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Oct 5, 04:37 pm: Online Community Summit: Holding Power Accountable (Notes)

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Holding Power Accountable: Transparency, Data, and Community
Presenters: Dave Witzel, Forum One + Andy Krackov, Lucile Packard Foundaiton for Chidlren’s Health

Dave Witzel:

• dissemination tends to mean I’ve got a report, I wish someone would read it.
• Transparency enables negative feedback before or duing a decision or action (should also include positive feedback)
• Good evidence that transparency is an impactful thing: Uganda Schools (1995 only 24% went to schools; published the $ that were supposed to go and that increased to 85%). getting right information to the right people so that change can be made. The hard part is figuring out the right information, the right people, so that the change can be made.
• EyesOnDarfur — asking the community to be witnesses
• Fact Checker
• Earmark Watch: getting mashed up w/ campaign financing data (provided but needs to be leveraged); comes from the Sunlight Foundation
• Wikileaks: trying to gather leaked documents (archival + promotion combined w/ anonymity)
• Wikipedia: design a system w/ inherent transparancy. Systems need to be self-revealing
• Pleeble: trying to give consumers a voice; has to do w/ value for $, acknowledging good behavior to promote good behavior
  [building systems that include transparency and transparency is really about setting up feedback loops by giving people enough information to create robust feedback loops; nonprofits can take advantage of the transparency of others as well as provide it for others; they can be a vehicle for transparency against the will of others]

Andy Krackov:

• kidsdata.org: “we’ve got your numbers” providing data re: kids at a variey of levels (regional, demographic, topic); new version; expanding the reach of the data
• how can community be used around the concept of data — raise awareness, achieve social change
• offers data on 250 seperate indicators (wealth of data at a very local levels)
• hope to inform advocacy work, grant proposals, strategic planning
• how can you hold organizations accountable through data?
  [the chronicle watch is another way thtis is happening — stating the problem and the time before solution]
• return visitors is an important metric
• how does the combine w/ offline strategies (media strategies ie issue briefs)
• offering the data is one way communication, also need to find ways for people to share + leverage the data
• npos focused on social change may be working on a very small local level; they don’t have enough to be able to draw the audience to create a community
• this begs the question: should they be building their own community, attaching to other communities
  [I’m almost always going to say that it should be attached to other communities]
• worried that providing some services would taint the foundations reputation as a neutral purveyor of information
• offer sharing opportunities: create .pdf fact sheet, print, email as well as utilizing higher tech services like Dig, del.icio.us
• Q: what about places where there is not internet access (even exist in the bay area)? Related: what about other languages?
• outreach into the community, going to the library
  [seems like there is more and more need for people to have access to these tools]
• build a separate blog and is another place to hold organizations accountable (highlight some of the facts by writing about it as well as bring in experts from the community w/ the opinion supported by kids data)
• blog can work even w/o a big community (it isn’t like going to the discussion forum that only has one or two posts)
• swivel: a community focused on nothing but data; program of official sources for data and allows people to provide an automatic stream of data to this global website; allows a small group to comment on data to a larger website and makes the local data available to a variety of others
• worried very much about achieving critical mass before deciding to open up the site to others
• create fact sheet or issue briefs but would be great if it was annotatable in some way (something wiki like)
  [would be create if the fact sheet provided a way for someone to personalize so that a group could present under their own brand and be able to use it even more like a tool — not quite annotated but maybe something that allowed a kind of co-branding or things that could be easily dumped into a .ppt + then some numbers about how it could be used]

Open Discussion from the Room:

• Q: do people need to play nice w/ data sites like swivel? How do they compare w/ other data sharing (photo, video) sites? A: Issue is that it is hard to get at the data and not necessarily best practices around whether to build own site to host data or to do it via these larger sites (like swivel). Juries out about which is going to get the data in front of more people. Data in the social sphere is a public good. People may have a variety of resources they can bring to the site. Do we really want to have a for-profit entity managing the public good.
• Comment. How does copyright play a part in this? Some of the information sources are copyrighted?
• Q. Why is there a concern about a for profit holding the data? A. Going to a part where we have a lot of social assets that exist on the web. Data is a good example of that. Who controls it? Copyright? And then a last mile problem w/ data. There are big datasets but to make it actionable that needs to be hooked into a local need. Local level data is what people want. Where they live and work. And that’s a big challenge. In terms of accountability, there is also an issue about data integrity (the measurements are often differnet as you cross regional boundaries)
• Q. Sounds like what is happen is primarily descriptive? What about the next step in looking for causal relationships? Correlate/cross-reference data sets. A. Swivel is doing that in the backgrand; running regressions in the background looking for correlations. [pluses/minues w/ making it this available because requires some knowledge to ensure that it is a causal relationship and not just a coincidence]
• Q. A third level of integration. Something that provided keys to the places where the elements is being used elsewhere. Something that they don’t want to do becuase of the quality of analysis? A. No. That’s something that they’d be comfortable w/ in different places.
• Q. How does privacy work w/ regard to data? A. That becomes an issue when you are looking at very small data sets. May make a decision not to publish data because the small set exposes the specific individuals.
  [missed a couple of questions]

tagged: ocs2007, conferences, notes, accountability, transparency