Blog Archives

Blog

The Rapidly Expanding Field of “Voter Information Platforms”

Tom Glaisyer

October 8, 2014

This post is by Tom Glaisyer, Kelly Born, and Jonathan Kartt. Tom Glaisyer is the Program Director of the Informed Participation Initiative at the Democracy Fund. Kelly Born is a Program Officer at the Hewlett Foundation, where she works on both Special Projects and the Madison Initiative, and Jonathan Kartt works in Programs & Evaluation for the Rita Allen Foundation.

How will voters find information in 2014?

For those who care about US democracy, this question is front and center in a world where both the structure of the news media and the channels through which voters get information are in flux. In the not too distant past, voters received most of their information about candidates and ballot measures through mass market dailies and TV or radio—places where the message was mediated by gatekeepers. The only opportunity to directly communicate with voters was through paid advertising or in-person contact. Nowadays, candidates have limitless options to directly reach voters – even television, when delivered via satellite, permits hyper targeting of political advertising messages.

But it’s not just campaigns that are exploiting these new digital opportunities—a host of (mostly new) organizations, non-profit and for-profit, are seeking not to win a vote, but to inform voters about their options.

It’s an exciting time for the field. Abroad, websites that match voters to policy positions held by parties, so-called voting advice applications, have seen significant adoption. In Germany, for example, Wahl-o-Mat was queried 13.2M times in 2013—not bad when you consider there are only 80M people in the country. In the US, we have encountered dozens of similar sites such as Vote411, ethePeople and Project VoteSmart.

The digitization of data permits an increasing amount of contextual information to be added to what was previously just a thumbnail sketch of a candidate or issue. For example, information on candidates or ballot initiatives can now be combined with “rules of the road” on where and when to vote, and what materials to bring. This digital “plumbing” is often under-appreciated—Google’s Civic Information API provide a way to lookup polling places in 2014 and listed the candidates on the ballot. It builds on data from the PEW Charitable Trust’s Voting Information Project and augments a recently developed iOS app.

Recognizing the possibilities in this emerging ecosystem of voter information, the Hewlett Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation and the Democracy Fund partnered to explore the dozens of voter information websites that have developed in the last few years. We examined a number of dimensions:

Candidates vs Ballot Initiatives (or both): Many of the sites focus on candidates, while others like Healthy Democracy in Oregon and Washington State’s Living Voters Guide have (until recently) focused exclusively on ballot measures. Others like ethePeople, Project VoteSmart and PollVault, cover both.
Geographic Scope: Many provide national coverage, whereas others, like ethePeople, partner with media and civics groups in specific states or localities. Maplight’s Voter’s Edge, cover national races, while also offering some down-ballot coverage in particular states (in this case, California).
Audience: Some, like Ballotpedia, provide detailed information that might appeal more to policy wonks like ourselves, whereas Voter’s Edge or Who’s On The Ballot seek to serve those who prefer a less detailed view.
Approach: Sites like Voter’s Edge provide “just the facts” (on a lot of dimensions, including candidate’s prior jobs, campaign funding sources, etc.). Others, like the newly launched Crowdpac,use campaign funding sources to predict candidates’ positions, in an attempt to address the challenge of comparing a 30-year incumbent’s record to that of a first-time challenger who has never held office. ISideWith uses matching algorithms – and has now paired more than 11 million users with their “ideal” candidates based on answers to basic philosophical and political questions (e.g., “what is your stance on taxation?”). Still others actually involve citizens in the deliberative process: Healthy Democracy in Oregon convenes a representative panel of dozens of citizens for a week to evaluate the pros and cons of a particular ballot initiative. The information is then shared with voters in the official voting guide. Research has shown how valued that information has been – a majority of Oregonians were aware of the tool, and roughly two thirds who read the CIR statements found them helpful when deciding how to vote. In Washington State the Living Voters Guide has utilized a deliberative platform to allow voters to share why they are in favor of or opposed to a particular initiative.
Business Models: Half of what we found are for-profit operations like Crowdpac and Poll Vault. The other half (most of what we’ve discussed herein) are nonprofit. So we spoke with venture capitalists who had invested in several of the for-profit competitors to understand their reasons for doing so, and to ensure that we felt there was a good rationale for philanthropic investment in this space.
Operating and Partnership Approaches: Some, like Project VoteSmart, rely on teams of dedicated interns, while others are striving towards more automated systems. We also looked at organizations’ partnerships – many like ethePeople are collaborating extensively as part of their model, others are closer to independent operators.
Use: Finally, we looked at use. Not much is known about the end-users of these types of voting information services beyond broad demographic statistics. In terms of numbers, some platforms have received a fair amount of uptake, whereas others are so new that no usage data is even available yet – however, no site appears to have come close to Wahl-o-Mat’s success in Germany.

This wide variety of activity left us with lots of questions: whether and how to support this field, who to partner with, and on what kinds of projects? We have begun to explore these questions, and will discuss our early work on this topic in a follow-up post next week.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Guest Post: First State-Wide Partnership Brings Voter Registration Services to 850,000 Students

Seth Flaxman

August 1, 2014

Back in January of 2012, TurboVote had one partner school, our first grant had only just come in, and I was struggling with how to run payroll for the first time. That month I hired a dynamic young organizer, Sam Novey, on one condition: fly to Miami for two weeks with no travel budget and get three colleges that are a little bit interested in TurboVote signed on as partners. Over a dozen trips to Florida later, we’ve come a long way.

Last month, Senator Bob Graham announced in front of a packed audience of student affairs professionals from across the country that Florida was now “leading the charge” with 38 colleges and universities from across the state institutionalizing voter engagement with the help of TurboVote. He was sharing some breaking news. The Florida College System (FCS) had just announced a new partnership with TurboVote to bring our tool to 27 state and community colleges—making this is the first system-wide project of the FCS Civic Literacy Initiative, which aims to make civic engagement part of the experience of all 850,000 students enrolled in the system.

