PJNet

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy releases its report today in Washington DC, setting a vision for healthy, informed, democratic communities.

The Commission report has 15 policy measures “to help Americans meet their local information needs.” They include:

Recommendation 1: Direct media policy toward innovation,competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.

Recommendation 2: Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.

Recommendation 3: Increase the role of higher education, community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information sharing for local communities.

Recommendation 4: Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.

Recommendation 5: Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.

Recommendation 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements of education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.

Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital
and media training, especially for adults.

Recommendation 8: Set ambitious standards for nationwide broadband availability and adopt public policies encouraging consumer demand for broadband services.

Recommendation 9: Maintain the national commitment to open networks as a core objective of Internet policy.

Recommendation 10: Support the activities of information providersto reach local audiences with quality content through all appropriate media, such as mobile phones, radio, and public-access cable.

Recommendation 11: Expand local media initiatives to reflect the entire reality of the communities they represent..

Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.

Recommendation 13: Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local “community summits” to address community affairs and pursue common goals.

Recommendation 14: Emphasize community information flow in the design and enhancement of a local community’s public spaces.

Recommendation 15: Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.