Together with PBS Engage, the Knight Commission has created a place for you to answer five questions about your information needs, ask Google's Marissa Mayer (Co-chair of the Commission) questions, and comment on the draft version of the Commission's report.

The public input pages will be live until the deadline tomorrow night, and you can also follow the conversation through the #publicinput hashtag on Twitter.

Tell us your information needs and please help us spread the word--

You can also share their thoughts with the Commission by calling (202) 721-5599 or writing to: Knight Commission at The Aspen Institute, One Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036.

You can answer the questions here.

Below, an excerpt from the post:

Problem: Where can people find the local information they need, whether it's about a school board meeting, a new construction project or a nearby robbery? Solution: A community hub, with all the information aggregated in one online source and pushed out via libraries, in-person meetings, community radio, small run print publications and cable access TV.

That's my conclusion after studying all the input received by PBS Engage when it passed on the questions from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Those questions all sought to get to the heart of one issue: What are the information needs of people in local communities, and what can we do as a society to serve those needs? I also asked that question on a post at Idea Lab, which David Sasaki answered with an excellent view of how mapping applications can boost community involvement.

Read the rest of the post with his eight steps, and please leave comments on the MediaShift post.

pbs.org/engage/publicinput

On the site, there are five questions you can leave a comment on (or leave a general comment here) along with blog posts and video from the Commission's seven public forums and the Commission's preliminary report (that you can comment on in a Scribd shared document).

Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Co-Chair of the Commission, will post answers to questions about the Commission's work via Google Moderator at www.pbs.org/publicinput on May 15th.

You can also leave a phone message for the Commission (202) 721-5599 or write to them at: The Aspen Institute, One Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036.

Questions? Let us know in the comments. Please leave all comments for the Commission on the pbs.org/engage/publicinput site.

You can watch the live webcast by clicking the top link on today's Commission agenda page.

Do you have thoughts to share with the Commission? Leave a comment below or Twitter @knightfdn.

If you're in the NYC area this evening, there is an informational event tonight from 7 - 9pm at CUNY Journalism School, Room 308, about the $5 million this year in the News Challenge, a yearly contest about innovative digital news delivery. The Facebook invite has more details. Future News Challenge events will be listed on this blog soon.

Questions? Thoughts? Let us know in the comments--

Archived video will live on the Knight Commission site, and smaller clips are in a Flickr set and below, some highlights from the media panel that just finished a few minutes ago:

Linda O'Bryon, Chief Content Officer, KQED Public Television talks about QUEST content collaboration:

Knight Commissioner Andrew Mooney asked about journalism business models:

And Jim Bettinger, director of the Knight Stanford Fellows answered:

Knight Commissioner Michael K. Powell brought up "information snacking":

And Raj Jayadev, Founder, Silicon Valley De-Bug talked about the internet as a gateway:

Posts on the speakers are on the new Knight Commission blog.

What do you think about journalism business models and information snacking based on the videos above?

How do you think push/pull works in local news and information dissemination?

The day is just beginning here:

To follow along, the discussion is being webcast live here and the proceedings are being blogged by Kristie Wells of Social Media Club and Josh Wilson.

The Knight Twitter account will also have updates throughout the day; ask questions in the comments below and on Twitter.

danah boyd on e-literacy from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

This conference, sponsored by Knight, brings together some of the brightest minds in media. Below is a partial list of attendees.

• Madeleine Albright (former Secretary of State)
• Philip Bennett (Managing Editor of Washington Post Company)
• Reed Hundt (former FCC chair)
• Paula Kerger (President and CEO, PBS)
• Bill Kling (President and CEO American Public Media)
• Marissa Meyer (VP search and user experience Google)
• Craig Newmark (founder, Craigslist)
• Ted Olson (former Solicitor General)
• Andrew Prozes (CEO Nexis Lexis)
• Philip Rosedale (founder Second Life)
• Paul Sagan (CEO Akamai)
• Cyrus Krohn (runs e-campaign for McCain)

The Paris Hilton video response to the McCain ad definitely got everyone's attention here and has been discussed as one example for the changed nature of media in the 2008 election. I'm posting more detailed conference notes (in a stream-of-consciousness style too lengthy for this blog) at www.mytribune.com.

What would you like to see the Knight Commission accomplish? Please leave a comment below.