Bringing this partnership to life required some serious teamwork. Our first few Florida colleges were all introduced to us through the Knight Foundation. Funding from Knight and the Democracy Fund helped us keep a team of talented organizers focused on this opportunity for over a year, and funding from the Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions at St. Petersburg College is what made the whole FCS expansion ultimately possible.

This is a big deal. FCS is how most Floridians access higher education – 65 percent of the state’s high school graduates begin their postsecondary education at one of the system’s colleges. And our partnerships are serious long-term love fests, not fly-by-night flings. When TurboVote partners with a school we provide them with a co-branded website and work with administrators on how to institutionalize TurboVote into their student services by integrating our site with class registration, freshman orientation, or other school-wide student experiences.

When students sign up, TurboVote helps them become active voters for the rest of their life. First, we’ll help them register to vote by emailing and mailing a completed registration form along with a pre-addressed, stamped envelope, then send text message reminders about deadlines. After that, we start tracking all their elections—local, state and national, and if students wish to request absentee ballots, we’ll send them all the forms and information they need along with pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes. Finally, for every election, TurboVote repeats the process, sending text message and email reminders with important election information, dates and deadlines, to ensure that they never miss another.

However, what’s most exciting about this news was that the move to institutionalize voter engagement was a notably bipartisan effort. Republican Congressman Lou Frey, who founded the Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Central Florida, is also a supporter of the TurboVote effort.

In the words of Congressman Frey, “the adoption of TurboVote by the Florida College System will provide a pathway to a lifetime of participation by the state’s youngest citizens.” Frey knows what he’s talking about. He helped sponsor the legislation leading to the adoption of the 26th Amendment in the 1970s that first gave 18 year-olds right to vote. And now he’s challenging “every student in the state to use TurboVote’s easy website to register and help shape the future of America by voting in every election.”

As schools across Florida come together to bring TurboVote to their campuses, they are doing more than introducing the next generation to our democracy; they are serving as a model for the rest of the country. TurboVote is now at over 140 campuses and signing on more partners every day.

Seth Flaxman is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Democracy Works, a nonprofit dedicated to the idea that voting should fit the way we live.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Guest Post: API seeks Best-Practices and New Tools for Fact-Checking

Jane Elizabeth

July 22, 2014

The practice of fact-checking is a core function of journalism in the 21^st century. As American Press Institute (API) executive director Tom Rosenstiel argues: “Nothing comes closer to journalism’s essential purpose than helping citizens know what is true and what is not. And in an age when information is in greater supply, it is more important, not less, that there are trusted and skilled sources to help citizens sort through misinformation.”

During the 2014 U.S. election cycle, fact-checking projects emerged in print, television, radio and online newsrooms around the country in greater numbers than ever before. Dr. Michelle Amazeen, a Rider University professor and API researcher, found that mentions of “fact-checking” in media increased more than 75 percent between 2011 and 2012 alone.

From this year’s primaries to the general election in 2016, API’s fact-checking project, launched earlier this year with support from The Democracy Fund, is working to improve and develop fact-checking best practices and trainings for newsrooms that want to provide deeper coverage for their audiences. In fact, API’s new emphasis on fact-checking excellence is already reaching beyond U.S. borders. Kirsten Smith, a journalist in Ottawa, Canada, contacted API in May with a request for assistance for her “small newsroom with limited resources” to prepare for the 2014 municipal elections and the 2015 national election. “Have you a tip sheet or primer for a small scale fact check program?” In fact, API has developed a big-picture tip sheet precisely for requests like this, and we will be developing in-depth training programs based on upcoming research.

API also has developed blog features, convened a meeting of its researchers and media, participated in the world’s first international fact-checking conference, and is discussing additional funding sources with organizations interested in promoting better fact-checking. An important initial function of the project is to compile, curate and examine the latest news from the fact-checking front. Features include:

Q&A interviews with those who study and practice fact-checking;
The latest from our scholars’ research projects and other studies in fact-checking;
“How I Got That Fact,” a regular column by journalists across the country who share their fact-checking tips and process;
A daily, curated collection of fact-checking stories from around the country; and
More news and learning tools from the fact-checking universe.

A major part of the initiative brings together six experienced scholars from around the U.S. and the U.K. to work on projects designed to examine and improve the practice of fact-checking. Their topics include: the impact of fact-checking on political rhetoric; the effectiveness of rating systems like the Washington Post’s “Pinnochios;” readers’ changing perceptions of fact-checking; and a survey of journalists on the prevalence of fact-checking. The group joined API’s fact-checking project, announced in February, with plenty of experience in the study of information, misinformation, and how facts are processed. Here are the scholars, with a brief description of their work for API:

Michelle Amazeen, Rider University. Amazeen, a Temple University graduate who holds a Ph.D. in mass media and communication, will study the effectiveness of political fact-checking rating systems (such as the Washington Post’s “pinnochios”). On Twitter @commscholar.

Lucas Graves, University of Wisconsin. Graves, who holds a Ph.D. in journalism from Columbia University, has written about fact-checking topics for CJR and other publications. He will study the effects of fact-checking on journalistic practice and is part of the team working on the study of rating systems. On Twitter @gravesmatter.

Ashley Muddiman, University of Wyoming. Muddiman, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, is part of the team that will study the effectiveness of rating systems. She also is involved in the Engaging News Project. On Twitter @ashleymuddiman.

Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College. Nyhan, who holds a Ph.D. from Duke University, will assist on the project on the effects of fact-checking and a project which will examine how attitudes toward political fact-checking change over the course of a campaign. On Twitter @BrendanNyhan.

