Dayton.FYI

I. An Ecological Framework for Local Information

In 1913, The Great Miami River overwhelmed its banks, killing more than 360 people in what remains the worst natural disaster in Ohio’s history.

Within weeks, this community made a promise: Never again.

What followed was the creation of the Miami Conservancy District, the largest civilian public works project in the world at that time. Not a federal program. Not a state mandate. A local decision, funded locally, owned by the community. Dayton’s forebears looked at a catastrophic failure and built infrastructure so durable that the city has not suffered from significant flood damage since 1922.

The Conservancy District didn’t totally control the water — it built infrastructure so the community could live safely with it, draw from it, test it, monitor it, and fight when someone threatened to contaminate it.

Today, Dayton, along with the rest of the country, faces a different kind of flood. The levees might not have burst, yet, but the cracks are showing and the rain won’t stop.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution — owned by the same company as the Dayton Daily News — ended its print edition in 2025 after 157 years. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, founded in 1786, announced its closure in January 2026. The DDN dropped Saturday print in 2023. The editorial board that shaped civic debate and held elected officials and local institutions to account for generations no longer exists. A Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News report published last year found a more than 75% decline in the number of local journalists since 2002 on average nationally.

It isn’t limited to newspapers, either. Local TV news, once the golden goose of local news markets, is facing a similar crisis. In Toledo, WNWO-TV, the Sinclair-owned NBC affiliate, made headlines when it abandoned locally-produced news in 2023, and many other stations have since dropped or significantly reduced local newsroom budgets as advertising revenue continues to decline.

The commercial model for local journalism is not declining, it is collapsing.

Non-profit and national public media is in no better shape. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was defunded by Congress in 2025 and formally dissolved in January 2026 after nearly 60 years of bipartisan support. WYSO, our local NPR affiliate public radio station, was dealt a huge blow when its federal funding was cut, forcing it to rely even more heavily on a donor base that itself is facing a grim, broader economic outlook.

If you applied the IUCN Red List to local journalists as a species, they would land squarely between the Endangered and Critically Endangered thresholds.

A failing media ecosystem that suffers such an enormous loss of human talent and knowledge has immediate, serious consequences for the larger “information ecosystem” of a community — the living, emergent system of how a community knows what it knows.

It is with the urgency of ecological conservation that we should seek to apply this information ecosystem concept first introduced in Nardi & O’Day (1999), Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, to the Dayton region. Specifically, applying their idea of a “keystone species” in information ecosystems — people who fill gaps, make tools work for the local setting, and create bridges between people and technologies — to journalists. We need something ecologists call “functional redundancy,” the principle that ecosystems become more resilient when the critical ecological functions performed by one species are distributed across multiple species.

On top of all the other structural issues the media has been facing for decades, AI introduces a new variable into an already unstable information ecosystem. It can accelerate the decline of local media and fragment our communities’ ability to identify agreed-upon truth — or, if integrated thoughtfully into local information ecologies, it can help a small institution perform functions that would otherwise require resources far beyond its reach. The difference depends entirely on who shapes the tools, whose values govern their use, and whether the community those tools serve has any say in the matter.

This proposal is essentially two-pronged:

• To more broadly distribute the critical functions that journalists perform across the larger population, while also ensuring our remaining journalists have the tools and support necessary to operate effectively.
• To build and protect the shared civic record that emerges when professional journalists and engaged residents work within the same local information ecosystem.

Our community should not and cannot wait for the total collapse of its information ecosystem to prepare. We can proactively build resilience in our local information ecosystem by elevating it to the position of a civic information utility — publicly owned, editorially independent, built to last — that treats this community’s information the way the Conservancy District treats its water: as infrastructure too important to leave to chance.

