Last Updated: January 11, 2012
The Center for Digital Information (CDI) is a new initiative to support our public dialogue by leading the policy research community — think tanks, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions — in a fundamental rethinking of how it communicates its knowledge in a digital society.
The Center has found that despite revolutionary advances in digital technology, a shrinking traditional journalism industry, and changes in how people consume information, the policy research community continues to use the internet in much the same way it did when the digital era began — as a distribution channel for its usual set of reports, white papers, journal articles, and policy briefs. CDI will help the field update its products and practices so that research remains relevant, engaging and informative to both the public and policymakers as they consume information in new ways brought on by rapid technological change.
CDI will model new interactive techniques for communicating research findings in digital media, highlight best practices, and convene stakeholders. It will also examine different technology-related funding strategies, organizational structures, and publication models to make innovative use of digital technology an integrated part of the research and communication process.
CDI will be funded by a combination of direct grants from foundations and joint proposals with research organizations.
CDI is based in Washington, D.C. and affiliated with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. It is supported initially by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Read more on digitalinfo.org
CDI's activities are arranged around three themes:
Philanthropic foundations occupy a unique position as both funders of policy-relevant information and communicators of information themselves. CDI will work with foundations to adapt each of these roles to a rapidly changing digital technology and information environment. It will model new digital end products in collaboration with grantees and the foundations themselves, build digital proficiency and capacity, and devise frameworks for turning traditional research grants into digital information grants (research + digital production). The goal is to help foundations increase their return on investment in policy-relevant research and their own effectiveness as digital communicators.
CDI will collaborate with research organizations to propose, conduct and disseminate research differently — as digital information (research + digital production). These projects will model new digital end products, create roadmaps for incorporating digital innovation as a routine part of information dissemination, and help researchers write digital production plans and budgets directly into research proposals. CDI will bring its own production money and skill to the table as part of these partnerships and also submit joint proposals with research organizations.
CDI will convene two events in 2012. On February 15, it will hold "Beyond the PDF: Think Tanks in a New Digital Age" in Washington, DC in association with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "Beyond the PDF" will bring together communications professionals, researchers and technology experts from the nation's leading policy research institutions to examine promising new digital presentation methods and to discuss how to make them a routine part of the dissemination process. On April 30, CDI will host "Philanthropy and the Digital Public Dialogue" at the Council on Foundations annual conference in Los Angeles, CA. This roundtable will examine the changing digital landscape and its implications for philanthropies as both funders of and participants in a public dialogue on their issues that is increasingly taking place in digital media.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has funded a prototype "Digital Information Dashboard" that pulls together key statistics and trends on internet penetration, broadband use, information consumption, mobile device use, and more. This new resource is intended to be a central location for funders and researchers to get a complete view of the digital lay of the land. The Dashboard will also be the new home for CDI's Showcase of interactive examples. It will be launched in the spring of 2012. Once the prototype is developed, CDI will invite more foundations to provide input, expand it, add features, and direct funds to research partners to do more data gathering to feed the Dashboard.
A recent Columbia Graduate School of Journalism report recommended above all that the journalism industry create "less-commoditized content designed for digital media." In other words, don't just post text articles, build interactive applications. Meantime, the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and a related FCC report "The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age," called on the nonprofit sector and foundations to become more effective partners in informing the public on important issues. Partnerships for Interactive News (PIN) links these two recommendations. PIN would pair leading digital newsrooms (i.e., New York Times, ProPublica, Chicago Tribune, Guardian, Texas Tribune, etc.) with social sector researchers and their funders, using the sector's large body of data and information to build valuable digital journalism products. Rather than research happening in a silo and then later hoping to garner media coverage, PIN would seat the researchers and digital journalists at the same table with a common goal: engaging digital coverage of vital public issues.
The Social Sector's Digital Newsroom
The social sector has both an opportunity and a need to play a more direct role in our public dialogue. Digital technology and its increasing use for news and information present the opportunity. The shrinking journalism industry and the lack of in-depth coverage of public issues create the need. In response, CDI proposes an ambitious plan to develop a new fully digital public-interest information outlet. Digitalinfo.org won't cover breaking news nor do investigative journalism, but instead cover the rich body of foundation-funded data and information on issues such as health, the environment, the economy, education, international affairs and global development. Uniquely, digitalinfo.org's primary mode of storytelling will be the interactive "application" — techniques such as interactive web packages, multimedia, mapping tools, and interactive databases — rather than the usual diet of static text and images. There are existing archives of social sector research (e.g., IssueLab, the Center for Governmental Studies Policy Archive, the Foundation Center PubHub): the same PDF products pulled into online repositories. These resources are important and would be potential partners, but the plan for digitalinfo.org is quite different. The objective is a professional multi-platform digital outlet — equal in production value and reach to commercial news sites — built by foundations; staffed by a highly skilled digital "newsroom" of coders, designers and former journalists; capable of giving public policy issues the kind of in-depth digital coverage that commercial journalism is increasingly unable to provide.
CDI is seeking to establish a digital production lab that will give the Center a measure of in-house interactive development capacity and the ability to initiate its own projects. The envisioned Lab will be comprised of 6-10 full- and part-time interactive designers/developers and fellows. It will build examples and prototypes in order to give funders visible samples of how research will be presented in digital media beyond the standard PDF document.
At its first roundtable in October 2010, CDI identified a key contributor to slow digital innovation in the policy research sector: a lack of integration among the research, communication and technology functions within organizations. CDI's fellowship program will create teams comprised of one or more people from each discipline: a policy researcher, a communications staffer, and a digital developer. Each team will work over a period of months to re-develop what would have been a traditional document — report, white paper, journal article — into an interactive digital resource.