Jason Reifler, University of Exeter, UK. Reifler also holds a Ph.D. from Duke University. He will work with the teams studying the effects of fact-checking and changing attitudes during the course of a campaign. On Twitter @jasonreifler.

Emily Thorson, George Washington University. Thorson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She will examine how contextual information in news coverage can minimize misperceptions, and will work with the team studying the effectiveness of ratings systems. On Twitter @emilythorson.

The American Press Institute will combine the researchers’ work with the work of other scholars and API’s own research to identify what kinds of fact-checking are most effective at stopping misleading rhetoric and are most informative to citizens. In the second year of the program, API will conduct workshops and meetings and develop other resources aimed at supporting news organizations interested in fact-checking on the eve of the 2016 election cycle.

Have questions? Topics you’d like to see tackled? A good fact-checked story of your own? Contact me at jane.elizabeth (at) pressinstitute.org, 571-366-1116, @JaneEliz.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Guest Post: Seeking Common Ground and New Audiences in the Good Fight

Robert Wright

July 18, 2014

Over the past few months, with the support of the Democracy Fund, we at Bloggingheads.tv have been trying to show that, even in today’s highly partisan atmosphere, policy disagreements can be expressed civilly—and, what’s more, even ideological opponents can find things they agree on.

In a certain sense, this has been our mission ever since Bloggingheads.tv was created in 2005. From the beginning we found that when ideological antagonists have a face-to-face conversation, their civilizing instincts usually kick in. What’s different about our new project, The Good Fight, is our attempt, in collaboration with The Atlantic, to make this civilizing effect visible beyond the small but devoted audience of politics and policy aficionados who come to the Bloggingheads site to watch meaty discussions that can go on for 30, 45, even 60 minutes.

Here is how The Good Fight works: We host a video debate on some policy issue, and the moderator encourages the debaters to crystallize their disagreements but also to highlight any areas of agreement they may have. The whole conversation is shown on Bloggingheads.tv, and, in addition, we distill the results into a highlight reel of only four or five minutes in length. That’s what gets distributed on The Atlantic, the aim being to reach a broader audience than we normally reach, including people who won’t invest as much time in a policy discussion as will traditional Bloggingheads.tv viewers.

So what have we learned from this experiment?

Well, for one thing, we’ve learned that, though 4 or 5 minutes may seem short by Bloggingheads standards, to many of today’s internet denizens, that’s an eternity.

Some commenters on the Atlantic’s site have demanded that we just print a transcript—it’s faster to read than to watch and listen, after all. Others have suggested that, if they’re going to invest as much as four or five minutes in a video, they want something slickly produced, with vivid graphics, arresting animation, and so on. One Atlantic commenter recently wrote, “If you want to produce a video about it, then produce a video about it. The point of video is ‘show me’ rather than ‘tell me’.”

To be sure, some of the videos have done pretty well. A debate between Andrew Sullivan and David Frum on the legalization of marijuana got thousands of views and was shared 700 times on Facebook. And that’s not bad—especially given that the Atlantic precedes each video
with a 30-second ad, thus discouraging casual viewers from sticking around. Still, most of the videos haven’t done as well as the Frum-Sullivan debate.

And maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If you reflect on the last time that you clicked on a video, you may find that it involved something visually compelling: footage of a storm or an unruly demonstration, say. And if the video was of two people talking, there’s a pretty good chance that there was heated debate, perhaps including a sustained rant. We all like drama, and the internet gives us so much of it to choose from that less dramatic if more edifying content faces an uphill battle for attention.

In any event, we’re proud to have produced some of that edifying content. Good Fight videos have shown that, even though committed partisans are often reluctant to cede ideological ground, points of agreement can almost always be found. For example, Sullivan and Frum agreed that marijuana can harm teenage brains. And NSA critic Conor Friedersdorf admitted that spying on foreign heads of state is appropriate, while Edward Lucas, a supporter of the NSA, conceded that Edward Snowden’s revelations about bulk metadata collection benefited the American public. And in a debate on whether to raise the minimum wage, Tim Noah agreed that placing the minimum wage too high would hurt employment, while Glenn Loury conceded that indexing the minimum wage to inflation made political and economic sense.

Our experiment is far from over. In collaboration with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts, we’re going to conduct a rigorous study on the effects that such agreements can have on the viewing audience. For example, will conservatives who see liberal Tim Noah concede that point about minimum wage be more open to the liberal side of the debate than conservatives who only see disagreement between Noah and Loury? The study is scheduled to take place in June, and we’re eager to see the results.

Robert Wright is a journalist, the Editor-In-Chief of Bloggheads.tv, and President of the Nonzero Foundation.

Back to Ideas

Blog

The Democracy Fund Relaunches as an Independent Foundation

Joe Goldman

June 30, 2014

We have incubated the Democracy Fund within Omidyar Network over the past three years as a unique philanthropic enterprise driven by Pierre Omidyar’s vision to address the perilous state of our democracy and rebuild public confidence in our political institutions. During this time, we have committed nearly $20 million to support organizations working to strengthen our media, improve the administration of our election and campaign finance systems, and foster more effective governance in the United States.

When Pierre asked me in the Spring of 2011 to develop this new program, I could not have imagined the incredible journey I was about to embark upon. Three years later, I am excited to share that the Democracy Fund will re-launch itself this summer as an independent private foundation within The Omidyar Group.

The Democracy Fund remains committed to the priorities we have set out in our three core initiatives. Our support for grantees like the Investigative News Network, the American Press Institute, Healthy Democracy, and the Engaging News Project will continue to foster innovative new practices within and outside of journalism to better inform voters. We will continue to work with grantees like Pew’s Elections Initiatives, TurboVote, the Committee for Economic Development, and Fund for the Republic to pursue common sense solutions for fixing our election and campaign finance systems. And our work with grantees like the Bipartisan Policy Center, the No Labels Foundation, the Faith & Politics Institute, and the National Institute for Civil Discourse will continue to build bridges across the aisle and seek out ways for our government to solve problems in the face of increased polarization.

