Here's a line you don't read too often: "it's the best sort of policy story: one where the policy works, the good guys win, and the public interest is served."
According to the Guardian's
Charles Arthur, Berners-Lee's motive was two-fold. First, the data are really the public's anyway, since the public "own the government." Second, he believes it will help companies and individuals to find out more about their surroundings and operate more effectively as a result.
P.S. Full disclosure: James and I were graduate students at the same place about the same time
Labels: Charles Arthur, David Eaves, featured, James Crabtree, Mark Surman, Michael Geist, The Guardian, The Prospect, Tim Berners-Lee, Toronto Star, Visible Government
A few things to highlight for those inclined to things of an international or foreign policy ilk:
1. Foreign Policy Camp is scheduled for Monday, November 30th, hosted by a terrific set of Canadian organizations. If you're in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto or Montreal, you can participate by registering
here. The Mark has a special
page dedicated to the deliberations.
2. The second issue of
Global Brief, Canada's newest international affairs magazine, is
available. This issue asks, "Who's to Lead?"
3. The
Canadian International Council has launched its
Global Positioning Project, designed to "generate and disseminate fresh perspectives... as Canada prepares to host the G-8 and the G-20." Content will come from number of expert panels, with papers and the like distributed through their website. At least one
blogger is excited.
4. Finally, I was extremely moved by this panel discussion entitled "
News Blackouts Save Lives," featuring kidnapped diplomat Robert Fowler and three senior leaders from Canada's major news organizations discussing the media's roles and responsibilities in kidnappings. The discussion was frank, engaging, intense and extremely educational, and I don't feel I could do justice summarizing it here. Fortunately, there's a
webcast and other clippings here, and a
write-up from the Torontoist.
Labels: brain candy, Canadian International Council, Canadian Journalism Foundation, David Eaves, featured, Foreign Policy Camp, Global Brief, The Mark
I attended two talks last week that helped me think about how Samara can help create opportunities for Canadians to meaningfully contribute, in small, fun and accessible ways, to issues that matter to them. Friends know this has been a
long-time interest of mine, something I've reflected on for years and regret not writing more about.
Talk #1: Kellerman was at Rotman talking about her
new book on followership. She's a leadership scholar at Harvard, and correctly points out that you can't have leaders without followers. Given technological and historical/political trends, she predicts that in this century, followers will be more important than they've ever been before.
This felt a bit "no duh" for awhile, but then she outlined two things that got me thinking. The first was a typology of followers, developed in light of the fact that we too often think of followers as a monolithic group (think "my constituents" or "my employees"). She outlined five types of followers, ranked from low to high based on their level of engagement.
- Isolates: Those who do nothing, and as a result, strengthen those with the upper hand.
- Bystanders: Those who observe but deliberately do nothing and therefore tacitly support the status quo (e.g., many Germans circa 1933)
- Participants: Favour or oppose leaders and care enough to invest something in it (e.g., Merck employees who alternately hid and highlighted the Vioxx problems)
- Activists: Those who feel strongly and act accordingly to support or unseat their leaders (e.g., the Catholics who organized to in response to the sexual abuse crises in their church)
- Diehards: Those who are prepared to die for a cause (e.g., suicide bombers, soldiers)
The second was the reminder that "most of us, on most issues, are followers most of the time." With the typology in mind, and not wanting to be a bystander when I shouldn't be, I called the
VoxBox to suggest a different angle on
a story that's really bothering me. Small step, I know, but better than nothing. I'll leave the diehard stuff to others.
Talk #2: David Eaves, who writes a terrific
blog, negotiates and thinks big thoughts for a living, came to Samara to present his thinking on how technology and social change are transforming (or should transform) public policy development and public service delivery. Building on the work of economist
Ronald Coase, internet thinkers
Clay Shirky,
David Weinberger and journalist
Chris Anderson (0f
long tail fame), Eaves argues that governments and other public service-seeking organizations need to orchestrate themselves for transparency, participation and collaboration to harness the "long tail." It is these features that will ensure legitimacy and success into the future.
My takeaway? This is going to require a little bit more of all of us. This means contributing when we can and, recognizing that things are more open than ever before, going a little easier on people to who are experimenting and may stumble from time-to-time. Samara looks to profile individuals or organizations who are working on the future of public service; ideas are very welcomed.
Labels: Barbara Kellerman, Canada25, Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, David Eaves, David Weinberger, featured, future of public service, long tail, media and citizens, Mozilla
Because
I promised, and you already know I'm slow, here's a dispatch from the investigative journalism conference I attended in Berekely, CA in early April.
Overall, it was a good couple of days that largely showcased various investigative stories on corruption and the journalists who uncovered them (
this Frontline doc was the feature). It was a clubby affair of many long-serving journalists from the major branded news outlets, and I was generally fascinated listening to the undercurrent of it all, which was naturally the "what the heck happened to our industry?" My favourite quote was from Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, who began his remarks with the quip, "the business model for newspapers isn't toast, but it's in the toaster." [As an aside,
later that week I read that he equated saving the Times to saving Darfur, so he obviously has a gift for the soundbite.]
The most interesting and useful session, given Samara's objectives, was the last one on the future of investigative journalism (glad I didn't duck out early). You can read the details
here. My favourite panellist was
Esther Kaplan from
The Nation Institute. The group has been around since 1966 and was created to address the bias in the independent press to write opinion pieces since no one had the resources to do reporting. These days she's getting more and more requests from freelancers, bloggers and new journalists for mentoring and support since there aren't a lot of older people around newsrooms to help anymore. She said, "I feel like I'm the social safety net for independent journalists." This jives with some of our early thinking at Samara, where we've identified some big gaps on the professional development side for those doing public affairs journalism - regardless of the medium. For example, there's really no media and public policy course taught in our journalism schools, save for a bit at Carleton. Nor is there much support provided to practising journos, whether attached to media organizations or working independently. In any event, we've promised to stay in touch on our respective efforts.
I was also reminded of some of the things I miss most about living and working in the States (of course, there's much I don't miss). Specifically, despite my best efforts, I didn't know the half of the tremendous proliferation of interesting media experiments happening all over the US. I lost count of the number of foundations and wealthy individuals funding journalism and investigative work of varying sorts. There were also a number of local news experiments (
this and
this were particularly interesting, and these examples don't even begin to scratch the surface on the local news front). I also learned of some neat university collaborations,
news literacy projects,
workshops and incubators, legal collaboratives,
global networks of reporters.... the list goes on. In short, a lot for us to learn from, and we'll share what we find with you as we get into the details.
On a final note, one of the major threads running through the conference (besides the "what the heck" stuff I mentioned earlier) was the need for journalism to be more "collaborative." There were a couple of examples of people doing apparently radical things like talking to each other and even going as far as sharing ideas and sources within and across news organizations! The horrors! I was a bit shocked, frankly, as none of these "radical" things seemed all that radical to me. I suppose I didn't appreciate how the old model, where resource constraints weren't so real, may have limited creativity quite so much. I'll leave it to
Dave Eaves to analyze that nut further.
Labels: David Eaves, Esther Kaplan, featured, media and citizens, The Nation Institute