Sally Duros

Some audience engagement tools to check out. Could any of them be useful to you?

HEARKEN IS PUBLIC-POWERED JOURNALISM

“Q: How do JOURNALISTS know the stories they report are stories their COMMUNITY finds relevant?
A: They ask them. And they use HEARKEN to manage engagement”

Listening Post and Curious City. What do you wonder about Chicago, the region and its people? Pose your question to Curious City and we’ll track down answers together, with stories online, in a weekly podcast, and on WBEZ 91.5 FM. Follow what we do — and learn how you can help investigate — on our website, on Facebook, on Twitter and Tumblr.

MediaPublic
What does it mean to be a member of a public radio station in the United States? What could it mean? How could expanding the definition of membership instill a sense of ownership and identity among listeners, allowing them to feel more connected and invested in public media’s content, work and mission? Follow Melody Kramer on GitHub.

Framed by WDET
An audio-visual experience that integrates PHOTOGRAPHY and AUDIO STORYTELLING to tell the story of ETHNIC AND CULTURAL COMMUNITIES throughout metro Detroit.

ChiHackNight
Chicago’s weekly event to build, share & learn about civic tech. “Open data  without journalism is public relations.”— Barb Iverson

Blendl
With Blendle, you read all articles from your favorite newspapers and magazines. Without subscribing. Coming soon to a locality near you.

New developments
Here in Chicago, City Bureau, SmartChicago and Invisible Institute have developed the Task Force Tracker.  
Using an excel sheet and Genius, a team of City Bureau Community Documenters  an annotated, updated and independent hub for public use that will measure the ~200 individual recommendations against existing contracts, policies, potential conflicts and public discourse; such as the Fraternal Order of Police contract, local legislation and media reports.

A couple of large scale initiatives involving remnants of big newsrooms brought together hold lessons for Chicago. And yes, they contribute to the “Could it happen here?” factor.
Poynter details how a non-profit now runs Philadelphia news and here’s an explainer. The Knight Foundation held a discusson last week and you can watch a video of the panel discussion  if you want more details. In Detroit, here’s the story of the Detroit Journalism Cooperative  and how the coop’s members — the Center for Michigan’s Bridge Magazine, Detroit Public Television, Michigan Radio, New Michigan Media, and WDET FM101.9 —all learned to play nicely together. Check out NextChapterDetroit.

The way that police unions routinely bargain away public transparency is at the core of the legal battle in Chicago that has unleashed a stunning series of events.

Open government advocates consider “open by default” to be the gold standard for public records. But for Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, ”closed by default” has been the standard upheld by collective bargaining agreements with the City of Chicago.

This standard is the case with the police union not only in Chicago, but in many cities nationwide, says Craig Futterman, who is a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago Law School Mandel Legal Aid where he directs the University of Chicago’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic.

Futterman has been working with independent journalist Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute, for more than a decade to open to the public the misconduct records of Chicago police officers through Freedom of Information Act requests and civil rights litigation.

Their vision is for an open data portal that will capture and make public the entire disciplinary database for the Chicago Police Department. The portal will be easily accessible for all to use, including journalists, researchers and community.

A common body of evidence

Fully stocked and fully iterative, the data portal will be a common body of evidence around which discourse, however contentious, however collaborative, can take place.

“The database we are talking about …. there has been nothing like this in Chicago or anywhere,” Futterman said. “It is unique in that it is dedicated to the principle that public means ‘public.’ This database is an attempt to make this more than an abstract principle and to make that principle real in Chicago.”

The portal already has a strong start with the Chicago Police Database Project (CPDP), a fully searchable community data portal announced in early November that contains the complaint records for more than 8,500 Chicago Police officers over the past four years.

A dark achievement 

In a significant step toward transparency, the City of Chicago had agreed to turn over its full list of misconduct complaints for all officers, dating back to 1967, to the Invisible Institute, Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. But the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police has taken legal action to block its release, saying they would destroy hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence, files and records related to Chicago police misconduct reports older than four years.