Going forward, the Democracy Fund will collaborate with its peers to drive funds towards major gaps in the field. We will seek to complement our grant making with more direct involvement in pursuing our goals through advocacy, research, thought leadership, and convening. We will maintain a strong commitment to pursue bipartisan solutions to the challenges facing our political system.

Pierre has become Chairman of our new Board of Directors and will remain the sole funder of our work. I will transition from my role as Director to become President of the Democracy Fund. Tom Glaisyer and Adam Ambrogi will continue to direct our initiatives on Informed Participation and Responsive Politics respectively. They will be joined later this year by a third Program Director for our initiative on Problem Solving and Governance.

We are also pleased to share that Senior Consultant for Operations Margaret Yao will be joined by Tony Bowen as our Manager of Operations, Finance, and Grants Management. Natalie Adona and Megan Mohr have also joined our team as our first Democracy Fellows. Several additional members of the Democracy Fund will be announced in the coming weeks and months as we continue to grow our team.

Today, we posted two open Program Associate positions that we hope to fill over the summer. Please take a look at the job postings on our blog to learn more about the positions and how to apply.

We are deeply grateful to our colleagues at Omidyar Network who have served as mentors, partners, and friends over the past three years. Their work to create a world of positive returns inspires us and we continue to be guided by their values. Without their patient support and counsel, the Democracy Fund would not be the organization that it is today. We look forward to continued collaboration to advance our respective goals.

The Fourth of July is a time for us to reflect upon the founding values and vision of our nation. While the dream of a country that is truly governed “of, by, and for the people” may sometimes feel out of our reach, it is incumbent upon each of us to do our part as Americans to continue to carry the torch of democracy and combat those forces and trends that threaten to extinguish it. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable…Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” At the Democracy Fund, we are honored to have the opportunity and resources to contribute to this important struggle and hope that you will join us in the days, months, and years to come.

At this moment of transition and possibility, we remain as inspired as ever by the potential for the American people to come together and rise to meet the historic challenges facing our political system.

Back to Ideas

Blog

How Do Foundations Support our Democracy?

Joe Goldman

June 7, 2014

This past week, the Democracy Fund and seven peer funders joined with the Foundation Center to launch the beta version of a new interactive map and database that documents how foundations fund our democracy and democracy reform. The new tool tracks funding across an intentionally broad set of categories, including money in politics, election reform, redistricting, civil liberties, open government, public administration, investigative journalism, media literacy, access to broadband internet, civic education, volunteerism, and public participation.

Our hope is that this new tool will help raise awareness about how the field is funded, so that we can make more strategic decisions about where dollars should go in the future. The map will also be helpful for new entrants into the field as they chart their own course and to prospective grantees who are seeking out new funders or partners.

The data remains incomplete and rough around the edges because of the challenges of compiling data on foundation funding and significant inconsistencies in how funders label and describe the grants that they make. Nevertheless, I find the current version to be tremendously helpful and am hopeful that the data will become significantly more complete over time.

Three things initially jumped out at me from reviewing the beta version of the tool.

First, while the overall amount of money going into the field is relatively large (about $450 million from 355 foundations to 1,570 recipients in 2012), the amount that is going into actual reform of our political system is shockingly low by almost any standard (and the total amount remains quite small compared to other major fields of reform). While these numbers are certainly incomplete, it appears that between $6.4M and $14.2M was invested in election and campaign finance reform efforts in 2012 (this does not include funds aimed at mobilizing voters.) Even if we assume that the actual numbers are twice as large, it is hard to look at this data and not be incredibly concerned.

Second, the fields within democracy reform are remarkably uneven in their development and maturity. In some subfields, like civil liberties, we can see strong anchor organizations (like the ACLU) and a wide diversity of funders. Other subfields,like campaign finance reform, appear to be quite fragmented and populated by organizations that are rather small relative to the challenges on which they are working.

Third, the field of democracy reform remains highly polarized. There appear to be very few areas where progressive and conservative funders are jointly funding work in the same area, let alone the same organizations, outside of the fields of civil liberties and volunteerism.

I hope that other funders, as well as reform leaders, will take advantage of this new tool to take part in collaborative discussions about the health of the political reform community and how we can guide funding flows in the future to produce stronger advocates and better reform. I am confident that it will shape the trajectory of the Democracy Fund and our partners going forward.

We are especially grateful to the Hewlett Foundation for their leadership in initiating this process and for the Foundation Center’s staff for their excellent work in creating the database and tool. This is incredibly hard work and everyone involved has demonstrated remarkable commitment and skill.

Please take a moment to visit the Foundation Center’s site and provide them with feedback on how the tool could be more complete and more useful.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Local Journalism – What will the new ecosystem look like?

Tom Glaisyer

January 16, 2014

Last year, the Democracy Fund convened a cross section of journalists, editors, and media experts to begin a dialogue about the major issues facing the field. It was a productive discussion that has greatly informed our approach to ensuring that the public has the information it needs to make informed choices. Perhaps the clearest priority voiced at the forum (and one that has the greatest impact on our thinking) is the need to support and improve the quality of journalism at the local level.

The challenges for reporters and publishers at the local level are legion—audience size is limited, online advertising rates aren’t anything like the rates obtained by print publications in the past, staff numbers in such outlets are small, and there are few opportunities for reporters to develop distinct capabilities or expertise. In the last months, the downsizing at Patch (AOL’s hyper-local network) and in Gannett’s community publishing division has just reinforced how tough this space is for all.

