Mdp

What is the Midwest Democracy Project?

The Midwest Democracy Project (MDP) is a proposed eight-month effort to engage citizens of Missouri and Kansas in political speech and issues dialog. MDP will invent, test and measure the results of new methods and platforms for citizen/journalist engagement in trustworthy environments.

MDP is proposed as joint public initiative of the Missouri School of Journalism and its Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, the University of Kansas' William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the Kettering Foundation, and involves a collaboration with key media organizations in both states, starting with The Kansas City Star.

Key initiatives

The MDP seeks to:

• Develop and experiment with new, web-based tools for assembling non-partisan, fact-based issues research and narratives -- shared in multimedia formats – about specific races, issues and civic challenges confronting Missouri and Kansas citizens.

• Focus on finding ways to systematically share the insights of knowledgeable, engaged citizens and the tasks of monitoring and watching government and campaigns.

• Convene and collaborate around public forums and issue coverage, and work to identify and circulate the issues that matter to the states' futures, working at times from schools, libraries, coffee shops and newsrooms statewide.

• “Open source" the work of the MDP to participating legacy and new-media outlets on a non-exclusive basis forming the basis for a permanent contextual archive of journalism that matters to Missouri and Kansas.

• Convene a one-day, post-election symposium to share and document the results and learning.

Specific proposed projects

• Fund a student reporter corps to work side-by-side with veteran print and web journalists to expand coverage in a two-state area during a July-November election season. As part of the program, students would attend a “boot camp” to immerse themselves in the essentials of election coverage and multimedia reporting. We also would hire a student coordinator to manage the students and serve as liaision with The Star’s staff.

• Design a Midwest Democracy Project website to give citizens easy “one-stop-shopping” access to a smorgasbord of election content. Our election “dashboard” would provide entrée to stories, videos, polls, blogs, tweets, photo galleries and much more on candidates and their races. We would track campaign finance and major issues such as health care and education as well. In addition, citizens could register to vote, send in questions for candidates and track candidates on the campaign trail.

• Underwrite a handful of student investigative projects to fund and publish on our Midwest Democracy Project site, working closely with professors and additional students at each school.

• Create a first-ever regional poll, sponsored by MU, KU and The Star and possibly other partners. Our desire is to poll in a four-state area, providing an interesting look at attitudes and elections issues in the heartland.

• Initiate a Midwest Democracy Project news service. We would offer to partner with newspapers in our region, offering our content as a community service. Missouri and Kansas largely are served by small, rural papers. The idea is to offer our political coverage – free of charge – to small, rural papers within our region who might not be able to provide this kind of coverage themselves. In return for use of stories, small newspapers could share any of their content and we would aggregate it on our site to give their stories further reach.

Why now?

As media splinters, voters have more choices, and more confusion, about the information available to help them make informed decisions at the polls and between elections. Traditional print and broadcast media have many fewer reporters than a few years ago. But even if that were not the case, and even if were not reducing coverage of civic affairs, there would still be a need for the Midwest Democracy Project.

While for much of the last century, the challenge was information scarcity, now we have moved from an information age to an "attention age." The proliferation of other sources -- particularly social media and direct communication from government and public officials via the Internet -- makes it increasingly difficult for citizens to find and assess the trustworthiness of information. Their attention is being called from many quarters.

Research components

We are exploring specific research ideas:

• The Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, has expressed interest in a research component for Midwest Democracy. Their objective would be to underwrite an experiment testing the effectiveness of leadership training on the outcome of public forums. They would consider training our student-journalists (possibly in Dayton) to design issue books to help lead constructive public forums, and then ask that that the students host both structured and unstructured sessions. The students would be expected to report the outcomes and any differences in the quality of the resulting public debate.

• Localocracy.org, a web-based startup in Amherst, Mass., founded by University of Massachusetts students, is beta-testing a method for increasing public engagement with specific, local issues through social-networking technology that matches pro-con comments nad debate and discussion with real-name, identified voters. We would create parallel sites, one permitting anonymous commenting and one requiring authentication to voter-address roles, and study the quality and impact of the resulting dialog. This test could help determine the best forum for future public-debate sites and contribute important data to the debate of anonymous vs. identified blogging commentary. (Download a PDF slide deck about Localocracy.org)