The Public Square Project

It's hard to believe that it has been one year since we kicked off the work of The Public Square Project with a series of citizen journalism training workshops held at The Union Project in East Liberty. Since that time, we have registered some key successes, dealt with many challenges, and made our share of mistakes.

Through it all, I've been very proud of the progress that we have made and the groundwork that we have laid for a more effective organization. The second year of The Public Square Project is going to be the time for us to take our work to the next level by becoming a fully-fledged organization and making good on our goal of improving the quality of local government in the Pittsburgh region by advocating for better access to public information, promoting government transparency, and educating citizens about the policy-making process.

It is particularly fitting that we recommit to doing so now because it happens to be Sunshine Week, a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information, led by the American Society of News Editors. We are very happy to be a small part of this effort, and so please check back every day this week for new content and information on how you can become involved in The Public Square Project.

As part of the Sunshine Week festivities, I will be in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, March 18th to participate in the launch of the Sunlight Foundation's Public=Online campaign, an ongoing non-partisan effort by the Sunlight Foundation to harness public support for accountability and transparency and to build a grassroots movement that works to hold elected officials accountable on the local, state and federal level. I am honored to be on a panel with representatives of the Sunlight Foundation, the Washington Examiner, the Huffington Post, and Google, highlighting the need for online, real-time access to government information. For those who haven't heard of the Sunlight Foundation, it is a national non-profit organization focused on using cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government more transparent and accountable. The Sunlight Foundation has been behind many of the most important innovations in government transparency since its founding in 2006, and we could not imagine a better partner to help us achieve our goal of making local governments in the Pittsburgh region national models for transparency and openness. We look forward to extending this partnership as 2010 progresses.

But before we move forward, it's important to recap where we have been over the past year.

As you may remember, the purpose of the citizen journalism workshops was to train aspiring non-professional, citizen journalists in the techniques and methods of professional journalism in advance of the launch of our hyperlocal news site and citizen journalism publishing platform, The Pittsburgh Citizen, then called PittPoint, which was funded, in part, by the generous support of The Sprout Fund. During March 2009, we are proud to say that we trained over 40 citizen journalists.

Our hope was, and still is, that by empowering citizens to report on what is happening in their neighborhoods, we can start to tell new kinds of stories about public policy and civic affairs in the Pittsburgh region, while building the capacity of traditional media organizations to cover local news and enhancing the transparency and accountability of local governments by putting more eyes and ears on the ground. I have always described this effort as an experiment, and it remains so today. Like many other startup news sites, we've been challenged to find a business and content model that pairs quality with sustainability.

We launched a beta version of The Pittsburgh Citizen in the Fall of 2009. In order to test our platform and our model, we partnered with the Coro Center for Civic Leadership, whose Public Policy Fellows used the platform to report on events surrounding the G-20 Summit, held in Pittsburgh on September 24-25, 2009. In the end, the Fellows wrote nearly 20 original stories about the G-20 that would not have otherwise been published.  Based on the extensive feedback that we received from the Fellows on what worked and what didn't, we decided to revise our business model. In the months since, we have focused our efforts on forming content partnerships with reputable blogs, news sites, and non-profit organizations, in addition to producing original, high-quality citizen journalism. We have entered into several such partnerships and we expect to roll out a new version of The Pittsburgh Citizen featuring the new content this Spring.

So, this Sunshine Week, I can proudly say that the future of The Public Square Project looks brighter than ever. But we can't achieve all of our goals without your help (we are still, after all, an all-volunteer effort!). Soon we will be asking for your financial support, but for now, we are focused on building a community around the need for greater transparency and openness at the local government level.

If you're reading this, you've taken a first step in helping us to achieve this goal. Can you help us extend this effort by inviting 3 friends to check out The Public Square Project? Click here to see all of the ways in which you they can become involved in our work.

Thank you for your continued support and stay tuned for a terrific Year 2 of The Public Square Project!