Since our spring 2013 meeting, I have been exploring how we can best understand the needs in this space and have been heartened by the research into news deserts being undertaken by Michelle Ferrier and the development of MediaCloud and the MediaMeter mapping the level at which the Boston Globe covers news stories. Thanks to these and other projects, we may soon be better able to understand both coverage and consumption at a much more granular manner than before.

What I have become most interested in are three themes that appear to be emerging as local news ecosystems transition:

1. Collaboration and sharing at a regional level.

One solution to the challenge facing local journalism is higher efficiency in the production of stories, or broader distribution through regional collaborations. As Jan Schaffer’s very useful recent research shows, collaborative efforts are emerging across the country. In Colorado, a local collaboration been led by the INewsNetwork started off as an independent organization and has now become part of a local PBS television station and built partnerships with 21 other outlets. In New Jersey, Montclair University’s School of Communications and Media is hosting NJCommons an effort to build collaboration between outlets within the state. This includes a story exchange as well as providing training to partner organizations. Other partnerships such as IdeaStream in North East Ohio that combines public television, radio, public access cable, and an online engagement platform shows how collaboration can grow within public media.

Regional and topic focused collaborations have also emerged. In radio, there has been the State Impact Project across public radio and partnering outlets. In public television, multiple local journalism centers have been set up. How much of this infrastructure will survive in the long term is unclear, but collaboration, often in a non-traditional manner, seems to be central to the provision and distribution of public interest journalism.

2. Specialization of outlets around news beats.

All too often, reporters at local papers simply do not have the bandwidth to develop the specialized knowledge they need to cover complex stories. Outlets that focus on a single beat can address this challenge by enabling local media to build on top of reporting they do and adding a local flavor. InsideClimateNews, winner of a Pulitzer for National Reporting in 2013, is perhaps one of the most well known example of a successful vertical outlet. They actively encourage republishing of their stories. ProPublica, goes a step further and provocatively asks people to steal their stories. The presence of non-profits such as the Food and Environmental Reporting Network suggest that there is momentum in provision of specialized beat news. In particular, Homicide Watch has been lauded for its coverage in D.C. and has expanded to Chicago via a partnership with the Sun Times.

3. Provision of services by a central organization

Another solution to improve local coverage is for small outlets to rely on a central entity to provide them with shared resources. The Shorenstein Center publishes Journalists Resource with the objective of providing journalists with easy access to relevant academic scholarship that can aid reporters. The Investigative Reporters and Editors organization has long provided datasets and operates DocumentCloud. For its part, our new grantee, the Investigative News Network provides a customized WordPress configuration that they are willing to customize further and host for organizations. The Public Insight Network operated by American Public Media serves as a source development platform for a number of outlets. The soon to be launched FOIA Machine platform is another great example. Nearly all of these are solutions narrowly tailored to a particular challenge but all seem to represent a promising trajectory.

There are many reasons to be cautious about the future of local news and journalism, but the impact of these three threads coming together in the right way appear considerable. We don’t know all the answers and how this field will develop, but we will continue to explore the space and welcome input on Twitter. @tglaisyer.

Back to Ideas

Blog

A Farewell to AmericaSpeaks

Joe Goldman

January 2, 2014

One of the leading innovators in the field of public deliberation, AmericaSpeaks, recently announced that it is closing its doors after almost 20 years in operation. As a recent funder of the organization, the Democracy Fund is sorry to see a grantee close their doors. As someone who has worked in many capacities for and with the organization since 1998, I’m especially saddened by the news. While the organization’s work will continue through many other forms, there can be no doubt that its leadership, creativity, and vision will be missed.

Over the years, AmericaSpeaks directly engaged hundreds of thousands of people in deliberation and touched the lives of millions. I personally witnessed citizens break down into tears many times because they felt heard for the first time and were moved by truly experiencing democracy in action. AmericaSpeaks’ work has meant a great deal to so many people. Whether it was engaging citizens in shaping New Orleans’ recovery plan after Hurricane Katrina or helping federal employees to develop better ways to involve the public, the organization was an important force for the highest values of our democracy.

A website has been created to share memories of AmericaSpeaks. AmericaSpeaks has also compiled a legacy document that summarizes the organization’s accomplishments and is worth reading. It seems appropriate to take this moment to reflect on what AmericaSpeaks is leaving behind. I’m sure that others will comment on these topics, but I’d like to offer my own take here.

Innovation

The two things that I always liked best about AmericaSpeaks were its ambitious vision for our democracy and the continued willingness of the organization to innovate. Some would point to the 21st Century Town Meeting model as the most important AmericaSpeaks’ innovation. Certainly, the widespread use of audience response systems in public meetings and the use of the 21st Century Town Meeting model in such places as Denmark, Australia, England, Italy, and elsewhere, are a testament to this. But for me, there are several other innovations that are just as significant (and often overlooked). Among them are:

Participatory Budgeting and Strategic Management: The first major initiative that I managed for AmericaSpeaks was a participatory budgeting program for the Mayor of Washington DC in 1999 called Neighborhood Action (I eventually joined the staff of the Mayor’s Office to coordinate their Neighborhood Action program for Mayor Anthony Williams’ chief of staff). Long before Chicago or New York adopted participatory budgeting, AmericaSpeaks designed a process that engaged thousands of DC residents in shaping the city’s priorities, which then drove the city’s strategic plan, municipal budget, performance contracts for agency directors, and a public score card for the city.