Kalven petitioned the court and an Illinois Circuit Court Judge ruled in an emergency order that Chicago authorities must notify journalists, activists and the public before they destroy records. This is a heated time, when the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing its investigation of the Chicago Police Department, said to be the largest investigation ever of a police operation.

Futterman’s work with Kalven paid off big time in early 2014 when Kalven won as plaintiff in Kalven v. City of Chicago, a watershed court decision in Illinois that made police misconduct records public. That opened the floodgates to information on the Laquan McDonald shooting. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Kalven obtained the autopsy that showed McDonald had been shot 16 times.

The Nov. 24 release of a Chicago Police Department dash-cam video shows Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 16 times and killing 17-year old Laquan McDonald. The brutal image contradicts the official account given by the Fraternal Order of Police spokesman on Oct. 20, 2014. Also raising questions is the $5 million paid by the City of Chicago to McDonald’s family to settle out of court prior to a lawsuit.

In the streets, black youth, ministers and concerned citizens have been marching. In response, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has fired the Chicago Police Superintendent, the head of the Independent Police Review Authority and the Chief of Detectives. More heads could roll, some are saying, perhaps even the Mayor’s.

These extraordinary events add up to what Rachel Maddow called a “dark achievement” for Kalven’s journalism and police reform and open government in Chicago.

In this latest round with the police union, Kalven believes his effort will prevail and  ultimately, after many legal volleys, the public records issue will be resolved permanently by the Illinois Legislature.

$500 million in police settlements

In addition to the human costs, the City of Chicago has paid out more than $500 million on police-related settlements, judgments, legal fees and other costs during the past decade, according to the Better Government Association, an independent watchdog group. The city shelled out $84.6 million in 2013 alone.

Meanwhile the existing data portal is there to carry water for Kalven and Futterman’s full transparency vision. Kalven is quick to say this is not a story about technology.

“The data is fragmentary in terms of the larger phenomena,” says Kalven, whose Invisible Institute first sprouted roots in an empty apartment at the old Stateway Gardens Housing Development. “That’s because there are things you can learn from the data. There are things you can only learn on the streets.”

“All the knowledge to reform the system is in the system, but it’s divided and scattered and divided from itself. (Events of the last few weeks) represent a huge breakthrough in (shattering) official secrecy. … Now, the key is to connect that knowledge with other kinds of knowledge on the street, in the department itself,” Kalven says.

System improvement as journalism

Kalven’s goal is to engender and fortify the feedback loops between the data and the people on the street and between the data and the police officers on the beat to create a systemic cycle of continuous improvement.

“I see that as fundamentally a journalistic project.”

When taken together, all the data completes the picture for public discourse on systemic police reform. Using the information in these documents and others as added, activists and journalists can map out the many interrelated components that form the entire  “system” of police misconduct: everything from the attorneys who approach families to negotiate settlements; to how abusive police disrupt community trust; to how their abuse thwarts the work of conscientious and law-abiding police; to how the $500 million in settlements paid affects the system that is the City of Chicago and on.

An open newsroom ecosystem

All this will be rich fodder for a journalistic ecosystem Kalven hopes to see sprout around the police misconduct data. Already running as a pilot is a new newsroom called City Bureau directed by Darryl Holliday (who also works part-time for Invisible Institute). Publishing in partnership with the Chicago Reporter, the Chicago Reader and The Guardian, City Bureau has partners in the journalism, civic media and education spaces.

Kalven points out that that newsrooms themselves have an important place on the systems map and how open or closed they are as a component has a significant impact on working toward a systemic solution.

“There’s a strategy to secrecy. For instance, ‘If you knew what we (the Chicago Tribune) know, but we can’t tell you, but if you knew it, you would know we’re right’,” Kalven says. “We’ve had versions of that for years around these issues. Everybody picking their own facts, so to speak.”

“That’s no longer possible,” he says.

