Active Citizens in a Digital Age Embracing Organized Complexity

Week 5 of the Active Citizen in a Digital Age course sought to develop an understanding of how we can engage directly with our political systems using the Internet and digital tools so as to develop an understanding of the ways in which they are changing democracy. Part of this is understanding how to make sense of news in the digital age, so one can be informed and hopefully use credible information for political action.

The course is mostly concerned with advocacy in the support or opposition of government action and how civil society does this.  Civil society, according to the course, “…Can be thought of as the place where minorities are protected, galvanized, organized, and gain access to the systems of government.” This is put in contrast to the fundamental principle that democracies are run by majority opinions. 

The question arises though, if civil society is working to protect the democratic rights of minorities, then why does civil society have to work in opposition to the government in this aspect? Because certain portions of civil society support those actions of government. Does this mean that portion of civil society has the majority opinion and vote? No, it could be a matter of structural components of the system, e.g., Gerrymandering or situationally induced views that can change when circumstances change. One shouldn't think of majority as monolithic or opinions as concrete.

Even in the digital age, with so many ways of engaging it is still a matter of real world organizing, communicating, funding, campaigning and finally voting.  Some of which is done in person, much of which can now be done digitally. In some cases being simply digital versions of these basic activities. For example, Turbovote, which provides election reminders, gets people registered to vote and applications for absentee ballots and the already NCP wiki featured MapLight which provides information on political funding. On the NCP Kumu map, MapLight is directly related to Transparency and Open Data in Government, making it an important tool in ensuring credible information for political action but one that needs to be used in conjunction with other resources. 

It has long been held by this blog that governance is different from government.  The former being a social activity taken on by a community and the latter being the establishment of institutions to implement those activities. The course differentiates between the outside-in relationships of civil society with government institutions and the inside-out relationships of government institutions with civil society.  This configuration already sets up a biased relationship conceding a greater centrality and implied ascendancy of power to the government institution diminishing democratic intent. 

Outside-in functions by civil society to influence government, besides the more formal civic functions, include easy actions such as gathering signatures for petitions or the use of hashtags on social media content. Digital makes obtaining a large number of signatures or retweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook far more possible but let us keep in mind Zeynep Tufekci warning about Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win from the last blog post. 

Digital tools can go beyond this though. They can be used to organize people, help them communicate with each other and with the broader system in which they exist. This has been true for both sides of the political spectrum from the Tea Party in 2010 to progressives marching in the streets today. 

The political agenda may be different but the digital tools remain the same. Groups like Indivisible are featured in the newly created Advocacy For and By Community wiki page which is explained more fully here. The course cites Kathryn Schulz’s New York Times article reminding us that in our digitally driven world, one of the oldest ways and powerful medium to make your voices heard is to contact your elected representatives by calling them (actually phones have gone digital as well). Using digital tools can help your organization or group grow to a larger size much more quickly but it also lets those in opposition to you know what you are doing by the digital trails that you leave.

Inside out, government institutions provide public services to those in civil society but they don't necessarily do so equitably and can become entrenched over time. The means by which governments interact with its citizens has changed because of civic tech, technology in the civic space. This again differentiates between civil society and civic space as was discussed before but now with a digital component. 

The nature of these digital programs can depend upon from which perspective they are being created.  These changes are often not initiated by governments from the inside-out. Many arise in the civil society sector to make government more transparent and accessible like Public.Resources.org.

“What Public Resources dot org is doing is literally making the public law public.”  

The OSET Foundation builds digital into the infrastructure of our democracy through open source election technology. It sets the standards for voting systems around the world to help re-establish trust in voting, our most basic democratic function. It is not a government institution but a nonprofit election technology research institute.

The course continued to warn about dangers inherent with using digital technology by examining the impact upon politics and democracy. Stating, it has the potential to empower the voiceless, actually a debatable statement. The course didn’t use potential as a modifier rather presuming the concept, empower can convey the sense that someone with power delegates to someone without power (more so in the UK) and it often isn’t a matter of the powerless being voiceless but the powerful being purposely deaf. Still, many who did not have access to making their voices heard now have multiple pathways that they can take but then so do all the other voices benign or malignant. 

The Internet makes increasingly obsolete what the course called the intermediaries, political parties, legacy media, and my addition institutions of government which created the barriers and therefore the power pockets of the pre-Internet world. Intermediaries are still necessary today but now they can make connections increasing the power of others.  This is a transition from scarcity to abundance, invoking one of NCP’s more controversial ideas. The course though may give the impression that this happens far more easily than happens in reality. One person having access to millions is one thing, one person among millions having access to millions is another thing. 

Other dangers arising from the Internet include lack of access to reliable information to make informed choices are examined in Can Democracy Survive the Internet.  This NPR Radio program features both the author of the original article, Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University and  Zeynep Tufekci discussing this more deeply. These dangers can be made worse with the excess virility of information including the creation of “fake news”. Even foreign governments have increased capacity to influence our elections by injecting “fake news” into the discourses. 

“One of the difficulties in defining “fake news” is that one person’s propaganda is another person’s persuasion.”

