As readers in cities around the nation lament the cuts to their local newspaper, their primary source of accurate information and reflection, I am mourning the demise of a related organization, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. I got to know the CJOG through Sunshine Week activities, a project in which CJOG was a major force. The Coalition also provided a forum for collaboration and communication among the many journalism organizations that stand up for open government, particularly at the federal level.

The work of the CJOG will be picked up by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, headed by Minnesotan Lucy Dalglish, and by the National Freedom of Information Coalition; Sunshine in Government will also continue to post information on federal open government issues. These are good, reliable — but very busy — hands in which to leave an important function.

Needless to say, the reason for closing the virtual doors at CJOG is money. Long ago I learned that people/organizations will pay for goods first, then services, and almost never collaboration. There’s no tangible, visible product, just the payoff of shared responsibility, division of labor, and the powerful impact of collective wisdom. Sometimes those benefits get in the way of other agendas, e.g. obfuscation of facts and empire building.

Thanks to Peter Weitzel for his efforts on behalf of open government and for his continued involvement at the federal level.

It’s a sad and sobering irony to reflect on the recent death of Harlan Cleveland mist the energy and hope that reign at the Media Reform Conference going full steam this weekend at the Minneapolis Convention Center. For decades Harlan Cleveland has been my guiding star in a turbulent information era.

Twenty-five years ago I was involved with a conference bearing the irresistible title “A Question of Balance: Public Sector, Private Sector Interaction in the Delivery of Information Services. The conference was a typically Minnesotan response to a report from the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science — from whence we derived the catchy subtle. With prescient naiveté we gathered journalists, media moguls, access advocates and gangs of librarians for two days of weighing the issues raised in the report, a report that one speaker accurately described as “pernicious.”

[The gathering was not without its lively moments – most notably the spectacle of Paul Zurkowski, head of the Information Industry Association, storming down the aisle, pointing his cane as he snarled “Poppycock! at the elegant visionary Anita Schiller.]

The keynote speaker at that event – and my all-time Information Hero – was Harlan Cleveland. He spoke, as he frequently wrote, about the characteristics of information “as a resource, “the basic, yet abstract information.” Cleveland lamented that “we have carried over into our thinking about information (which is to say symbols) concepts development for the management of things – concepts such as property, depletion, depreciation, monopoly, market economics, the class struggle, and top-down leadership.” It might help, he opined, “if we stop treating information as just another thing, and look hard at what makes it so special.”

In Cleveland’s 21st Century construct, information as a resource possesses these unique characteristics:

Information is expandable – “The facts are never all in – and facts are available in such profusion that uncertainty becomes the most important planning factor.” Thus, “the further a society moves toward making its living from the manipulation of information, the more its citizens will be caught up in a continual struggle to reduce the information overload on their desks and in the lives in order to reduce the uncertainty about what to do.”

Information is compressible — “Though it’s infinitely expandable, information can be concentrated, integrated, summarized… for easy handling.”

Information is substitutable — It can replace capital, labor or physical materials.

Information is transportable — “In less than a century, we have been witness to a major dimensional change in both the speed and volume of human activity.”

Information is diffusive — It tends to leak – and the more it leaks the more we have.

Information is shareable — Information by nature cannot give rise to exchange transactions, only to sharing transactions. Things are exchanged. “If I give you a fact or tell you a story, it’s like a good kiss: in sharing the thrill, you enhance it.”

Cleveland would relish the exuberant exchanges echoing through the Minneapolis Convention Center this weekend — snippets of conversations involving 3000 reform advocates talking about knowledge, wisdom, informed citizens and their role in a democracy, transparency in government, media ownership, network neutrality. Many of these attendees may not know the name Harland Cleveland, but they understand – intuitively and empirically — that information is a resource that is expandable, compressible, substitutable, transportable, diffusive and, most important, shareable — like a kiss!

Note: One of the earliest iterations of Cleveland’s thoughts on information as a resource is found in the December 1982 issue of The Futurist. Check the site for much more about Harlan Cleveland’s life as well as numerous articles written by Cleveland through the years.

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The trail of information – from creation through processing through application — is always a path forged by real people, people who do the research, who organize the results, who select and review, who dig and piece together and create then share information that – finally – makes a difference.

Bill Moyers most recent Journal, aired last Friday, offers one of the best articulations of that process I have ever seen. The topic the chemical Bisphenol A, but it’s the process that captivated my attention.

Stars of the show are a trio of investigative journalists on the staff of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Prodded by an appropriately pushy editor they set out to track the story of Bisphenol A. Their laborious investigation involves federal government deadends, hours in the stacks of the University of Wisconsin library and the keen analytic minds of concerned journalists.

The interim result is a remarkable series on “Chemical Fallout” that exposes the facts. On May 20, 2008 a reform bill was introduced – in spite of government blockage and the compromise of corporate and professional organizations along the way.

The reporting team who broke the story are taking viewer questions about the story and their work as investigative reporters on The Moyers Blog. Check out the video and the text on the Bill Moyers Journal. This is just how it’s supposed to work!