Over the course of Mayor Williams’ eight years in office, the “Neighborhood Action” program influenced the deployment of millions of dollars in city funds. At the neighborhood level, planning department staff worked with citizens to develop strategic neighborhood action plans that were linked to cross agency teams who were charged with addressing critical neighborhood needs. I’m unaware of any example of a municipal program in a major city that more comprehensively put citizens at the center of planning and priority setting as was instituted under the Williams Administration. While few have attempted to replicate the DC model, it is worth paying attention to the Washington DC Neighborhood Action initiative as participatory budgeting begins to really take off across the US over the next few years.

Televised and Video-Based Deliberation: AmericaSpeaks’ passion for taking deliberation to scale pushed the organization to experiment with a range of technologies that could enable the public to participate in authentic discussion across geographic boundaries. In 1998, the organization began this experimentation with the use of satellite-based video teleconferencing that linked up to 10 meeting sites at a time for national discussions that featured President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, and many members of Congress. Over the years, AmericaSpeaks continued to experiment with multi-site meetings, video-based dialogue, and online deliberation formats. A national discussion on autism, for example, led to the creation of a “virtual table” methodology that combined video-based presentations, facilitated conference calls, and chat rooms to support discussions. This video does a great job capturing the reach of a national discussion on debt and deficit with dozens of sites across the country. More recently, the organization demonstrated the significant potential for using Google Hangouts to support meaningful discussion.

Open Government: President Obama’s Open Government Initiative brought a focus on openness to the federal government in 2008. However, despite the Obama Administration’s verbal commitment to transparency, participation, and collaboration, the primary focus of the initiative from its early days was on transparency. AmericaSpeaks was one of the most vocal organizations pushing the White House and federal agencies to remember the President’s commitment to participation. The organization was instrumental in articulating the core principles that would be required for executive branch innovation – many of which would go on to influence elements of the open government program. AmericaSpeaks convened federal managers to develop recommendations for Administration policies towards greater participation. It also authored several important reports evaluating the Administration’s progress and making recommendations for improvement.

Proof Points

The last 25 years represent an important period of research and development for the field of public deliberation. AmericaSpeaks and its peers developed a series of innovative formats for engaging the public on the premise that diverse groups of citizens could find common ground on complex policy issues in ways that could improve the governance process. While these processes have not been institutionalized at a scale that had been hoped for, we have demonstrated the value and potential for integrating public deliberation into our governance processes.

To this end, AmericaSpeaks is leaving behind an important paper trail that proves that many of the principles behind deliberative democracy are well-founded and do work. Independent researchers documented the impacts of many of AmericaSpeaks projects. Over the years, they found that citizens learned from public deliberations, changed their points of view, gained a greater sense of efficacy, and took action as a result of their participation. At the same time, evaluators found that well designed public deliberations led to important, meaningful policy changes.

One set of evaluations looked at the degree to which deliberation could influence policy and decision making.

A Harvard University study of AmericaSpeaks involvement in the creation of the Unified New Orleans plan after Hurricane Katrina found that the public’s involvement significantly impacted stakeholder’s views about the planning process. The evaluator interviewed two dozen New Orleans leaders about the impact of the deliberations. She found that the AmericaSpeaks’ work enhanced the credibility of the plan. Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge Morrell told the Harvard researcher: “I think it has done more to bring credibility to the table than all of the little individual meetings that people go to.”

Interviews with stakeholders by Columbia University researchers in New York after AmericaSpeaks’ 21st Century Town Meeting about the World Trade Center redevelopment process found that the public had a significant impact on the planning. For example, the Vice President for Design and Planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation told the evaluators that the AmericaSpeaks town meeting was “critical in giving him the leverage he needed to open up the design process against the original wishes of the Port Authority.” According to the New York Times: Governor Pataki decided it was “time to go back to the drawing board” in response to “a wave of public dismay over the first designs for rebuilding Lower Manhattan” as articulated through the AmericaSpeaks deliberations.

Research by two independent evaluations firms about AmericaSpeaks’ statewide conversation on health care reform in California found that the policy positions of leaders shifted in the direction of the public’s priorities and that stakeholders credited the process with creating momentum for reform. They wrote: “While it is not possible to know the exact reasons why a certain policy changed over time, it is clear that the policy debate overall did move to reflect more closely the preferences found by CaliforniaSpeaks by the time the debate ended in January 2008.” Interviews with California stakeholders found that: “According to the policymakers interviewed, that engagement created a sense of political momentum, even urgency, in Sacramento as legislators and their staffs were reminded of the need for reform.” These short videos of the former Speaker of the California State Assembly, the former Governor’s top health care advisor, and the former Secretary of Health and Human Service testify to the impact and influence of the process.

Other studies focused on the effects that deliberation has on individual participants. For example:

A Northwestern University study of a series of deliberations on Social Security found that “not only did attendees say their understanding of facts of Social Security increased as a result of their participation in the forum, but also their responses to a series of six factual questions showed their overall knowledge really did increase.” The evaluation went on to say that, “after the forum, attendees were dramatically more likely than others to say they spent time thinking about talking about, and reading about Social Security.”

The same Columbia University study of the AmericaSpeaks town meeting on the world trade center development process mentioned above also reported that: “A respondent who described herself as politically conservative said she was “amazed at what came out of my mouth. I said there should be low income housing down there.” She explained that the discussion gave her “time to really think about things I’ve never thought about very much” and she came to believe “this could be a new beginning for a lot of—for our city and for all of us—and to have low income and middle income housing…would be a new beginning.”

Research by professors at Harvard and the University of California found that participants in a statewide discussion on health care were far more likely to take action out of a town meeting than those from a control group: “One of the most striking findings from our research so far is that those who participated in the CaliforniaSpeaks town meeting were far more likely to engage in a range of political acts on the health care issue — such as contacting public officials, volunteering for organizations, signing or circulating petitions, calling in to a radio station, and contacting other media.”