The other two concerns with the Internet were echo chambers and privacy. These may actually feed into each other. There is not only, no civil society space, on the Internet, there is also no individual privacy on the Internet as was also discussed previously. There is, therefore, no community on the Internet save what trust we place in other people. Allowing for the privacy of others because they allow for our privacy, we also trust in their authenticity as they trust in ours. A lack of authenticity or anonymity may disclose not only a lack of conviction but even a lack of humanity.

The course places the responsibility of this primarily on the individual, particularly the individuals taking the course. The course seemed to emphasize community joined efforts in the background readings but more individualistic endeavors in the videos and assignments. 

On an individual basis, efforts can only be aggregated as a statistical class. To allow for collaboration to create meaningful change requires some level of community. The transition from aggregated individuals to collaborative socialization moves the community from disorganized but predictable and manageable complexity to organized complexity, difficult to predict, less manageable but creative (see Science and Complexity - Warren Weaver). 

As the course states, people do need to be careful as to what actions they take on the Internet, whether directly through blog posts or the creation of apps or indirectly through retweets and Facebook likes. The problem is that the advice came across as a discouragement. The problem with that advice is that only those taking the course would be following it. Those creating or propagating fake new have no such stipulation. This cannot be effectively countered with only the cumulative efforts of individuals. This doesn’t mean not taking any actions. It requires community or as Jane Jacobs saw it a level of organized complexity. Jane Jacobs concept of eyes on the street could also be applied to the Internet. The more people see something or are made aware of it, the harder it is to purge from social consciousness and the more it can grow to create new paradigms for the community. 

Finding More Pathways for Vehicles of Change

This blog post is going to be a continuation of the last, adding more online resources to the New Community Paradigms Wiki and again provide associated locations on the NCP Wiki Map.

Because New Community Paradigms doesn’t configure community governance functions in the same manner as traditional hierarchical, largely in separate silos, top-down command structures many of its approaches are means or process oriented rather than goal oriented.

One example is Community Management and Technology, the map of which displays a number of different approaches to addressing social problems. Among these are Community Tech Tools map.

Community Tool Box is a free, online resource offering thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities to those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. Over 300 educational modules and other free tools for community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, advocacy, and other aspects of community practice.

Poplus is about sharing code so that every organization using digital technologies to hold governments to account, challenging corruption, and demand the right to transparency doesn’t have to write their software from scratch

Another pathway is Systems Thinking Approaches, the map of which tied directly to Systems Thinking but bridges to Community Management and Technology through Systems Thinking Theories, Methods and Tools Table which is seen as being related in turn to Change Management and Processes, a bridge, as reflected in the narrative section to the left between Community Change Agencies, Systems Thinking, Change Management and Technology and Asset Based Community Development.

A new resource under the Systems Thinking Online Training, Books, and Methods section is the updated Beyond Connecting the Dots (Now free and downloadable Mac and Windows)

Beyond Connecting the Dots is a new kind of book on Systems Thinking and Modeling. Rather than being constrained by the printed page, it runs digitally on your computer or your tablet. Because of this, it can provide you an exciting experience that goes beyond the printed word. The models in the book are truly interactive and you can directly experiment with them within the book as you read about them.

Online Version: http://read.beyondconnectingthedots.com/
User Name: reader
Password: feedback

Community Arts has been featured before, its map connecting to Soul of the Community. Storytelling and Social Change: A Strategy Guide | Working Narratives with communities to tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy by drawing on participants’ personal experiences and local cultures. By telling stories—whether in the form of performance, radio, video, or other media—communities build power, envision new democratic possibilities, and change culture and policy. Their work is located at the intersection of arts, technology, and social change.

Design Thinking was also connected with Collective Impact as reflected on the map. A new resource is Design Impact, a non-profit social innovation firm made up of designers, community development practitioners, social entrepreneurs, and educators. Their mission is to: • INCUBATE projects that transform communities, • EQUIP leaders with social innovation tools, and • ADVANCE methods of creative community change.

Transparency and Open Data in Governance are seen as a bridge from Governance linking particularly to National and State Movements, to Community Management and Technology linking to Maplight. The recent elections arguably make this all the more important.

Open Government Partnership is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a Steering Committee including representatives of governments and civil society organizations. This version of the Advancing Open and Citizen-Centered Government | whitehouse.gov, however, is an archived historical material from the Obama administration that will not longer be updated. The Trump administration version will be linked to once it is made available.

In the third Open Government National Action Plan, the Administration both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered. The plan includes new and impactful steps the Administration is taking to openly and collaboratively deliver government services and to support open government efforts across the country. These efforts prioritize a citizen-centric approach to government, including improved access to publicly available data to provide everyday Americans with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions.

Data Journalism and Community Information is seen as being associated Civil Society within the map while being related to Transparency and Open Data in Government in Governance.

Doubtful News’ “Beyond Doubtful” list of no-go-to sources | Doubtful News is the latest new resource.

Doubtful News’ “Beyond Doubtful” list of no-go-to sources The purpose of Doubtful News is to expose questionable claims in stories you find on the internet. Mostly we deal with major news outlets because those are the stories that people will search on to find additional information. We get those searchers who then can see some science-based, rational takes on paranormal, anomalies and alternative subjects in the news.

