. And he’s fairly tech-savvy! This is a problem that needs to be solved, and going mobile-friendly is one main way to start.

I wrote more about this for the Knight Digital Media Center at USC site: US Census upgrades American FactFinder tool, new data coming soon | Knight Digital Media Center.

Recently I wrote about how a Los Angeles Police Dept. geocoding data glitch yielded inaccurate crime maps at LAPDcrimemaps.org and the database-powered network of hyperlocal sites, Everyblock.

On Apr. 8, Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty blogged about the two ways his company is addressing the problem of inaccurate geodata.

1. Latitude/longitude crosschecking. “From now on, rather than relying blindly on our data sources’ longitude/latitude points, we cross-check those points with our own geocoding of the address provided. If the LAPD’s geocoding for a particular crime is significantly off from our own geocoder’s results, then we won’t geocode that crime at all, and we publish a note on the crime page that explains why a map isn’t available. (If you’re curious, we’re using 375 meters as our threshold. That is, if our own geocoder comes up with a point more than 375 meters away from the point that LAPD provides, then we won’t place the crime on a map, or on block/neighborhood pages.)
2. Surfacing ungeocoded data. “Starting today, wherever we have aggregate charts by neighborhood, ZIP or other boundary, we include the number, and percentage, of records that couldn’t be geocoded. Each location chart has a new “Unknown” row that provides these figures. Note that technically this figure includes more than nongeocodable records — it also includes any records that were successfully geocoded but don’t lie in any neighborhood. For example, in our Philadelphia crime section, you can see that one percent of crime reports in the last 30 days are in an ‘unknown’ neighborhood; this means those 35 records either couldn’t be geocoded or lie outside any of the Philadelphia neighborhood boundaries that we’ve compiled.”

These strategies could — and probably should — be employed by any organization publishing online maps that rely on government or third-party geodata.

Holovaty’s post also includes a great plain-language explanation of what geodata really is and how it works in practical terms. This is the kind of information that constitutes journalism 101 in the online age.

(NOTE: I originally published this post in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

gov20planners

Several planners of the recent Government 2.0 camp (By Patrick at work, via Flickr)

There is a movement afoot among government employees to use “social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more effective, efficient and collaborative U.S. government on all levels.” It’s called Government 2.0, and it could end up being very useful for journalists, citizens, and government officials and employees.

Members of this movement held a lively and productive unconference, Government 2.0 camp, in late March in Washington, D.C. The Twitter stream for the hashtags #gov20camp and #gov20 are still going strong.

Personally, I find this movement remarkable and encouraging. One of the great difficulties citizens encounter in learning about or interacting with their government has been the top-down, silo-focused, and generally tight-lipped or obfuscatory approach typical of government communication…

While there is often good reason for government officials to be cautious and circumspect in their communication, not being able to speak plainly, collaborate easily, or respond quickly often frustrates government employees as much as journalists or citizens. Also, as the comments to the field manual for Government 2.0 camp, many government employees also are frustrated with their own access barriers — like not being able to access Facebook from work (even when it’s work-related).

If you cover the government and use online or social media, I’d recommend following this effort and participating in discussions. That’s the best way to make sure that, if this movement gains traction under the Obama Administration and in state and local governments, it will benefit the practice of journalism as well as direct interaction with government. Check out the Government 2.0 Facebook group.

On Twitter, the key Government 2.0 people to follow are Peter Corbett (corbett3000), Mark Drapeau (cheeky_geeky), Maxine Teller (mixtmedia) and EPA director of Web communications Jeffrey Levy (levyj413).

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits)

lacrime

LAPDcrimemaps.org has some recently revealed geodata flaws.

Crime maps are one of the most popular and (in urban areas) ubiquitous types of geo-enabled local news — and they’re a staple of the Knight News Challenge-funded project Everyblock. This data comes from local police departments — but how reliable is it?

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reported a problem with the Los Angeles Police Department’s online crime map, launched three years ago…

“LAPDcrimemaps.org is offered to the public as a way to track crimes near specific addresses in the city of Los Angeles. Most of the time that process worked fine. But when it failed, crimes were often shown miles from where they actually occurred.

“Unable to parse the intersection of Paloma Street and Adams Boulevard, for instance, the computer used a default point for Los Angeles, roughly 1st and Spring streets. Mistakes could have the effect of masking real crime spikes as well as creating false ones.”

Apparently the LAPD wast not aware of the error until alerted by the Times…

LAPD spokeswoman Mary Grady told the Times that “the department will work with its contractor to make the map as accurate as current technology allows.”

Also, the Times reported: “Alerted to the findings, Lightray Productions, the contractor that designed the LAPD site at a cost of at least $362,000, has promised to fix the problems. …One reason the errors were not caught earlier may be that the LAPD site retains crimes for only six months and allows viewers to see only a seven-day period at a time. The presentation makes some trends, such as the large accumulation of crimes mapped at Civic Center, more difficult to spot.”

Distorted or erroneous geodata, especially from official sources like police departments, can have ripple effects. In this case the LAPD crime data was automatically pulled into, and displayed by, Everyblock — an experimental project funded by the Knight News Challenge. (UPDATE: Everyblock has since implemented some corrective measures to spot and fix source geodata problems in its crime maps.)

In the All Points Blog from Directions Magazine, Adena Schutzberg noted:

“While the Times article highlights some key points about the process of geocoding and why the error was not found sooner (the app only shows data back a week, making such spikes less obvious) it missed out on some other points including:

• Different applications use different geocoding algorithms.
• Different applications use different data against which to geocode.
• Sharing raw data (vs. maps) can help identify such errors.

Schutzberg concluded: “My main question is this: Everyblock took the same data feed for its L.A. maps, and it seems, ended up with same inaccuracies. Is that because they use the same geocoding and data against which to geocode? That’s not clear from the Times article.”

If your news organization is using geodata to create interactive online features, you might want to consider ways to double-check for possible accuracy issues, perhaps by checking the results yielded by a different tool set to see if and how it handled the data differently.

(NOTE: I originally published a slightly different version of this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Hat tip to Adam Glenn