The same researchers from Harvard and the University of California found that participants in a national discussion on debt and deficit moderated their views and reported high value from the event: “On different policy items, liberals and conservatives seem to have given ground on their specific priorities in order to help achieve this goal over the course of deliberation. For example, conservatives became more supportive of raising taxes on the very wealthy (liberals began with high levels of support for this measure and didn’t change much). To a similar degree, liberals became more supportive of a 5% across the board cut to discretionary programs after one day of deliberation.”

It’s worth noting that the study of public deliberation within the fields of political science and communications has dramatically expanded over AmericaSpeaks tenure. There is little doubt in my mind that AmericaSpeaks played a significant role in this development through such things as the creation of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the Journal of Public Deliberation, the publication of the Deliberative Democracy Handbook, and its many researcher and practitioner convenings on deliberative democracy.

Looking to the Future

Looking forward, I think the great challenge for the public deliberation community will be to figure out how to institutionalize the practices that have been developed over the past two decades by AmericaSpeaks and its peers. In the past,, the public deliberation community has valued adherence to the core principles of deliberative democracy at the expense of broader adoption of practices that engage and empower the public. AmericaSpeaks itself in partnership with Face the Facts worked to marry the production of events, media, and deliberative practices in 2011 and 2012 with the support of the Democracy Fund. However, as a community, we have too often criticized practices that do not live up to our standards even though they have the potential to provide more people with a greater voice in our democracy. While we should not give up on our principles, we need to acknowledge that not enough progress has been made in institutionalizing the practices that we have spent so many years developing and defending.

When I look at the field of practice today, I am most excited by those organizations that are working to institutionalize deliberative practices in ways that directly respond to core incentives that drive the behavior of major institutions in our political system (and that do so with relatively little expense). Participatory budgeting and citizen initiative reviews are two of the most important examples of deliberative practices that can be easily institutionalized and scaled. Both have their shortcomings, but will only improve with time. Similarly, Talia Stroud’s work at the Engaging News Project is finding inexpensive ways that newsrooms can changes to how they present information on their web sites that incentivize greater engagement and deliberation (and that also attracts more readers and more revenue for the publications).

The biggest vacuum that AmericaSpeaks leaves behind in its wake is its vision for national deliberations that provide the public with a voice in the national decisions that are made in their name. I am hopeful that organizations like Voice of the People, PopVox, and the National Institute for Civil Discourse will fill some of this void – though their solutions look very different than those envisioned by AmericaSpeaks. Hopefully, the national discussion on mental health that was co-sponsored by multiple deliberative organizations will also point the field in a new and productive direction.

Thanks

The staff, associates, and partners of AmericaSpeaks are some of the most impressive and talented people with whom I have ever worked I cannot count the number of times that I have seen this group accomplish seemingly impossible tasks under the most challenging circumstances. It has been an honor and a privilege to be associated with each and every one of you. Thank you to Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, Steve Brigham, and everyone else who made this organization’s work possible.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Guest Post: The Role of Ranked Choice Voting in 2013

Rob Richie

December 19, 2013

(This post was co-authored by Drew Spencer, Staff Attorney for FairVote)

If you followed the local elections that took place in 2013, you probably heard stories about ranked choice voting. There were excellent new examples of how it works in practice and a wave of positive national press, including a Governing magazine news story on the impact of ranked choice voting on civility in elections and a Governing commentary by former Oregon Secretary of State Phil Kesling explaining its value for electing winner with higher voter turnout.

The most prominent stories came from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where voters had an unusually wide breadth of election choices for the open mayor’s seat. Current law requires candidates to pay a filing fee of only $20, which led to 35 candidates appearing on the ballot. Had voters been restricted to voting by indicating only a single favorite candidate in a single round of voting, Minneapolis’s mayor almost certainly would have won with a low plurality of the vote. In this year’s mayoral race in Boston, for example, the first place finisher in the preliminary election received only 18% of the vote. While a November runoff election did produce a majority winner, it came at the price of knocking out all candidates of color before the higher turnout general election.

Instead of a choose-only-one election system, however, Minneapolis uses ranked choice voting. Voters were able to express not only which candidate was their favorite, but also which second-choice and third-choice candidates they preferred over the remaining candidates. Those rankings were used to conduct a series of instant runoff elections, with the last-place finisher eliminated and their ballots added to the totals of the candidate ranked next until two candidates remained.

Ranked choice voting led to Minneapolis’ mayoral candidates competing seriously but also positively. Voters ultimately elected Betsy Hodges, a candidate who earned broad consensus support. Heavily outspent, Hodges skipped spending money on television ads in favor of grassroots campaigning. She broke from the field by earning more than a third of first-choice rankings and was the first, second or third choice of more than 60% of the voters—and was a landslide winner in the final instant runoff with her better financed rival.

Minneapolis voters overwhelmingly understood and preferred ranked choice voting, according to an exit poll by Edison Research and analysis of the election by FairVote Minnesota. Minneapolis school board member Kim Ellison was among many expressing excitement and pride in the outcome even when their first-choice candidate did not win. In Minneapolis, commentators noted that the political climate had changed from traditional “machine politics” to coalition politics, in which candidates talk to voters more about issues and policy. A local professor called the 2013 mayoral election a “game changer.” In video interviews, voters shed light on how positively ranked choice voting was viewed.

Among those elected to the city council’s 13 seats by ranked choice voting are the city council’s first Latino, Somali and Hmong Cambodian members. Ranked choice voting was also used for eight additional offices, including five seats elected by the fair representation, multi-seat form of ranked choice voting.

Similarly encouraging stories have come out of the other cities using ranked choice voting this year. In St. Paul (MN), incumbent mayor Chris Coleman easily defeated three challengers, with ranked choice voting allowing that election to take place in one round instead of two. As highly competitive special election led to the election of the first Hmong American to its city council. Instructively, two Hmong Americans were able to run without concern of splitting the vote—and the campaign was civil enough that the winner ultimately hired an African American candidate who finished a close second to work on his council staff.