The final addition is Data Sources also under Community Management and Technology under the map. The Overview | National Equity Atlas is an introduction. More is expected to be rolled out related to this new and expanding resource in the future.

The National Equity Atlas is a living resource, and our team is working to add new data and functionality to this site and produce new equity analyses that inform action. 

The Pew Center on Open Data, Whether Half Full or Half Empty, What's the Next Half of the Journey?

This post will be a slight detour from the pathway being taken by the previous two NCP posts concerned with Collective Impact. The Facebook group Open Government and Civic Technology - (The global #opengov group) recently had a post on Americans’ Views on Open Government Data | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and provided different views on the topic.

This brought to mind the past NCP blog post, Open Data as End and Means of Civic Disruptive Innovation, as well as the wiki-page that arose later, Transparency and Open Data in Governance and related blog post, Open Data - Left or Right, Inside or Outside, Works for Creating New Community Paradigms.

The Facebook post was submitted by Alex Howard of @digiphile, who also wrote 15 key insights from the Pew Internet and Life Project on the American public, open data and open government | E Pluribus Unum. According to the Sunlight Foundation Blog's perspective, “New Pew study: Public is optimistic about open government and open data”. In his Civic Innovations blog post, “Hearts and Minds and Open Data” writer Mark Headd wrote that it, "suggests a tremendous opportunity for organizers working in cities across the country to engage people to use data for new apps, services and visualizations." Steven Clift of the E-Democracy Forum and @democracy saw, “this survey as a huge wake up call to #opengov advocates on the #opendata side that the field needs to provide far more useful stuff to the general public and care a lot more about outreach and marketing to reach people with the good stuff already available.” Alex Howard also did a follow-up post, “Half empty or half full? Mixed reactions to Pew research on open data and open government” which extended the variety of perspectives even further.

Whether half full or half empty, it still puts us at being not any more than half way done. The question is being done with what? If it is transforming our means of democracy then this should be seen as nothing more than getting our foot in the door.

It has to be kept in mind that for the most part, especially in terms of truly impactful engagement and empowerment, we are on the outside of often entrenched systems of community governance. Did anybody think that the entrenched systems of bureaucratic, political power would fade away when enough apps became available?

Open data does not mean easily accessible or willingly shared. The need remains to penetrate the walls of entrenched bureaucratic, political systems often putting such efforts, and therefore the needed design focus of app developers, closer to that of community data journalists. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to become a local community data journalist. It does mean creating platforms to move from community data to community information and on to community wisdom, but open data and apps alone will not accomplish that, far deeper systemic transformation is needed

Most of the community and civic related technological innovations have been of the sustaining variety, for the most part sustaining the status quo, making changes on the edges. Significant examples of change can be found, yet for people to reach a tipping point to bring about true transformation, not only what they do but how they do it and why they to it, we need something much closer to disruptive innovations.

That pathway is a much longer haul, still being explored and requiring more steps. It will also require greater use of design thinking, not only to improve the user interface with an app within particular systems, but also within larger scalable, community based, collaborative efforts such as Collective Impact or upcoming The Next Systems Project in deeply understanding the needs of the community.

The Knight Digital Media Center believes that design thinking can develop better solutions for community organizations, especially foundations, and community media. Design thinking as used by design firms such as IDEO and others is based on a human-centered, design-based approach to helping public and private sector organizations innovate and grow.

Design thinking can help community foundations frame the question, “How might we craft information solutions that meet the deepest needs of our community?” It is done, according to the Knight article, “Can design thinking power better solutions for community foundations?”, by diving deep with small groups of people, to really understand their day-to-day behavior, their context, how they feel, what they do and how, instead of talking with a scientifically representative sample. The Stanford University d-school approach makes going even further explicit, drilling down to the individual. Looking for extreme users to understand the experiences of people at the statistical edges is also insightful. “The idea is that people who are in extreme positions one way or the other are exhibiting needs more acutely than the average person,” said Andrew Haeg, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University. “If you can talk to them they're going to help you understand problems that a lot of other people share or help you understand dynamics that are shared by a lot of other people."

The next question is how to apply this to communities? The Incourage Community Foundation’s initial goal of working with the community of Wisconsin Rapids on developing new ways of listening, talking and interacting, to encourage a culture ripe for self-organizing and collective action, was through adaptive skills but the foundation’s work quickly began incorporating design thinking which increased the impact of their work with residents. Applying adaptive skills prepared the ground so that a human-centered design approach created deep roots helping to transform the people and the culture of the place where they worked and lived. As sharing and spreading lessons about the resident-centered process with other organizations was seen as an important objective, a defining question then became: “How do we nurture the demand for information in the community?“

This started my thinking about Alex Howard's response to a Facebook comment with better questions. “A majority of American adults use open data in apps and services but do not realize that they do so. Do people need to be ‘engaged’ to find use in it, even if they're unaware? More broadly, under what conditions would providing access to data created with public funds to the public be a useless idea?"

The last NCP post addressed the need to be 'engaged' question. Apps and services using open data can be applied to all levels of Increasing Engagement (Kumu map). This would also include adding the concept of community attachment to that list. This still leaves open the question as to how to move people up the list to true engagement and beyond to empowerment. There isn't likely to be any sort of tipping point though if those using the apps, those curating the apps, and those designing the apps are focused only on specific grass-top organizations.