The Challenges This Proposal Seeks To Address

1. The funding crisis. Arguably the most pressing and the root of everything that follows. Because we live in America, the collapse of the media ecosystem is largely a story of market collapse. American journalism has almost always been a private enterprise. From the explicitly partisan broadsheets of the early republic through the advertising-subsidized daily newspapers of the twentieth century, the production of local news has been a business — often a wildly profitable one. For most of its history, this arrangement worked well enough. Advertising revenue cross-subsidized the civic functions of journalism: the accountability reporting, the city hall beat, the public records work, the deep-dive investigations. The market didn’t fund these things because they were profitable, it funded them because they came bundled with the profitable or fun parts — classifieds, car ads, comics, crosswords, and legal notices.

That bundle no longer exists. The internet unbundled it, and platforms captured the revenue. This is not a temporary downturn or a market correction, it is a permanent structural change.

The nonprofit model — the path that most of the innovation in local journalism has followed over the past fifteen years — is necessary but insufficient. Signal Ohio, with 30+ staff and $15 million raised, relies on philanthropy for 80–85% of its revenue. Houston Landing closed after less than two years despite more than $20 million in seed investment from the American Journalism Project and other major funders. The Wichita Beacon closed in 2024. The pattern is consistent: philanthropic funding is generous at launch, uncertain at renewal, and structurally incapable of providing the stable, recurring revenue that a permanent civic institution requires. Every nonprofit newsroom that has failed in this country has failed for the same reason — not because the journalism wasn’t good, but because the funding wasn’t durable.

This ubiquitous market failure justifies public investment. Not because government should be in the news business — it should not — but because the civic functions that journalism performs are public services that the market can no longer sustain. Public safety is a public good; we fund it publicly. Clean water is a public good; we fund it publicly. Parks, libraries, public health — all public goods, all publicly funded, all operated with varying degrees of independence from the political bodies that authorize their budgets.

And what constitutes a public good has changed over time. Fire protection in American cities was private through most of the 18th and 19th centuries — competing private brigades that would sometimes let a building burn if it wasn’t insured by their company, or fight each other for the right to respond. Private water companies served American cities through much of the 1800s, and the transition to public water was driven by cholera outbreaks and the recognition that private companies had no incentive to serve neighborhoods that couldn’t pay. Libraries were subscription-based and membership-only before Carnegie’s philanthropy and then public levy funding made them universal. The Conservancy District itself was the product of exactly this pattern — flood control was left to private landowners and market incentives until 1913 proved that the market couldn’t protect the community. The transition from private responsibility to public infrastructure wasn’t ideological. It was pragmatic. The community decided that the function was too important to leave to the market.

The two-tier structure of this proposal, detailed later, reflects this conviction and offers multiple pathways, at different funding levels, to support a healthier information ecosystem.

2. The collapse of trusted, local information and the rise of misinformation. When credible local information disappears, the void doesn’t stay empty. It very quickly fills with rumor, algorithmically amplified outrage, misinformation that confirms what people already fear, and with disinformation deliberately engineered to exploit communities that no longer have a shared factual foundation. Springfield is the case study that happened here, in Ohio, in 2024: debunked claims about Haitian immigrants amplified nationally, triggering bomb threats to schools and government offices, in a community that lacked the local journalism infrastructure to establish and hold a factual baseline before the narrative spiraled. But Springfield is the dramatic example. The quieter, more corrosive version happens daily — in neighborhoods where residents have no reliable way to distinguish a legitimate development proposal from a predatory one, where a social media post about a city commission decision circulates without anyone with institutional knowledge to confirm, correct, or contextualize it. The information ecosystem doesn’t degrade into silence, it degrades into something more pernicious: noise. And the people most vulnerable to that noise are the people who were least served by the commercial model to begin with.

3. The access and equity gap. The information ecosystem’s collapse does not affect all residents equally, and the systems that preceded it were never designed to serve the whole community in the first place. The commercial model served the portion of the community that advertisers wanted to reach. Coverage of everyone else was a byproduct, not a commitment, and when the model collapsed the byproduct disappeared first. What remains is stratified by access: seniors who rely on print lose their primary information source when papers cut days or cease publication. Residents without reliable internet are locked out of digital-only alternatives. Non-English speakers are excluded from public documents that are never translated. Low-income neighborhoods that were already underserved are the first to become true information deserts — places where the answer to “what is my government doing?” is functionally unknowable. The equity gap isn’t a secondary concern. It’s the reason a civic information utility must be designed for universal reach from the start, not as an afterthought once the digital platform is built.

