Insight Pt. 1: Resolve Philly's Documenters Network Initiative

The Documenters Network Initiative aims to make local government more transparent and accessible by recruiting, training, and paying Philadelphians to attend and take notes at public meetings across the city. I speak to Julie Christie, Director of Data and Special Projects at Resolve Philly.
https://resolvephilly.org/
Twitter: @resolvephilly
Instagram: ResolvePhill

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Good morning, Welcome to Insight,a show about empowering our community. I'm
Lorraine balladmorl Independence. Blue Cross ishonoring nurses with our Celebrate Caring campaign.
We'll be talking with three inspiring winners. We'll also speak with Philadelphia Academies,
which offers students a path to lifesustaining careers. But first, there's an
organization called Resolve that has a veryunique program called the Documentar's Network Initiative that

(00:24):
aims to make local government more transparentand accessible by recruiting, training, and
paying Philadelphians to attend and take notesat public meetings across the city. To
tell us more about this as JulieChristie, director of Data and Special Projects
for Risolve Philly, thank you somuch for joining us today. Thank you
for having me. I'm happy tobe here. Before we get into this

(00:45):
particular project, the Documentary's Network Initiative, tell us about Resolve, Who are
you? We are a nonprofit herein Philadelphia that focuses on pushing the journalism
industry to be a lot more communityfolkst solutions oriented, and collaborative, and
that shows up in all of thework that we do. We have a

(01:07):
very large community Engagement team who arededicated to doing a lot of the work
that journalists don't often have the timeor freedom to do from their editors,
like just showing up at community spaceslistening to people without having the agenda of
collecting a story and collecting people's livedexperiences for publication, and instead just showing

(01:32):
up to be there to say,Hey, I'm here, I care,
I want to know what your lifeis like. Our community engagement team really
brings a lot of that information,all the things that they learn and the
themes they see, the connections theymake to our collaborative reporting initiative. So
we have a very one of thelargest and longest running local news collaboratives in

(01:56):
the country. We've been operating intwenty sixteen twenty seventeen. We currently have
twenty seven newsrooms who are all workingtogether to produce solutions journalism. So we're
bringing that focuses on responses to socialissues and not just the issues, and
sharing that with Philadelphians and also witheach other. So large newsrooms like The

(02:21):
Inquirer are amplifying and sharing stories fromour partner newsrooms like Philly Gay News or
Dos Puntos Pilatinos Radio, and atthe same time, Philatinos Radio are able
to access things like the relationships thatwhy Y has or something like that,

(02:43):
and so it's a lot of resourcesharing and community centered reporting. We have
another initiative that takes another look atthis whole issue and thinks about, well,
what about the people who don't haveinternet or computer access who can't get
digital news. But these are peoplewho need it especially, and so our
Equally Informed Initiative has a text linewhere people can text in with any question

(03:08):
they have and our team will getthem the answer. They will work with
local reporters to get those answers,connect to those people with questions with reporters,
or help distill local news and explainwhere that information came from and said,
you know, hey, our partnersover at NBC ten just did an

(03:28):
article about this. This is whatthey wrote. Because you know, folks
don't have reliable internet, which isa huge issue here in Philadelphia, then
they're not going to be able toget the news that they need. It
sounds like what you do is essentiallyyou fill in the spaces in between what
the larger news operations can't do.Certainly now because of the basic massive disruption

(03:55):
of the media business, whether it'snewspapers or television, everything is changing so
rapidly, and so many of theselarge organizations are downsizing so that, as
you noted, they don't always havetime to get into the more local,
granular stories that really affect people directlybut are often not covered by the major

(04:20):
news operations. Now, let's talkabout this particular program, which sounds great
because not only does it provide additionalsources of information, but citizen reporters can
get paid for it. So tellus how that works. Yeah, So
we have yet another initiative called Shapethe Table, which we're focusing on local

(04:43):
government accountability. There's a lot ofgreat reporting on what city council is doing,
there's not as much reporting on whatlicenses and Inspections or the Streets Department
are doing and talking about in theirpublic meetings, and so once, like
you said, we're trying to fillin those gaps. And one of the
big gaps that we noticed right awaywas the lack of information on what happens