For New Community Paradigms, an ideal approach would be a bottom up one endeavoring to build a viable civic network by being able to follow these Tips from Beth Kanter and find local data nerds and build a local data hub, again from | Knight Digital Media Center. While this approach still focuses on grass-top organizations like nonprofits, it does attempt to reach into the community. Kanter's original post suggested setting up something like Chicago CivicWorks' online services, mobile apps, reports, or local services accessed by interactive text messaging and provided 10 strategies for finding volunteers and others to assist with data projects.

There is also the need for better community related content creation that is not only transparent but also factual, meaningful and viable. Again, from the Knight Digital Media Center, Public Lab’s DIY science plugs community into civic decisionmaking. Using low-cost tools, Public Lab is able to inject community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental concerns. Public Lab lists scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. It also puts accessible tools into the hands of the community not only resulting in good solid data being collected the tools themselves become self-replicating and viral through the provision of hand drawn, illustrated guides on how to create them, along with video tutorials walking people through each step of the process of using them to collect data. Open source licensing has also fed into Public Lab’s sudden growth.

By enabling ground up data-based research and communication, by putting the tools, the media platforms and devices into the hands of the community, Public Lab addresses a huge information gap with local governments and the industries whose policies impact the environment that community members can fill? The outcome could be a media campaign, interfacing with journalists or calling for a larger, systematic study of a certain area.

Working towards and attaining all of this in a comprehensive fashion by which it becomes ubiquitous will undoubtedly make things more complex, the challenge is making it all coherently complex, even simple if possible, which means continuing to develop new community paradigms.

Community VSI - GPS for Herding Cats?

The last blog post started to look at Virtual Systemic Inquiry as a viable method of collaboration in addressing difficult or even wicked problems. That first stage, and the original concept, was designed for a relatively small team of individuals, disconnected geographical coming together, albeit only virtually, for the purpose of addressing a specific issue. Individuals could perhaps serve on multiple VSI teams but it would be circumstances that would govern the make up of a specific team. It is unlikely, under this scenario, that many of the VSI team participants would be serving in the role of on the ground stakeholders to a truly significant extent.

It is no longer likely that the essential participants at the various stages of the process are all going to be located geographically close together. Traditional meetings will make little logistical sense. The manner in which we usually communicate ideas will not work, either because, as mentioned before, geographical separateness, time schedule conflicts or due to the size of the group or community involved. So if within the context in which we operate, virtual collaboration is appropriate but as the old tools and processes don't work well enough, what then are the options?

What then is the potential for expanding the concept of Virtual Systemic Inquiry into a larger community context, which would significantly involve stakeholders, and how could that be made to work? In this post we will look to the remaining elements of the VSI process and how they could start to be incorporated into a community context.

A good deal of virtual interaction has already been integrated into local institutions of government.  Most cities have a webpage, and possibly other systems of web based community governance, expanded with the inclusion of Facebook pages and Twitter for many advocacy groups. The next step is incorporating systemic inquiry into a systematic process. This, however, means reexamining not only how we work with virtual tools of community governance but how we engage in Virtual Collaboration.

The Internet and World Wide Web, provide much of the context in which we typically work today. How collaborators should go about effecting a meaningful result within such an environment is still a relevant question. The more traditional word processing and spreadsheets and even basic email will likely not suffice in this new context and will simply further overload any potential participants. It is not merely having a set of tools with which we've developed a level of comfort or that could be easily learned. 

It is also not a matter of having the latest apps freely available but also including changes as to how they are to be used. The rise of data journalism, as an example, not only incorporates new tools but also entirely new technical approaches to information with 'Big Data' and other community engagement approaches with 'Open Data'. At the same time, the simple excel type spreadsheet remains a very effective research tool and more importantly, the underlying principles of journalism still apply.

It is a matter, as was asserted earlier in this effort that one should run the technology; don't let the technology run you. It is a matter of how the tech tools are used by increasingly larger populated networks with correspondingly larger number of connections resulting in greater complexity with at least the potential for emergent attributes.

Discussion Groups are the standard first response to the question of collaboration, virtual or otherwise. It should be recognized though that there are important differences between discussion, dialogue and deliberation. Our community based discourse, including virtual discourse on web platforms such as LinkedIn, phpBB, etc. is too often stuck at the level of discussion. We need to find ways to evolve those discussions to the level of both dialogue and deliberation as envisioned together by the NCDD. We will use the term, 'means of discourse' or 'discourse' to cover all three.

The expectation or hope seems to be that thoughts initiated in a discussion will lead to other thoughts in a reinforcing manner finally leading to a better understanding of the situation as well as an approach for dealing with the situation. More often than not this turns out to be a fix that fails for structural reasons. Discussion groups seldom achieve consensus, particularly if it is perceived that there is little need for a consensus to be achieved. The unfolding of the content remains essentially linear although in truth is conceptually intertwined. It is very difficult for multiple participants to build on separate dimensions of understanding within this linear environment in any meaningful manner.