“What’s powerful about this is the publicness of it. … I see the journalism as an extension of that. As a possibility of really building an ever more robust ecosystem of journalists at different points in their career working individually, in collaboration on a whole constellation of issues bearing on these general themes and then having that work accumulate in a coherent way and be at the center of really critical public policy decisions that are going to be made in coming months and years about how the police operate in the city.”

“We made a very significant kind of down payment with the data we have on a public resource that’s open and available to everybody,” Kalven says. Now for others working on this issue, it’s  “write your scoop, but then pass that material on to us. Don’t just put it in a file cabinet somewhere. Incorporate it into this expanding resource that’s of ever great use to everybody.”

The way forward for Chicago police reform

“This is an extraordinary moment in terms of possibilities for police reform, Kalven says. “If we have the black caucus and the ministers and various civic organizations, at least loosely, behind a clear, coherent reform agenda, that will be huge. There’s never been that kind of constituency for reform of this nature before.“

To Kalven’s view, four fundamental issues guide the police reform process forward.

They are —

1. Transparency
2. Accountability
3. Code of Silence
4. The Fraternal Order of Police Contract.

1) Transparency. It’s critical the information is made available to the public.

“That’s the phase we’re in and the drama we’re living through,” Kalven said. When Invisible Institute won the court decision in 2014 saying that police misconduct files are public information, he, his lawyers and Craig Futterman sat down and negotiated with Steve Patton, the corporation counsel and his team about how to operationalize the decision. “It was really successful and it was really a good negotiation,” Kalven said.

2) Accountability in terms of how citizen complaints are investigated and in the disciplinary process.
“Fundamentally, it doesn’t work,” Kalven said. “I think what our data show, overall, is they provide a kind of portrait of impunity.” Because the odds are against an abusive officer being identified, investigated and disciplined, there’s no real fear of punishment. And because of that residents of neighborhoods most affected by these patterns feel there’s no use in filing a complaint.

In addition, most large organizations that interface with the public conduct pattern analysis as part of quality control. Kalven cites airline practices that look at complaints as an important source of information for improving the bottom line. The City of Chicago ignores this large body of evidence.

3) The Code of Silence and the culture that enables it.
“This is where leadership really matters,” Kalven says. In the Laquan McDonald case, “I think it’s more disturbing how the culture of the department responds. This wasn’t some dramatic departure from the norm. This is the norm,” Kalven says.  The way the institution responded was symptomatic of larger patterns. At every level, from officers on the scene as the boy was lying there bleeding to the highest levels of the city. “Over time, everybody’s instinct was to circle the wagons. To put out a false narrative and then double down on that false narrative when it was challenged. We now have more and more evidence and more will come out. That process of maintaining the false narrative required destruction of evidence, intimidation of witnesses, falsification of police records and, ultimately, the five million dollar settlement with the family, “ Kalven says.

4) Removing impediments in the union contract to vigorous, timely investigations.
This is likely to happen. Mayor Emanuel has referred to going back to the bargaining table with the police union, Kalven says. “The Fraternal Order of Police has succeeded in negotiating in their collective bargaining agreement so many layers of protection for police officers who are accused of crimes that it really is, ultimately, antithetical to the public interest,” Kalven says.” I joke sometimes, but it’s not really a joke that there’s no category of citizens including children and the mentally ill who have as much due process as police officers do.”

Through low-cost tools, Public Lab injects community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental issues. This community engagement also alleviates media blackouts and information shortfalls that can occur after a major environmental event.

“That’s one of the essential tenets of Public Lab. It’s about rethinking how people can become involved in the decisions that are being made about the places where they’re living,” says Shannon Dosemagen, CEO and a founder of Public Lab.

Public Lab was born from balloon mapping work during the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast. Balloons and kites in the hands of community members provided low cost, easy to use transportation for cameras that took aerial images to create maps and provide data for the community’s case on cleanup priorities.

