Unmet Community Info Needs Roundtable: Kim Walesh

Kim is the Chief Strategist for the City of San Jose and spends a lot of time finding ways to engage the public and disseminate information for them.

Some major challenges they have experienced over the last couple of years:

• Getting people to care about local community – almost a prerequisite to there being a need to gather information. As San Jose is the largest city in the Bay Area (went from 100k to 1 million in the last 30 years) – it has made it difficult for people to connect.

• People view themselves as global citizens – see success contributing to global community not as much to their local community.  They also don’t seem to get information from local outlets, like the Mercury News, instead they source it via NY Times, Singapore News, etc. How people get information has complicated ability to engage the local community and made it more expensive for the media outlets. Experimenting with Peak Democracy and The Alliance for Innovation – using Art, employment networks, etc to connect wiht the younger generations (under 35) as they don’t come to ‘traditional’ news sources and seem separated.

On a positive note, San Jose has been a leader in putting the business of the local government on the web with public calendars, videos, archiving of meeting notes, etc. to help get information out there. Also done well in cultivating neighborhood networks, with 22 neighborhoods working to help distribute information within their own local community – solely to determine how they should use their human and financial resources (i.e. should they be buying more books, or more computer terminals for the library?)

This goes a long way towards serving the local needs and interesting to watch leaders and communication networks emerge naturally.

Unmet Community Info Needs Roundtable: Judy Nadler

Judy is a Senior Fellow in Government Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University whose focus is helping people disseminate the information provided to make better decisions.

She shares the power of ethics and transparency in government agencies and the need for civil engagement. A nice example she gave was around the San Jose, CA city government offices opening up their calendars to the public to show when they were meeting, who they are meeting with and why they were meeting – all in an attempt to educate the public on what was happening in their local community and how resources were  being spent. It is bringing more people to the town halls and getting the community better engaged.

In her eyes, ‘providing information to the public is not a luxury – it is a necessity’ and is critical to building and sustaining healthy communities.

Judy suggests more local news needs to be produced, using more friendly and easy to understand language. Journalists should have an understanding of how the government works, and the channels we feed news through.
As content and usability vary greatly from county to county (some use webcasts that are archived, others use blogs, many do nothing) these differences need to be addressedto ensure news is received by those that need it and they continue to find ways to engage the younger generation to ensure longevity of the media outlets and the strength of the community.