Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

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.

Why do I know this? Well, Jill Miller Zimon updates me at least twice a week on her blog (as you might expect, her blog supports engagement with her through all the fashionable media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and sometimes her constituents chime in, too. More than that, though, she posts in a Google calendar the Council meeting schedule and writes regular blog posts both about the issues facing the Council and also her efforts as a councilor. Jill Miller Zimon sat down with a former city council member on Sunday, February 14th, working side by side on her laptop updating the city website. Her efforts aren’t just transparent; they’re also collaborative. We’ll have more to say about Pepper Pike City in the future, but it is clear to me that as much as we need to care about journalism and how much access can be provided (broadband is key), sometimes we forget that individuals can make a difference.

Now back to that database.