“After the BP oil spill happened … there wasn’t a lot of good or solid information that was coming from the spill. And, so I started using a crowd-sourcing platform and getting people to report what they were seeing or what they smelled or other changes in their environment. And then another project that I ended up working on during that time was with the aerial mapping kit that Public Lab is pretty well known for,” Dosemagen says.

This work earned Public Lab $500,000 in the 2011 Knight News Challenge and in 2013, they were awarded $350,000 in the Knight News Challenge for Health to build a suite of pollution detection tools.

Today five years after its founding, Public Lab says it is an “open community supported by a non-profit” that creates low-cost tools that everyday people can use to create information that residents need about the places where they live. The data collection methods for researching environmental impact typically cost less than $150. The group’s website lists 22 low-cost technologies and more are being developed every day. Public Lab’s map archive includes 326 citizen-made maps from around the world and some are included in Google maps.

The Public Lab non-profit has staff offices in five states with 62 organizers, who Dosemagen describes as “super volunteers.” The super volunteers integrate Public Lab methods or tools with the work they’re doing and the organizations they’re working with. Activities are under way in 12 to 15 solid chapters and a broader community of between 5,000 and 6,000 people who contribute research notes based on the work that they’re doing or participate in one of the many mailing lists that Public Lab maintains.

Public Lab lists scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. For instance, in Philadelphia, geographers are mapping to visualize and document community events and gatherings in parks and plazas throughout the city. In Southeast Chicago, in an old steel mill industrial area, massive piles of ‘petcoke’ or petroleum coke waste from Canada, are accumulating. Activists and media outlets such as NPR and Vice News have reported on the piles and the possible health hazards. With Public Lab training, the community is documenting the petcoke piles, mapping them and discussing ways to estimate their volume as well as monitor air quality around them. In June, Public Lab will be hosting a Chicago “barn raising” to mobilize community around the petcoke issue.

The belief that decisions about the environment belong to everyone is core to Public Lab’s philosophy.

The non-profit creates space for different types of expertise — from scientists associated with a research institute to community organizers to community educators.  “We’re interested in creating a place where people can bring their different experiences and backgrounds and think through processes together,” Dosemagen says.

This culture springs from the unique perspectives of the seven co-founders of Public Lab. The founders include an environmental organizer, a professional cryptographer, a biologist, an urban designer, another designer and two anthropologists, including Dosemagen. Dosemagen says her training as an anthropologist brings listening and analytical skills that help her understand how to make connections across different groups of people.

“We’re connecting on a different front with the much broader concept of climate change in terms of what it means,” Dosemagen says. It’s not big data, it’s local data, observing the impact from a very local level.

Historically, most tools used to research the environment are created at a price point that’s accessible for research institutions, corporations and government. Few tools have existed that allow people in a community to investigate local environmental concerns.

Public Lab changes that by enabling ground up data-based research and communication from the people in a place to the local governments and the industries whose policies impact the environment.

That’s a huge information gap that community members can fill. Activists, change agents, journalists are limited. They can’t participate in every minute of an event. Public Lab puts the tools — the media platforms and devices — in the hands of the community. Using the tools, the communities can gather information and fill in the gaps.

The outcome could be a media campaign, interfacing with journalists or calling for a larger, systematic study of a certain area.

The annual conferences, or barn raisings, bring people together in the spirit of thinking through a problem and putting together a tool. The gatherings are “unconference” style, which is a flexible facilitation method that allows people to self-organize around the issues and activities they are most passionate about.

While good solid data can be collected by putting accessible tools into the hands of community, the tools themselves can become self-replicating and viral by providing hand drawn, illustrated guides on how to create them. Public Lab’s video tutorials walk people through each step of the process of using them to collect data.

Open source licensing has fed into Public Lab’s sudden growth.

“I’ve heard the word float around several times that using those licenses is infectious in terms of the way things are able to spread,”  Dosemagen says. “If a certain component of that hardware tool is not available they could locally source it and then share that information back with the community. So I think that’s how the community really gains strength and momentum over the years.”