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.
There are some occasions in DC that find others 