It seems the basic nature of discussion groups is to be divergent which is not necessarily a bad thing. From a design thinking perspective it can be a good thing. It is the nature of thoughts to provoke other thoughts, this divergence though can wear people down and cause them to lose interest because of being pulled in multiple directions by tangents of thought seemingly only slightly on topic, if at all. Keeping the discussion on track, from the perspective of those responsible for managing the collaboration, might seem as an impossible a task as herding cats.

The last post was on the first set of steps in the VSI process. Step one was Enabling Generative Interactions in which we looked to Integrating Interactions. If the stakeholders are seriously interested in understanding a situation as a basis for developing a project, program or a strategy to improve a particular situation then developing and working with models is seen as essential. Allowing collaborators then to keep track of the development of the model and their contributions to it is essential. The component tools should then be employed in a manner that glues things together.

The first thing that should be created is a focus page. A wiki is one means that could be used as the focus page because of the ease of multi-user updating allowing everyone involved in the collaboration to know that whatever aspect of the investigation they're looking for that the appropriate links can be found on that focus page. Discourse could be initiated with a link to the Focus Page with multiple discussion threads focusing on particular aspects on the inquiry.

Concept maps could be developed in Insight Maker and in Kumu. Once initiated a link to the concept map is also added to the wiki with thought exchanges on the concept map conducted though the discussions (at this phase it is discussion). Formal models have also been developed in Insight Maker and Kumu, again once initiated a link to the model is added to the wiki and exchanges on the model are conducted through discussions. Kumu is beginning to be seen as the best means of simplifying the architecture and integrating the multiple pieces of the puzzle, being Focus Page, Discourse, Concept Maps and Formal Models.

What is most essential for stakeholders engaged in developing a strategy for dealing with a difficult or complex situation or wicked problem facing their community is to optimize their understanding of the situation by understanding the relevant relationships and the implications of those relationships.

The most viable approach to accomplishing this is for stakeholders to work together to understand the particular relationships by building their own models. In this way they not only develop a better understanding of the relationships, someone else doesn't have to later help explain the resultant model to them. They gain ownership of the issue and can instead help explain the model to others when it is presented to larger portions of the community through a process of community discourse that rises to dialogue and deliberation.

Keeping an Eye and a Thumb on Entrenched City Halls

As stated in a prior blog post, there is no plan to turn this blog into a data journalism site. There is still though a great deal of commonality between the efforts of new community paradigms and data journalism. Partnerships would seem to be a natural relationship. This is particularly true with new community paradigms efforts working from the outside, engaging with entrenched political institutions over a protracted period of time. This takes a more disruptive approach to establishing new community paradigms. Entrenched politicians often use anecdotal stories to support their decisions. Having a thorough analysis of the facts, especially those hidden from public view could help leverage change in a community. Even if a data-based story is not of larger publication interest it could still be of importance to the community in which it is occurring.

The first challenge is finding out what data there is available. This can depend upon how consistently open the government is to transparency and open data. Those which have an open approach can offer different methods of keeping current.

Some sites will offer “email alert” functionality. The Doing Journalism with Data, First Steps, Skills and Tool course offers UK government publications as an example, here is the American version. Others will offer RSS feeds (read more about RSS). The course features the Office of National Statistics in the UK and Data.gov.uk. Here in the United States, there is Data and Statistics | USA.gov.

This accessibility does not seem to be as prevalent though at the state and especially at the local levels of government and when it is available one needs to be sure that it is providing untampered and unbiased information.

Even when the institution does not offer either email alerts or RSS feeds, there are alternatives available such as ChangeDetection.com which can track changes and send update notifications with or without the willing cooperation of the institution.

There are also advanced Google search techniques that you can use to help determine what sort of information you want and where that information might be.

A Google search though can provide too much information and there can be a desire to focus the search. Searching with an exact phrase by using quotation marks e.g. “crime statistics” has fewer results compared to crime statistics with no quotes. Using a minus sign can exclude data, e.g., “crime statistics” versus “crime statistics” -national, the later will provide a more local and regional focus. You can also broaden your search with a wildcard asterisk "*". Using * for example within an exact phrase such as “crime statistics city of * ” will give you a list of websites of cities and their crime statistics. You have to experiment though and the number of results generated does not stay consistent.

You can also try searching within particular types of websites for specific information. Using site:ca.gov "community health” provides community health-related websites in California ending with ca.gov. Using filetype:xls will give you results formatted as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, filetype:doc as Microsoft Word documents and filetype:pdf as PDF’s.

Searching for databases is a different matter as the contents of a database might not be visible to the search engine. In that case, you can use the word database "search by" instead of filetype. Databases though are the best means of organizing data for analysis if made efficiently accessible.

More advanced search operators such as Google’s advanced search, Google Guide advanced search operators page and the ability to combine different search operators are also available.

Sometimes, however, a possibly more confrontational approach, using legal avenues to obtain information by requesting it directly from government institutions through Freedom of Information or Right to Information laws is needed, when you cannot find it online. These are rules or regulations that provide citizens access to particular types of information, such as environmental laws.

To understand these legal rules and regulations check with sources for Freedom or Right to Information laws, or connect with people fighting for these laws.