(05:06):
during a lot of public meetings.There's so many reasons that that happens.
The pandemic only exacerbated them. Sowe were looking around thinking about what can
we do, and one of mycolleagues mentioned this program called Documentaries. That
newsroom out in Chicago created that newsroomnews organization. They do a lot of

(05:30):
similar stuff to what we do.They're called City Bureau, and they'd set
up this whole thing where they trainresidents of the city to go to public
meetings and take notes, and thepublish those meeting notes online for free for
everybody. There is no paywall.They're under creative common licenses I think,
or they're just available for newsrooms touse and source in their reporting. So

(05:55):
we looked at them, We're like, that's so cool, let's do it.
We've worked with City Bureau before.We're pals, and so we became
one of it's now nine cities thathave this program, and so we joined
this really large network and we're goingto be paying Philadelphians to go and take
notes at these meetings where a lotof the time nobody's taking notes. Some

(06:16):
of these meetings don't have agendas,sometimes they don't get announced until the day
of. It's a lot of informationthat just kind of gets lost in the
wind. And knowing that, youknow, a city like Chicago has seen
so much success in this. Phillyhas a lot of similarities to Chicago,
and so being able to see thatit's so successful there is really exciting and

(06:40):
encouraging to see how we can seesome of that success, see some more
transparency as well as just like moreinformed people. If people are interested in
being one of these documentars, arethere any requirements or how do they apply?
Tell us all the details. Applicationsare pretty easy. The only requirement

(07:00):
that we have before somebody can pickup an assignment and start getting paid for
documenting is that they attend a training. We're going to be hosting a training
at the end of May and thena few weeks after that because we've gotten
a lot of interest, which isreally exciting. Otherwise, people don't have
access to a digital note taking deviceor any kind of technology. That's fine.

(07:25):
We have iPads that people can checkout. I think there's some limitations
around. We're figuring out how dowe make all of this work, all
this information language accessible. Public meetingsare not actually language accessible, so there
is some level of English speaking required. One of the awesome things about this
programs that you know it's a lotof work on your writing skills. If

(07:46):
you literacy skills. This is thekind of program that can help with that,
so you do not have to bean expert in note taking or in
local government. There's a lot ofpeople who go into this program that we've
learned from their cities, who eitheralways go to public meetings, they know
the ends, they know the outs, they know what's going on. And
then there's other people where this istheir first time ever attending a public meeting.

(08:11):
I think that that is equally exciting. When we have somebody who's been
here for years, they know allthe dirty laundry, and then there's somebody
who is fresh, they don't knowanything going into these meetings, and those
perspectives are both just so important andhelpful to understanding like what's going on here,

(08:31):
what's being left out, what's beingbrought in? If they want to
apply, give us the specifics.Is there a website or a number they
can call right now? We havea website. It is resolve Philly dot
org slash Philly docks so Philly docs, and you can read a little bit
more about the documentary's program and thenjust fill out a really really quick form.

(08:54):
The only thing we're asking for inthat form our folks's name, email,
own number, pronouns, and likewhat neighborhood they're coming from. Otherwise,
that's it. If people want newsthat perhaps is not covered by the
majors, they can also go tothe website and get all of that content
as well. Is that right?Yes, they'll be able to check out

(09:16):
our collaborative which is currently doing aproject called Broke in Philly, so it's
really focused on economic mobility here inthe city, and they can check out
that website and see all the newsthat partner newsrooms have been doing it.
Information is power, and that's whatResolve is all about, is empowering us
with information and doing it in away that's very grassroots. And the Broken

(09:37):
Philly News operation is pretty awesome andResolve is doing something quite unique which I
love, which is the Documentar's NetworkInitiative, which aims to make local government
more transparent and accessible by recruiting,training, and paying Philadelphians to attend and
take notes at public meetings across thecity. Julie Christie, director of Data
and Special Projects at Resolve Philly,thank you so much. Thank you.

(10:01):
We'll have more insight after these messages