4. Building On Transparency
One piece of the post-conference JTMPNW agenda is an initiative titled Building On Transparency. It seeks to heighten collaboration between community interests and public bodies in the Northwest, around more abundant and better-organized government information.
Helping hyper-local bloggers learn to find and use online public documents, databases and data sets – and educating high school and college students about these tools – is one aim of a Building on Transparency pilot project called Public Data Ferret.
Public Data Ferret is a database searchable by jurisdiction and topic, which highlights neutral, blogged synopses of public documents and data from city and regional governments in King County, plus the state and federal governments. Links to original sources are always included.
Public Data Ferret is an independent informational project of Countywide Community Forums (CCF) - – which is a privately underwritten public engagement project bringing together citizen advisers and King County government. CCF Director and Public Data Ferret founder Matt Rosenberg has begun leading educational conversations about open government with high school and college classes in the greater Seattle region and has begun a regular weekly radio segment about the work at Public Data Ferret, on KOMO-AM 1000, Seattle’s leading news radio station. The debut segment, including audio and transcript, is here:
Over time, JTMPNW’s Building On Transparency working group plans to enrich the news ecosystem of the region in ways that highlight the ongoing and vital importance of community journalism. This will include modeling the tracking of local and regional governments in part by utilizing online resources, and will also entail the encouragment and mentoring of current and new community journalists.
Also sought out will be content-expert contributors to the regional news ecosystem from outside traditional journalism environments. At a time when the staffing and reach of legacy print media continues to contract, well-trained community journalists are an urgently needed civic resource.
Building On Transparency hopes to develop a best practices guide for local and regional public bodies on open government, including emphasis on online information and its organization.
Links to:
Countywide Communication Forums
Contact Matt Rosenberg
"Building on Transparency" supports the Knight Commission objectives
The Knight Commission recommended pursuing three fundamental objectives for achieving its vision of informed communities. All three are supported by the JTMPNW Transparency in Action initiative. The objectives are:
* Maximizing the availability of relevant and credible information to communities. The availability of relevant and credible information implies creation, distribution, and preservation. Information flow improves when people have not only direct access to information, but the benefit also of credible intermediaries to help discover, gather, compare, contextualize, and share information.
* Strengthening the capacity of individuals to engage with information. This includes the ability to communicate one’s information, creations and views to others. Attending to capacity means that people have access to the tools they need and opportunities to develop their skills to use those tools effectively as both producers and consumers of information.
* Promoting individual engagement with information and the public life of the community. Promoting engagement means generating opportunities and motivation for involvement. Citizens should have the capacity, both individually and in groups, to help shoulder responsibility for community self-governance.
This JTMPNW initiative also supports the Commission Recommendation 4:
Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.
The Commission observed:
Public information belongs to the public. Governments at all levels should adopt a theme implicit in the remarks of many Commission witnesses: “Make information available; people will find ways to use it productively.”