Information Equity (part 1)
I work in health communications. I think that working with the government to make better, clearer health information — and really, any and all information — is a political, social, and moral imperative. Here’s why.
A problem statement
We are living in a world with “alternative facts,” Fake News, anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, conspiracy theorists. We’ve got raw water, the Deep State, Nigerian princes, Gamergate, Pizzagate, actual Nazis, trolls in the government, regulatory capture, Orwellian doubletalk, retweeted bots, hoaxes, information overload, and weaponized information.
It can be hard to know what information to trust. In this environment, we need civic institutions that don’t look like an apparition exhorting that we pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. We need leaders we can trust. We need information we can trust.
After years of working for governmental institutions (in public health), I’m convinced that most people working government jobs are deeply committed to improving the lives of other people — to public service. But, I can also see how some people conflate their distrust for politicized information with information coming from the government. People conflate their distrust of elected officials with people who work everyday government jobs because they want to improve their communities and serve their neighbors.
Information & communication play important roles
Your slimy politician being investigated for taking bribes isn’t the same as the public health nurse who recommends that you get a flu shot, but I understand why people conflate the two. In public health, we don’t always do a good job of explaining what we do, why we’re doing it, and how you can benefit from it.
For example, we often think that just making information available to people means that they’ll use it how we want them to. But we’re wrong — and it’s a problem that I spend my career working on. Instead of bombarding people with an endless barrage of facts, I try to understand what people think and believe, what behavior change we’re trying to affect, and how to design information so that it works and helps them do what we want them to do.
Simply put, it’s the difference between spraying somebody with a hose and offering them a glass of water when they’re thirsty.
What this has to do with paying parking tickets
I’ve seen this same problem replicated in the field of civic tech, where people work to improve the technical foundation of government services and to make government services easier to understand, access, and use. This is important work. Take, for example, the difference between the government site Census.gov, and a private effort, CensusReporter.org. They have the same data, but CensusReporter makes it far easier to browse, understand, and use.
Let’s be frank: like medical information and health information, information originating from government sources can often be complicated. Have you tried navigating your city’s website? Is it easy to figure out when garbage is collected, how to find property records, where the nearest health clinic is, how to pay a parking ticket?
Take a look at beta.phila.gov — a big improvement over the old city website. The new one, a long work in progress, makes the most common uses of the city’s website more prominent. It might seem a little odd at first glance that the core functions of a city’s website are to help residents find a trash day or pay their bills. But by making these and other services easier to find and use, the site makes government administration more accessible to Philadelphia residents.
We need more like this: projects that work to understand what information people need, deliver it at the right time and in the right way — making government information, services, and functions easier to understand and use.
What if it was all easy?
The possibilities are endless. What if it was easy to file and submit taxes? What if finding information about your neighborhood was as easy as using the NYTimes’ Census Explorer? What if you could easily apply for a passport, or figure out what permits you needed to file before you could open a new business?
What if you knew where to take your kids to get their shots for free, how to get tax breaks for installing solar panels on your roof, apply for public housing, or see what educational opportunities are avilable to you?
Questions like that, I imagine, were the guiding force behind Gov.UK, an attempt to consolidate the websites of the many government agencies of the United Kingdom into one streamlined website.
How much better off would we all be? How much smoother would the world be? How much healthier would we be?
Information Equity
The theme that connects the health communications that I do, and the work being done by people in civic tech, is a commitment to information equity. I haven’t heard people use this term, but thinking through these issues over the past five or so years of my work, this is the term that I use to describe the importance of making government information easier to use.
Information equity is:
- When information is designed to be accessible to more people and used more easily — especially by those who might have barriers to accessing, understanding, or using information.
- Work to know your audience; access, understand, and organize information; and design that information in ways that are appropriate for your audience.
- A way to meets the challenge of making information more effective, trustworthy, and widely used: by designing information so that it’s easier for people to understand and use, we make a lot of pre-existing work more effective.
In an era of disintegrating trust and an overwhelmingly competitive information environment, information equity can be the foghorn guiding us into a safe harbor.
We know that information is a valuable resource
Heath communicators, science communicators, web usability people, user researchers, community organizers, data visualizers, civic technologists, plain language writers, translators, and doubtless many others know that information is a valuable resource.
And right now, the challenge isn’t that there’s not enough information. The challenge is that there’s too much of it, and not enough of it is good. So it’s our challenge to make better information.
