MisinfoCon: Vote on ideas that are important to you

Jeanne Brooks
MisinfoCon
Published in
3 min readFeb 17, 2017

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Image via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

We’ve curated a list of suggestions, ideas and concerns generated from the 400+ people who expressed interest in being a part of MisinfoCon.

Applications are now closed and most invitations to attend have been sent. If you did not receive an invitation at this point, know that you were among an impressive list of people who applied. Because there’s only space for a small percentage of those people at this MisinfoCon, it’s likely that there will be another event in the near future.

What the applications showed us, however, is there are many people interested in this topic. So, as we develop focus areas for the Creative Studio, we’d like you, — the MisinfoCon community-at-large — to help us to prioritize and grow the list below. This list is by no means exhaustive!

Please highlight any items listed below to express your interest or support for an idea. You can add to the list by commenting on an item or the post. And if you have more you want to contribute please email Jeanne Brooks or Phillip Smith and request to submit a draft for the MisinfoCon publication.

We’ll be tracking responses and will post an updated version next week before the Creative Studio.

Let the community know what’s most important to you.

Information credibility (trust, fact-checking, verification)

  • Allowing readers the opportunity to look “under the hood” of investigations or other data sources (making data accessible)
  • Diversifying leadership and addressing bias
  • How tech companies can be responsible for design and safety decisions
  • How to make vetting information easier for readers
  • Ethics standards across the information ecosystem
  • Examining internal newsroom practices: workflows, social media tactics, ethics
  • Create new systems for critique and better models of communication
  • Improving how we serve the needs of a changing audience
  • Citizen-led credibility scores for news articles, journalists and publications
  • Social news gathering, verification and reporting methods
  • Social media’s influence on political narrative
  • Tracking the White House paper trail when they are hiding it

Community

  • Combating echo chambers where no one is listening
  • Growing inclusive communities of knowledge
  • Grassroots organizing skills for reporting and audience development
  • Media collaborations with fact-based investigations by NGOs
  • What can the US learn from global experience?
  • Strategies for small and local newsrooms
  • Connecting librarians and the public to education on open data and data literacy
  • Supporting civil discourse on social media
  • Protecting open networks
  • The influence of fear on the truth

Tech, Data & Design

  • Aggregated data presented to everyday people for deeper understanding
  • Developing interfaces to explore and interact with data sets
  • Access to data and public records
  • Creating qualitative data about how social media platforms are managing content
  • Tools to evaluate information quality during circulation
  • Building visually distinct brands that communicate integrity

Law & Policy

  • Understanding of the way misinformation undermines democratic institutions and of the best tactics to confront it

Education

  • Industry standards for teachers to share with journalism students
  • Next generation framework for high school civics, media literacy and online civic reasoning
  • Student curriculum for combating misinformation
  • Public school teacher looking for how media and digital literacy are implemented in schools
  • The influence of fiction reading on people’s perspectives — can you create readings list to support deeper understanding of current context
  • Media/data/digital literacy for kids and parents

Business

  • Funding models for shifting media landscape
  • Exploring potential philanthropy solutions
  • Engagement-focused solutions
  • Connect people’s engagement with business models
  • Keeping pace with online journalism when misinformation slows things down

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