Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

[Note: This post is one of a series that will document Scranton’s information ecosystem and how it is changing.]

Scranton, PA – One of the tests for an informed public advanced by the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is: Does the community have at least one high-quality online hub?

Until 2009, the newspaper of record here avoided the drastic cuts already underway or completed in other metro area, and each of the three major commercial television networks aired local news. But by spring, the family-owned Scranton Times-Tribune would reduce its staff by 15 percent through buyouts and layoffs (I was among those laid off), and CBS affiliate WYOU replaced its lagging local newscasts with Judge Judy and Hollywood Insider.

I have spent the last few months (with my colleagues Nick, Kara, Amanda, and Molly) populating a database with information that seeks to describe local information communities. The objective is to provide a qualitative understanding of the information health of a community. This data will take some time to consolidate and share, but I wanted to provide an example of one city councilor working in one city council in one state. It’s not sensible to draw strong conclusions about this example, but it suggests to me an interesting future.

There’s nothing especially unusual about Pepper Pike City, Ohio. It’s a small community—smaller than average, perhaps, at a population around 6,000—outside Cleveland, with weekly town meetings, a public library, local school system, a budget to balance, and, one imagines, the occasional broken street lamp to fix. But it also has plenty of concerned citizens, who not only want their community to be able to afford gas for snow plows, to give a recent example, but also want their neighbors to weigh in on their own budgeting priorities, to have a voice in the proceedings whether or not they make it to the town meeting.

The long awaited Open Government Directive was launched at 11am this morning. No hoopla, just three passionate protagonists sitting in front of the White House equivalent of a webcam oozing enthusiasm for a policy change they clearly think is transformational.

You could be forgiven for wondering if issuing it with 12 hours notice and holding the interview 30 minutes before a speech by the President on the economy suggests it isn't thought important. My guess is that the White House thinks that for a directive that is most interesting to information geeks it's nigh on impossible to launch it to the big wide world without sounding nerdy. Launching it to the people that care (and do they care - Did you see that twitter and facecbook stream of questions!) is probably your best approach.

They want the public to focus on how government is better once it is launched. A laudable aim (more on that below) though my interest is more for signs that this might have an impact an democracy in our digital age than governmental efficiency.