The model for disseminating web content is evolving. Traditional barriers between consumers and real-time information are falling.
People curious to learn more about these trends packed a room at the National Press Club in Washington on September 16 to discuss the challenges and successes of content syndication.
Our latest Web Executive Seminar, “Web Sites without Walls,” featured four speakers who are helping change the landscape for content sharing. Speakers came from Stephenson Strategies, DC government, NPR, and the Sunlight Foundation.
The speakers wasted no time discussing the values and benefits when opening up the flow of information. Some presenters jumped at the chance to defend Jeffersonian principles through the timely release and transparency of public information. Others went on to crown the achievements from the participatory public sphere that have arisen as a result of increased access to content. Their messages shared overarching themes, which I have distilled below:
1. Old school vs. New school – David Stephenson kicked off the panel by highlighting the decline of the “managerial” role in control content. For too long, tight controls were placed on information released to the public. Spawned by exaggerated fears, governments and content publishers distrusted their constituents or audiences and would only release information once it had been filtered, cleansed, or massaged. However, these traditional models are breaking apart.
Vivek Kundra, Chief Technical Officer, for the District of Columbia, discussed the District’s radical transformation a model of the to the digital public sphere model. The District, never a beacon for transparent governance, sought to reverse course when he joined the new Adrian Fenty’s administration. The District adopted consumer technologies for use in the public sector to make the District’s public information more accessible. This included putting all videos of procurement bids on to YouTube to releasing real-time data sets in a catalog of 261 data feeds, the DC government has quickly become a leading example of data transparency. Already, the Fenty Administration is seeing dramatic changes in the way government is operating as it works with the same real-time data that is accessible to the public. Citizens are more quickly adept to hold government accountable for its actions.
2. People are coming together to create cool technologies – Syndication and programming tools such as APIs, widgets, and RSS have provided publishers with a bevy of methods to disseminate information. And increased accessibility of this information has people innovating and repackaging content in meaningful ways. The rise of data aggregation and collections has spurred tremendous collaborative interactions among people. Mash-ups, the interrelation of at least two data feeds, are rearranging content in ways that were never imagined by the content owners.
For example, someone could mash-up a feed containing requests made to DC’s Department of Public Works with a map as done by Everyblock.com. The tools are coming together to help people collaborate and receive real-time information such hurricane movements. It also allowed the U.K. government to run a “Show Us a Better Way” contest. The winner is the one who creates the best new model for displaying government content.
Clay Johnson’s presentation of Sunlight’s Capital Words widget, a tool that distills a day’s worth of congressional testimony to the most commonly used word, had the audience awing over the keyword patterns discovered. The crowd was especially amused when Clay drew election year patterns. As it turns out some words have incredible spikes in election years and then rarely get mentioned again. This was the case for the highly politicized word “marriage.”
3. Ready for launch – It is not all smooth sailing. There were challenges along the way for the presenters before the content could be syndicated. For Kundra, old paper records had to be digitized. Clay Johnson taking knocks at Congress, though seeming easy to do, actually had the problem of working with too much information from Congress, most of it unusable. And NPR’s senior management was concerned that the organization’s brand equity might suffer once its content was thrown into the wild. These common issues are what face organizations looking to get into the mix. Below are the three areas where challenges were identified:
- Setup – Collecting content for syndication is sometimes a challenge unto itself. Fortunately for DC, an entire team was devoted to the data warehouse and scoured paper files, databases, and people’s brains to set up the catalog. Having people with technical expertise helped get them to the 261 feeds they currently supply.
- Shape - Though Thomas Jefferson probably would have wanted his namesake, Thomas.loc.gov, to be the go to place to find legislative discourse, he might have been dismayed to learn the site is a challenge for the public to glean the main topics from testimonies. Sunlight Foundation took the otherwise clunky testimony information and created compelling data feeds with it helping users actually know what Congress is talking about on a given day.
- Launch Permission - Brand defamation? – Not quite. NPR’s real-time content syndication ensures what consumers are using is the same information publishers are distributing. Andy Carvin’s “brand and release” phrase pretty much summed it up. Just brand the content at syndication and release it into the wild. NPR also requires users of its API to use a unique key. This way, if the syndicate violated their terms of use, pulling the cutoff switch is easy.
Check back here soon for narrated "slidecasts" of the speakers' presentations, and let me know in the comments what your experience has been at working with APIs, RSS or getting your boss to buy into the idea.
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