You should speak with the organization in question before making the request, to check if they do hold the data but also anticipate possible exceptions and exemptions. Consider what judgments have been made on previous or similar requests.

The second challenge, beyond gaining access, is considering the means of analyzing the type of information you are seeking, whether it follows changes over time, requiring data over time or it compares items, meaning you need data dealing with the comparison or sometimes you need data that can add context to an issue.

All of this depends though on how the institution maintains its information online and how it provides access to the public. As suggested above, maintaining the data in machine readable form within databases is the best way of establishing a transparent open data environment.

If this is the case then you can request a related data dictionary. If investigating, for example, crime, gender, victim, and suspect information gathered by the police or investigating gifts or hospitality given to individuals by organizations and that information is kept in a database, then a data dictionary can be very useful.

These have data codes, designed specifically for combining datasets that use the same code. The course provides the HES online Data Dictionary Inpatients (PDF) from Great Britain. Here is access to data dictionaries for the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Obviously, it would be easier if all government institutions organized their data this way. This provides a good rationale for supporting open data laws. Often though the data is not so neatly organized and must be extracted.

There are means of collecting and extracting data usually left to those focusing on data journalism. Still understanding these methods so as to better work as or along with data journalists seems a good idea.

A primary means of extracting data is called scraping: using Google Drive spreadsheets or other online tools such as OutWit Hub, Import.io, Chrome extension Scraper or Scraperwiki. With a Google Drive spreadsheet which is available to just about everyone, it is matter of using the function formula =ImportHtml(“URL","query",index) with the URL of interest address in quotations, the type of data format which is either table or list you want, also in quotations and the sequence number of specific table or list that you want which is not in quotes.

As an example, the World Cup has been ongoing for the last few days so the course provides a FIFA webpage that publishes information on football agents in Cyprus. The formula for extracting the first table on the page is =ImportHtml(“http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/organisation/footballgovernance/playeragents/association=cyp.html”,”table”,1). Be warned though, you cannot just copy and paste from a Page or Word document or even blog post.

The New Community Paradigms wiki provides a variety of different of organizations, often through Facebook connections, outside the framework of institutional government that can provide knowledge and advice on a range of issues.

You need to map out what you’re interested in and which organizations, both governmental and non-governmental deal with that area. You might also seek other experts or pro-amateurs that collect and publish data by thinking about the people affected by the issue that interests you.

If looking for data in specialized areas of knowledge then you need to understand the jargon or professional language used in that arena. Sometimes you have to pick up the telephone and ask someone.

Data journalism pursues in-depth analytical stories that may be beyond the capacity or interest of an organization focused on particular community issues. There may be times though when statistics or data on a certain issue are needed to make a case for change in a community. There are a number of different types of sources of information available to build a case for change.

1) National statistical organizations

2) Local, regional and national governments and departments

3) International bodies

4) Regulators and auditing bodies

5) Charities and non-profit institutions

6) Corporations

7) Professional bodies and unions

8) Open data initiatives in your field

• Google’s Public Data page

• The Guardian’s datastore

• OpenSpending

At some point, these efforts take on the aspects of a long-term campaign by an established and organized group rather than one time issues. Maintaining a data library then becomes essential. The course suggests using social bookmarking services such as Delicious or Pinboard.in. This site uses the Diigo Group Page feature for new community paradigms to organize sites and related tags. You can also keep records of your sources in a master document (Google Docs, Microsoft Excel). Proper tagging allows you to find your data fast.

If starting to work as an organized group for change through new community paradigms, then the basic idea behind organizing your means of accessing, extracting, collecting and analyzing data in this fashion is the same as it is for data journalism.

"If you need to do something more than once, get a computer to do it for you," Charles Arthur (The Guardian).

Finally, even if the data is not available or not made accessible by a government institution or city hall, it still raises questions. Why is there a lack of data? What are the implications if certain data is not collected? What about data that exists but is not shared? These concerns still fall under the endeavor to create new community paradigms.

Open Data - Left or Right, Inside or Outside, Works for Creating New Community Paradigms

The importance of open data to new community paradigm efforts was realized at the end of last year with the post, Open Data as End and Means of Civic Disruptive Innovation which dealt, in part, with Code for America’s Beyond Transparency related video panel and Open Data - Getting Started video panel. Since then supporting documentation on the topic from a variety of sources has been collected. This issue has support from both the political left and right and from numerous organizations. Two of which are sources that have been followed for some time but have not been featured to any extent on these pages. One works from within government, at all levels, and one works mostly outside of government, actually it pretty much works outside. 

Public Lab for Open Technology and Science is a connected online but still working within their own individual community that develops and applies open-source tools for environmental exploration and investigation by democratizing inexpensive and accessible Do-It-Yourself techniques, like hooking camera’s to weather balloons or kites for public mapping. It is a collaborative network of practitioners actively re-imagining the human relationship with the environment. Although there is no claim of any expertise in this area, having a chapter in your community with which to work together seems a logical step. Online, they seem a very cohesive community. How well they are integrated into the community advocacy within their own communities outside of their group circle is another question.  There would arguably be easier and better integration with community governance based on participatory democracy than with the more institutional forms of government.

