The Civic Literacy and Public Engagement Buzz
I haven't blogged for FGI in three years. They've made the blogger interface so much sexier (so why don't you volunteer next month?) since 2006, but otherwise all is familiar. And that's the feeling I get when going through the recent stream of reports about civic literacy and public engagement. Not the sexy part, but the fact that some of it is new (or newly documented), but most of it is familiar territory. Three reports discussing civic literacy and citizen engagement recently came out, all within five days of each other. Here's a quick look. Pew Internet released The Internet and Civic Engagement [PDF] on September 1. The report compares the demographics of those traditionally involved in their community affairs and politics offline with the demographics of those actively participating online. It turns out those two groups look pretty much the same until social media use is measured. That's where we find the new netizens. (The report compares groups that have internet access; the focus is on a civic divide rather than a digital divide.) The Association of Research Libraries published Public Engagement, SPEC Kit 312 on August 31. Government or political engagement is not the focus but is one of various types of academic library community outreach discussed. You have to buy the publication, but the table of contents and executive summary [PDF] are online for free and, from what I see, the Government Information Online virtual reference service is mentioned. Finally, the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services released Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills on August 28. The IMLS report [PDF] covers civic engagement as part of its broader mission "to engage libraries and museums, community stakeholders and policy makers at the national, state and local level in a concerted effort to meet the educational, economic, civic, and cultural needs of communities." The Skills Definitions section of the report identifies the scope of civic literacy as the ability to "participate effectively in civic life through knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes; exercise the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national, and global levels; and understand the local and global implications of civic decisions." Do any of these reports provide you with ideas for action, fodder for justification, or inspiration to ask new questions? Continue reading
POTUS tracker
The Washington Post has an RSS feed called, The POTUS Tracker. It lists events location and events for the President of the United States. There is also a more traditional Calendar view of the President's activities and you can view events by issue, type, and attendees. Continue reading
Peggy Garvin takes another turn as FGI blogger of the month for Sept 2009
Hi all. We've got a treat for you as Peggy Garvin takes another turn at the podium. Peggy, the blogger in chief at the SLA Government Information Division blog, was BOTM in August, 2006 and liked it so much she decided to do it again (hear that other guest bloggers?!). So without further ado, take it away Peggy. Continue reading
NYT enhances its Congress API
The New York Times has a nifty interface that programmers can use to access information about Congress, the Congress API. Recently, they have added improvements including bill cosponsorships, a new members response, and member voting record comparisons. Read about it here:
- Congress Returns, As Does an Improved Congress API, By Derek Willis, New York Times Open Blog, (September 2, 2009).
Statistical reality check
As noted here earlier, Sunlight Labs has announced the three finalists in its "Apps for America 2" competition. One of those is DataMasher which enables users to "have a little fun" with government data "by creating mashups to visualize them in different ways and see how states compare on important issues. Users can combine different data sets in interesting ways and create their own custom rankings of the states." A post about this on slashdot prompted a reply, Lies, Damned Lies, and DataMasher that worries that "in practice DataMasher would end up mostly generating a lot of bad information." The reply continues:
The site as it exists now seems to encourage you to think about issues in a really simplistic way (with a simple arithmetic combination of two numbers on a state by state basis) that's going to mislead more often than inform. The devil is always in the spurious correlations, and DataMasher just doesn't give you ability to get at that sort of thing (nor do most people have the understanding of statistics anyway). ...Statistics are extremely useful in determining public policy, but only if used carefully. There's already so much bad use of statistics in our public policy debates, and DataMasher seems perfectly designed (unintentionally, I'm sure) to exacerbate the problem.I am very sympathetic to this argument but would add an additional caveat to it. Any tool can be misused or used badly. Decades ago, some statisticians were upset when commercial software like SAS and SPSS were being introduced because it allowed anyone to run a regression without knowing what it was or how to do the math or whether they were regressing variables that made sense. While it is certainly true that the design of tools can encourage misuse or bad use, it is also true, I think, that even well-designed tools can be used badly and even bad tools may be better than no tools because they can encourage imagination and exploration and curiosity. Those can lead to better, more informed questions and analysis. For libraries and service providers there is another side to this story. As tools like DataMasher become more available and easier to use, it actually creates new challenges for information service providers. Rather than making our jobs easier, the availability of these kinds of tools actually makes our jobs more complex. Rather than pointing at a reliable book of statistics, created by government statisticians and published by the government, we now have 'raw' sources and sources that require more understanding and skill to use and interpret accurately and responsibly. Where once we tried to make sure that the people we helped looked at footnotes and table headers so they understood statistics, now we are faced with helping people use raw data and helping them produce their own statistics. Every library will have to decide on what level of service to provide in situations like this. No library should avoid addressing the service implications of the availability of new sources of information -- no matter how good or bad they are. Continue reading