4. The public records gap: transparency without accessibility. Ohio law establishes that government records are public. It does not ensure that they are accessible in any meaningful sense. The reactive model — you request, the agency responds — serves journalists, lawyers, and activists who know what to ask for. It fails the resident who cannot request records they don’t know exist. And even when records are obtained, they arrive in formats designed for institutional use, not public comprehension: 500-page budgets, dense zoning codes, contracts buried in filing systems that predate the internet. The information is technically public. It is not, in practice, available. This gap means the raw material that informed civic judgment requires — the contracts, the votes, the spending decisions, the abatement agreements — sits behind a barrier of procedural knowledge and institutional literacy that most residents cannot cross. Proactive disclosure doesn’t just change how records are delivered. It changes who can participate in the civic process.

5. The threat to democratic self-governance. This is the challenge that gives all the others their urgency. When residents cannot find out what their government decided last week, when voters enter a booth — assuming they decide to exercise their right to vote — with no idea who the candidates for city commission are, when a neighborhood doesn’t know that an LLC has been buying every other house on the block, when a policy proposal is voted on before any independent analysis exists or its consequences are fully understood and debated — democracy doesn’t function. It becomes performative. Elections still happen, the meetings are held, the comment periods open and close, but the substance drains away because the informed public judgment that democratic governance requires has no informational foundation to rest on. Every empirical study of the local news crisis confirms this: when local journalism disappears, fewer people vote and fewer people run for office, municipal borrowing costs rise, government spending becomes less efficient, and corruption increases.

A Tiered Funding Approach

Given these challenges, what are our community’s options for future sustainable models for news and information that both grows out of and supports inclusive democracy?

This proposal offers a two-tier structure, one contingent on a broad, enduring vision of what we should aspire to and one immediately actionable.

Tier 2 is what we can build right now. A nonprofit civic information platform, operated by The Journalism Lab, an existing Dayton 501(c)(3) with nearly six years of demonstrated community journalism work. No legislation required. No levy. No government authorization. A Community Voice Network that cultivates and amplifies independent writers and thinkers across the region. A community documentation network that trains and pays residents to attend and document public meetings. A consolidated public meetings calendar. Civic AI tools that make dense public documents accessible in plain language. A searchable archive of public records. Citizen journalism training, including youth programs. And dayton.fyi as the platform that connects it all.

Tier 2 is not a fallback, it’s the foundation. It is the working institution that Dayton’s residents can use, evaluate, and critique before anyone asks them to vote on anything.

Tier 1 is the aspiration — and potentially a national model. A voter-approved ballot initiative for the November 2027 general election, creating a publicly funded Information District with dedicated levy revenue, proactive public records disclosure mandates, a governance structure written into law, and a small professional newsroom focused on accountability. Modeled on the successful passage of Issue 9, which proved that Dayton voters will support creative use of the ballot initiative for community infrastructure.

Tier 1 cannot succeed without Tier 2 existing first, but Tier 2 is valuable on its own. If the ballot initiative never happens — if the legal analysis comes back unfavorable, if the community says no, if the political window closes — the nonprofit platform still serves Dayton. The foundation is worth building regardless of what gets built on top of it.

Tier 1 also serves a structural purpose beyond funding: it creates the durable civic institution that lifts this work off the shoulders of any single organization or individual. The Journalism Lab is the scaffold. Tier 1 is the building. That transition — from founder-driven initiative to permanent civic infrastructure — is a core design objective, not an afterthought. The vision remains, however, to create a durable civic infrastructure that can outlive any one person, organization or even generation. That’s incredibly difficult to do without a public funding mechanism.

