Making the most from community assignments

While we want many people to read and interact with the information Documenters collect, we don’t expect that the majority of people will come to our website to read meeting notes, so Documenters Network sites use several different strategies to share this work with wider audiences. 

News products
We think product development should come from your knowledge of the information needs, habits and channels of the communities you want to reach. 

• Newsletters: Some Documenters program sites publish a daily or weekly digest newsletter highlighting Documenters notes, Documenters live-tweet threads, upcoming public meetings and other ways to get involved in local civic issues. Here’s the Newswire for Chicago and Cleveland.

• Social media: Dedicated social media accounts highlight the work of individual Documenters, point readers toward editorial products and offer civic information. For example, the Minneapolis Documenters Twitter account shares messages from Documenters who are live-tweeting a meeting. The Cleveland Documenters’ Instagram feed spotlights powerful public comments from a recent meeting, announces its weekly newsletter and profiles individual Documenters.

Civic tools
Sometimes an idea for a data tool emerges from our documenting or reporting tasks. For example, the open-source City Scrapers tool was created to make life easier for the Chicago Documenters program; without it, it would be very hard to track public meetings across cities and counties. Since then, we’ve developed other tools that we think are useful to both our program and the public: 

• • Chicago Bill Bot was built to track legislation on-request via Twitter—because City Bureau made the code open source, civic coders in Cleveland later followed up with Cleveland Bill Bot

  • City Bureau partnered with local journalists, lawyers and organizers to build the Chicago Tracker Project, an annotation tool using Rap Genius to explore police accountability documents.

  • Chicago Documenters partnered with nearly a dozen Chicago-based news organizations to inform voters about the 2019 municipal election via Chi.Vote

Community surveys
Documenters come from a range of backgrounds, neighborhoods and experiences—because of their access to a multitude of networks and community groups, we’ve found that they make great interviewers for community listening and surveying projects. It's our take on "snowball sampling." 

• • Cleveland Documenters worked with the Marshall Project to interview residents: We Asked People in Cleveland What They Want to Know About Judges

  • Chicago Documenters partnered with BallotPedia to explore a local election: We Paid People to Interview Their Friends About Chicago’s February Election

  • Voices on the Vaccine: Cleveland Documenters interviewed more than 40 friends, family members, neighbors and residents from across the city on receiving the vaccine to understand their views, which in some cases were still evolving.
    
    

Partnerships

• Collaborating with journalists: This shouldn't come as a surprise, but journalists are natural partners for participatory media programs. Not only are many of Documenters sites hosted by newsrooms, but journalists often serve as the editors who review and approve Documenters’ meeting notes. 

• Collaborating with civic technologists: We've found that civic technologists often come with a culture of collaboration and open-source work and social justice. 

• Collaborating with librarians: In many ways, libraries are the clearest expression of place-based, participatory media. Not only can you access public works and resources, you can contribute to them. Nearly every Documenters site has hosted in-person trainings and other workshops at libraries over the years. We love libraries!

• Collaborating with researchers: Researchers are curious, dogged and, often, bring analytical skills to partnerships they join, plus they can help clarify, document and promote the experience of your program participants.

• Collaborating with electoral advocates: To be honest, we haven't explored this type of partnership but we'd love to! In our opinion, Documenters are exactly the type of people who should run for office. Run For Something, are you interested? Let's talk!