Highlights from the Knight Commission's report
Here are the 15 recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. You can download a short summary of the report here, or download the full report here (both PDFs).
Recommendation 1: Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.
Recommendation 2: Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.
Recommendation 3: Increase the role of higher education, community and nonproft institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.
Recommendation 4: Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.
Recommendation 5: Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they afect social outcomes.
Recommendation 6: Integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education ofcials.
Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.
Recommendation 8: Set ambitious standards for nationwide broadband availability and adopt public policies encouraging consumer demand for broadband services.
Recommendation 9: Maintain the national commitment to open networks as a core objective of Internet policy.
Recommendation 10: Support the activities of information providers to reach local audiences with quality content through all appropriate media, such as mobile phones, radio, public access cable, and new platforms.
Recommendation 11: Expand local media initiatives to refect the full reality of the communities they represent.
Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.
Recommendation 13: Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local “community summits” to address community afairs and pursue common goals.
Recommendation 14: Emphasize community information flow in the design and enhancement of a local community’s public spaces.
Recommendation 15: Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.
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October 6th, 2009 at 6:40 am
I watched most of the Knight Foundation reports on C-SPAN and was heartened by the emphasis on community involvement and civic engagement and the need to intentionally spread the digital media into all communities. However, I did not see anyone representing faith communities. That is too bad because faith communities have the most broadly and most personal penetration of different kinds of communities. Faith communities also bridge the impersonal divide between media and personal contact, assisting individuals and families access and implement educational, health and government discussions.
We are currently researching ways to connect, educate and train families with special needs children with professionals, faith communities and similar families. The digital age will be critical to accomplishing that goal but it must also be able to connect peer volunteers and extended family members personally with the familes so education can lead to support.