The group that works from within the multiple levels of government is GovLoop, which has a simple mission: connect government to improve government. We aim to inspire public sector professionals to better service by acting as the knowledge network for government. This is something to which communities striving to create new paradigms would want to be connected.

GovLoop is the largest government niche network of its kind, serving a community of more than 100,000 government leaders helping them to foster collaboration, learn from each other, solve problems and advance in their government careers, as well as being a leading site for addressing public sector issues.

It could also be a potential fifth column against entrenched bureaucratic institutions of government power, a good thing from this blog's perspective. Not that this will be found in any part of the GovLoop mission statement or be anywhere explicitly stated on their webpages but they invariably give support to best practices across the spectrum of government which is helpful in putting pressure on entrenched holdout government institutions and the community making up GovLoop is often sympathetic to the community principles expressed on these pages, at least as individuals if not through their particular institutions. 

Voices from both of these communities have spoken up for important events supporting the expansion of open data in government. PLOTS called for celebration, within their ranks, for the first birthday of the US Open Data Policy and the first open data report. President Obama took the historic step of signing an executive order on May 9, 2013, making open and machine-readable data the new default for government information a year ago. Not that sexy sounding but making information about government operations more readily available and useful is paramount to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government at all levels.

The White House Project Open Data, covers, at a federal level, efforts in  opening data in areas of importance to new community paradigms including Health, Energy, Climate, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development.

These efforts, which are designed to share best practices, examples, and software code to assist other federal agencies with opening data, have helped unlock troves of valuable data and are making these resources more open and accessible to innovators and the public. Data for which taxpayers have already paid.

Pat Fiorenza, Senior Research Analyst at GovLoop, posted an article, ”DATA Act is a Big Win For Data Transparency", on the passage of H.R. 2061, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2013 (DATA Act), the Senate version of which had passed in April, and which the President’s signed in to law on May 9, 2014. 

 The DATA Act was supported from both sides of the political divide in Washington DC being championed by Representatives Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) in the house and Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rob Portman (R-OH) in the Senate.

Government transparency, according to Pat, provides numerous means of improving not only transparency, but also business growth and improved government services. Making it as well, in my view, a primary and essential tool for community activists. 

Freely available data from the US, and from all levels of government for that matter, is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and economic growth. In a time of imposed austerity because of tightening budgets, it can provide a means of combating waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.

Publishing data allows activists to analyze government’s financial data and assess spending trends, and be improved stewards of taxpayer money. Pat was actually talking about government institutions but the idea still works for advocates not on the government payroll. 

John Kamensky, a Senior Fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government and another frequent GovLoop blogger had previously written an article on "Implementing the DATA Act:  Encouraging Signs" focusing on the sweeping nature of the new law and the challenge for public managers to effectively meet the relatively tight implementation timeframe. 

This was the result of a three-year effort to pass the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (the DATA Act) which deals with federal spending transparency based on the success of the Recovery Act’s financial reporting efforts and proposed extending of it to all federal spending.  

Even though the effort was at the federal level, there are still lessons for advocates working at the local level. John, highlighted several key lessons provided by Ed DeSeve, a key leader of the Recovery Act effort. 

These included providing focused leadership from the top with implementation led by well-respected veterans of public service. New community paradigms recognizes that community leadership will remain essential as will dedicated professional public service.

Perhaps more apparent in keeping with new community paradigms is a collaborative governance framework through which to engage networks of affected stakeholders.

If  they can get statutory deadlines established ensuring the urgency to act and get appropriate funding for implementation then it would be an extremely helpful step, although this is likely something that community advocates working outside of the doors of city hall cannot initiate by themselves.

Unfortunately, there isn’t any dedicated funding even with the new federal law, but  other aspects point to hopeful signs of potential success and again provide lessons at the local level.

The effort had virtually unanimous support in Washington. Virtually unanimous community support, if and when it could be achieved, would arguably be as good if not better than virtual bipartisan support in Congress. There would also though still be the need for a commitment to the oversight of its implementation.

The federal effort was supported by the Data Transparency Coalition, an outside group involving industry and non-profit stakeholders that not only supported passage, but more importantly supported implementation. As demonstrated by the New Community Paradigms wiki, communities have multiple advocacy organizations with which to work.

Communities can seek key support and involvement from public interest organizations that are key stakeholders in using transparency to improve citizen engagement and agency accountability such as the Sunlight Foundation.

As John Kamensky said, with the federal effort, any attempt to implement open data policies, regulations and laws will have to face the real challenge of not just complying with the law, but actually acting on its intent to increase transparency, improve performance, and change the culture in government institutions, particularly from a new community paradigms perspective city halls.

By creating coalitions of like minded advocates both outside and inside of government halls, those seeking to create new community paradigms can achieve not only the opening and availability of data but can also create the social networks needed to transform their communities.

Data Journalism - Another Tool for Creating New Community Paradigms

Besides taking the ongoing STW/STIA Systems Thinking Certification course, there was also an opportunity to participate in a Doing Journalism with Data, First Steps, Skills and Tool course put on by the Data Driven Journalism site as part of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative, a hub for news and resources from the community of journalists, editors, designers and developers who use data in the service of journalism.

