Last year I was asked by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to author a study on models for local online hubs or community web portals. This paper was one of several commissioned by the Knight Foundation to implement the 15 recommendations found in the Knight Commission report on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The specific Knight Commission recommendation I focused on in my white paper read as follows: “Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.” More specifically, it said: “Communities should have at least one well-publicized portal that points to the full array of local information resources. These include government data feeds, local forums, community e-mail listservs, local blogs, local media, events calendars, and civic information. [The entire three paragraph recommendation can be read here.]
My resulting white paper is entitled, Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action, and it was released by the Aspen Inst. & Knight Foundation at an event this morning. (Another Aspen/Knight white paper was simultaneously released on Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government. It was written by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee.) A short summary of my report follows down below, and you can find the entire report online here. I’ve also embedded the video of this morning’s launch event for both reports.
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