FairVote’s Andrew Douglas wrote of the positive effects that the fair representation multi-seat ranked choice voting method had in this year’s city elections in Cambridge, Massachusetts for nine city council seats and six school committee seats. The Cambridge election resulted in four first-time winners including the council’s first Latino member and a 29-year-old Arab American. Despite comprising less than 20% of the city’s population, African American candidates have had continuous representation on the council since the 1950’s, and won two of six school committee seats. More than 95% of voters typically rank at least one winning candidate as one of their top three choices and like-minded voters can elect a candidate with 10% of the vote.

Takoma Park (MD),- where FairVote is headquartered, also elected its city offices with ranked choice voting, but races were lopsided. The bigger story was it becoming the first city in the nation to extend voting rights to residents after they turn 16, a practice already done in national elections in several countries, including Austria, and Brazil. Turnout of eligible voters who were 16 and 17 was nearly twice as high as the the turnout rate of residents 18 and older.

This fall there were two special elections for U.S. Congress in which ranked choice voting played a role. Louisiana held a special election to fill a vacancy in its fifth congressional district on November 16th. In Louisiana state and federal elections, all candidates run against each other in the first round; If no candidate earns a majority, there is a runoff election between the top two candidates a few weeks later – with this year’s runoff between two Republicans. However, the time between rounds of voting is too short for many military and overseas voters to be able to receive and return their runoff ballots. To allow those voters to fully participate, Louisiana instead allows them to complete a ranked choice ballot before the first round takes place. That way, their ballots can count in the runoff for whichever of their highest ranked candidates remains.

Alabama also held a special election for Congress this fall with ranked choice ballots for overseas and military voters. There, the partisan primary elections include a runoff election if no candidate receives a majority of votes. With a crowded field of competitors for the Republican nomination, a runoff election was expected – and again overseas voters would not have enough time to receive and return new ballots for the primary runoff. Because federal law requires that such voters not be disenfranchised, a federal court ordered that Alabama allow them to use a ranked choice ballot when voting in the Republican primary – a remedy Alabama itself proposed as a means to allow it to keep a tight schedule for its multiple rounds of elections.

FairVote has written about the use of ranked choice voting for overseas and military voters before. It’s a simple reform that helps make runoff elections work better while respecting the votes of absentee voters, and it’s very popular with both voters and election administrators. That’s why, when the Presidential Voting Commission began its hearings to discuss issues with access to the polls, we submitted testimony advocating for the widespread adoption of this increasingly common reform.

The expansion of uses of ranked choice voting is an especially notable development at a time when gridlock and dysfunction in Congress have made cynicism about the American democratic process increasingly pervasive. Strong commentaries this year focused on how ranked choice voting can increase opportunities for racial minorities and heal our partisan, ideological divide, with FairVote having a series of our its similar commentaries in recent weeks in the Washington Post, Newsday, San Jose Mercury News, Cleveland Plain Dealer and more than a dozen other publications.

Next year offers more important ranked choice voting elections, including those in four California cities that use ranked choice voting. More than 60 colleges and universities now use it for student elections, and the Oscars use the multiseat form to nominate nearly all categories and the one-winner form to choose best picture. More states and cities are starting to consider ranked choice voting with a growing awareness that voting equipment vendors are making the reform easier to implement it. If you have questions about bringing ranked choice voting to your community, be sure to contact our team at FairVote.

Rob Richie is executive director of FairVote.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Guest Post: Journalism educators — Have you a project that will energize your local media ecosystem?

Jane McDonnell

December 2, 2013

Today ONA launched the application process for a contest for journalism educators to experiment with new ways of providing news and information

We know that you and your fellow j-school colleagues have been talking about experiments that innovative experiment that will shake up your curriculum. There’s a talented student who just needs the right mix of collaboration and inspiration to fulfill her promise. You have a local media partner willing to work with you and a cool engagement platform in mind. Researcher: Check. Designer? Could be. Developer? In the wings.

You’ve got the right ingredients to apply for the 2014 Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education, and inject up to $35,000 in the form of a micro-grant that can push your idea to launch and—we hope—make both your curriculum and your local news landscape stronger. The competition, run by ONA and funded not only by a collaborative that includes Excellence and Ethics in Journalism Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as well as the Democracy Fund, will support live news experiments that further the development of teaching hospital models in journalism education, in which innovative projects are created by teams of educators, students, professionals, technicians, and researchers.

Micro-grants will be awarded to 15 to 25 projects to be completed during the 2014-2015 academic year. Irving Washington, ONA’s Director of Operations and Challenge Fund administrator, in advising applicants suggests “Your project should stretch the limits of what you think you can do. Don’t be afraid to fail. The goal is to empower journalism schools to lead professional innovation and thought leadership. The size of your school or program shouldn’t limit the project’s ambition.”

Teams will be selected based on ideas that show the most potential for:

encouraging collaborative, student-produced local news coverage
bridging the professor-professional gap
using innovative techniques and technologies
and producing shared learnings from their digital-age news experiments

The competition will culminate in at least one substantial grand prize for the project most likely to change either local newsgathering, journalism education or both. An overall prize will be given for the best project evaluation, regardless of the experiment’s outcome. The winners and their projects, chosen in consultation with academic advisers and ONA leaders, will be featured at upcoming ONA conferences and other news media education events.

For inspiration, FAQs and resources, visit journalists.org and follow the conversation on #hackcurriculum.

Have questions? Email challengefund@journalists.org.

Deadline is Feb. 13, 2014 and winners will be announced in April, 2014.

Good luck—we can’t wait to see what you come with up.