The organizer is based in Europe but this blog has had no issue with adopting resources from Europe, Great Britain, Canada or anywhere else if it can help engage and empower communities. There is also a USA version of the course being provided through the Knight Foundation’s Knight Center for Journalism called INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE, but it is much further along and was only just discovered so it will be covered in subsequent posts. The Knight Foundation was featured in a post from 2011 that is one of the building blocks for this effort, Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms, more later on that as well. 

While there aren’t any plans on becoming a data journalist or having this blog become a data journalism site, there is still an important role that this type of information gathering and dissemination could play in creating new community paradigms. 

The first basic question addressed in the class is ‘What is data journalism?’ It is learning to use the techniques of data journalism (which changes all the time) to find the best possible way to tell a story using numbers.

Data, as  the course points out, has always been a part of how news organizations work. Historically, this also includes those using information to bring about change. Doctor John Snow's mapping of a cholera outbreaks in nineteenth century London changed how we saw how a disease progresses and serves as a model for data journalism today. Another surprising historical example, at least for me, is Florence Nightingale’s key report, ‘Mortality of the British Army’, published in 1858, which presented statistics on the Crimean War regarding war dead. The report documented changes in procedures at military hospitals initiated by Nightingale during the Crimean War and was illustrated using statistical diagrams.

Journalism’s job still remains reporting facts in a manner that people can understand more about issues that matter to them.  The added goal of data journalism is to bring numerical data to life making it possible not only to be understood, but I would add also to make it actionable. 

The basis for this ability is easy access to a variety of often free tools and other resources and their ease of use. This is one of the primary purposes of the New Community Paradigm Wiki. 

Today data journalism can reveal the numbers behind the news, on a national level as through the Associated Press,  US Election results 2012 interactive visualization. At the local news level, even with relatively little resources, it can tell stories that work for local communities, as  with the  Washington DC income gap (DC Action for Children). It can also be a watchdog on local community politicians, as the Texas Tribune did with it’s Ethics Explorer, A guide to the Financial Interests of Elected Officials.

This depends upon greater availability to open data though that is still an ongoing process. Hopefully, this will mean the development of a greater network of trust through increased transparency between those creating and generating data and those who are depending upon it. 

The skills required for data journalism are a collaboration between coding, designing, and journalism applied to a variety of different media products ranging from visualization to long form articles. It is the process of turning numbers into a story, regardless of whether the story is composed of words or of graphics.

There are different approaches to creating data journalism stories. The Lone Ranger approach is when you are able to do everything by yourself. This is possible because of tools now available such as those found in the Data Driven Journalism ecosystem. These include tools like OpenRefine, Datawrapper, Tableau, Google Fusion Tables, CartoDB. You could also have two person teams, like the Guardian's DDJ team in the USA that created the award winning Guide to gay rights in the US story or a small scale team capable of producing innovative projects quickly like the 'Flooding and Flood Zones' map Hurricane Sandy by WNYC.

It is large teams, like the New York Times that have the resources and the capacity to implement a deliberate strategy to create a new kind of online journalism. They can help with finding ways to tell the story better. An example is their 2012 Olympic Experience.

The size of the team is not everything though. Data journalism, according to the European Journalism Centre Data Journalism course, is about making friends which means it is about community.  The course is designed to  start out with smaller things, what that story will be, how to turn the numbers into stories and give you the basic skills to practice on your own or as part of a team with the potential of becoming part of a movement. The essential thing to remember is that anyone can do it. As the course states, you don't need to compete with the New York Times or The Guardian.  Starting small can lead though to bigger things.  Argentina's La Nacion, considered by many the best data journalism site in South America, started without a programmer using free software. What is important is the information. There are times when quick, messily created pieces can be hits having tremendous impact.  Even visualization is not always required for a compelling story. What is vital is getting the correct facts.

Data, the basic stuff, the building blocks of data journalism, is usually organized for use in commonly used formatted spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel or Numbers. The key is the selection of the data. The fewer numbers you use to tell the story, the better.  This makes research the most important role but also the most tedious and time consuming, having to dig around in data on the basis of a journalistic hunch that may not pan out. 

If you adopt the Lone Ranger approach then you are going to have to do your own coding. If you have a team, particularly a small team, then your coders can also assist with research on the front end and visualization on the back end. A good team will effectively coordinate who can write and who can code. One notable example sited by the course is Reuter’s Connected China. Designers are those who can make visualizations happen. The example provide by the course is the Guardian’s 99% vs 1%.

At the end of the day though it is the words of the story that give context to the numbers, without context numbers are just numbers.  The Guardian’s Yearly guide to public spending by each government department  helps to explain the data.

“Public spending in 2011-12 was £694.89bn - compared to £689.63bn in 2010-11. That may look like an increase but once inflation is taken into account, it is a real-terms cut of 1.58%, or £10.8bn.”

I will finish up by letting Simon Rogers, one of the instructors for the course, sum it all up in this TEDxPantheonSorbonne video. 

“Today, data is increasingly accessible and simple to use, allowing journalists to develop a new way of sharing news. This revolution in the use of data is also accompanied by the increasing importance of data-journalists newsmakers, amateurs, representatives from the crowd ... No specific skills, unfailing motivation: the data-journalists are punks sharing of information.”