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Having a clearer shape of a problem is not the same thing as having solutions. It's important if only so we don't collapse in the face of a task that often seems insurmountable: making sense of how the current media environment prepares citizens to be effective civic actors. I'm hoping that naming and framing these problems can make the task easier for my friends on the Knight commission and everyone wrestling with this challenging tangle of problems.

"We need to be open not in the big things, but also the little thing , like embargos.  (Confederation of Open Access Repositories, 2014) The little things like this talk. The little things like this slide. The little things like this picture of boats shooting at each other. Open content, open access, open learning. These are not only a part of democracy, a part of the free exchange of ideas, a part of the culture of learning, but they define all of these, and they define our system of free and open government.  (Jarche, 2014) These things depend on them. When I say the institution has different values from us, it's important to understand exactly what it is that the institution has different values from."

RSA Animate - The Internet in Society Does the internet actually inhibit, rather than encourage democracy?

"Promise Tracker is a citizen-monitoring platform designed to help communities track issues they care about and use that information to advocate for change with local government, institutions, or the press. More than a data collection platform, Promise Tracker is a civic process designed to gather groups of citizens to discuss critical issues in their communities, collect actionable information to better understand those issues, and engage in dialogue with local actors in order to develop solutions."

Law enforcement agencies across the country have failed to provide us with even basic information about the lives they have taken. And while the recently signed Death in Custody Reporting Act mandates this data be reported, its unclear whether police departments will actually comply with this mandate and, even if they do decide to report this information, it could be several years before the data is fully collected, compiled and made public. We cannot wait to know the true scale of police violence against our communities. And in a country where at least three people are killed by police every day, we cannot wait for police departments to provide us with these answers. The maps and charts on this site aim to provide us with the answers we need. They include information on 1,131 known police killings - including 1,067 arrest-related deaths (according to Bureau of Justice Statistics definitions) as well as 64 unintentional, off-duty and/or in-custody deaths - that occurred in 2014. They also include information on 1,080 police killings in 2013, 1,131 in 2015, 1,129 police killings in 2016 and 1,147 killings in 2017. 93 percent of the killings in our database occurred while a police officer was acting in a law enforcement capacity. Importantly, these data do not include killings by vigilantes or security guards who are not off-duty police officers.

"PATTRN IS A TOOL TO MAP COMPLEX EVENTS - SUCH AS CONFLICTS, PROTESTS, OR CRISES - AS THEY UNFOLD."