Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

U.S. municipalities are increasingly pushing out data through online portals, but the first generation of “open data” experiments has fallen short in its promise of revolutionizing government transparency: The sites are generally little-used, and fail to prioritize data to align with what their various constituencies (journalists, researchers, the general public) most want and need. For this study, the authors surveyed open data portals in U.S. cities of varying sizes to see whether the highest-demand set of data in contemporary civic life – use of force by police officers – could reliable be tracked, and found the data completeness and timeliness to be, at best, spotty. The authors examine the systemic shortcomings of open data sites, and recommend a set of “best practices” to prioritize the affirmative disclosure of data that is verifiable and publicly actionable, starting with using each municipality’s existing knowledge base of FOIA requests to identify the data that journalists and other “super-users” most frequently request. The study concludes that affirmative disclosure of independently verifiable data will only become more important with the decline of mainstream community “watchdog journalism” organizations that once could be trusted to gather, analyze, and publish essential data.