For a more ambitious national goal, local residents could petition Congressional representatives to apply a cable franchise fee analog to AI and data centers. Inspired by a 2023 paper in the Journal of Information Policy that directly proposes a digital entertainment tax modeled on the cable franchise fee structure. Lucia Walinchus — who runs Eye on Ohio — has proposed a national digital advertising tax where a portion of revenue would fund a nonprofit news utility. She draws the public access analogy explicitly: a portion of your cable bill goes to C-SPAN because C-SPAN helps track Congress, and in the UK your TV license funds the BBC. Political likelihood is slim, and beyond the scope of this work.

II. Influences and Precedents

This proposal incorporates frameworks from multiple sources. Little, if anything, proposed is genuinely novel, but its holistic approach and execution would be. It’s important to identify, credit, and explain the invaluable work we are building upon:

Community Info Coop’s Info Districts

The vision of the Community Info Coop is of “a world where communities are equipped with the systems, tools, and information they need to design and maintain media institutions that serve their civic information needs.” This organization should be credited with the original formulation of the “Info Districts” public policy program in 2019, which has, so far, not been put into practice in the United States.
Read the U.S. Info District Guide →

III. What An Information District Could Do

This section will try to explain the full vision of what the Information District can do as a civic information utility. Not every function launches on day one and not every function may prove necessary. The scope is deliberately broad because these capabilities are interconnected: they share data layers, feed into one another, and become more valuable in combination than in isolation.

This section is organized in layers — from the editorial functions that require human judgment, to the infrastructure that makes the work possible, to the archives that accumulate value over time, to the channels that deliver it all to residents. Residents won’t see layers, they’ll see one coherent civic dashboard organized around their place and their expressed interests or needs.

✎ The Foundation Layer: What the Institution Produces

These are the functions that require editorial skill and institutional commitment. Everything else either feeds into these or distributes what they produce.

Accountability Journalism

This is the core that gives the rest of the system teeth. When the vote tracker reveals a commissioner voting against their stated positions, when the community pipeline surfaces a systemic problem — someone has to pick up the phone, knock on doors, file records requests, and write the story. That’s journalists.

Tier 1 funds a small professional newsroom (2–4 journalists) that is editorially independent from both city government and the Community Information Board. The newsroom focuses on accountability reporting that follows from the data the rest of the system surfaces.

Without the newsroom, the Info District is a well-organized library. With it, the Info District is an accountability institution.

In Tier 2, accountability coverage is lighter — driven by the Journalism Lab’s existing capacity, community contributors, and the documentation network. In Tier 1, it becomes a dedicated professional function.

Independent Policy Analysis

When a significant policy proposal comes before the City Commission, the Dayton Public Schools board, or another tracked government body, the Info District publishes an independent, nonpartisan analysis: what the proposal does, what it costs, who benefits, who bears the cost, what assumptions it relies on, and what comparable cities have experienced. This analysis is published before the vote, ensuring that residents and officials have access to an evaluation that was not produced by the proposal’s chief advocates or by staff who report to the body voting on it.

No equivalent exists at the municipal level in most American cities. The Info District functions as a local Congressional Budget Office, providing the independent analytical capacity that informed democratic decision-making requires.

Consider what happened with ShotSpotter. In 2019, the Dayton City Commission approved a $205,000 contract for gunshot-detection technology deployed across a three-square-mile area of predominantly Black northwest Dayton. No independent cost-benefit analysis, equity impact assessment, or review of the growing national research questioning the technology’s effectiveness was made available to the public before either vote. In November 2020, the commission voted 4-1 to extend the contract for $390,000 more, the day before Thanksgiving, over Zoom, without public comment, despite a petition with hundreds of signatures opposing it. The first real data investigation came not from the city but from WYSO, a full year after the extension vote: fewer than 2% of ShotSpotter alerts in Dayton resulted in an arrest. The city eventually let the contract expire at the end of 2022, after spending roughly $595,000. An independent policy analysis available to the community before either vote, with national data, local effectiveness metrics, and comparable city research, could have changed the outcome.

In Tier 2, this is lighter — plain-language explainers sourced from public documents. In Tier 1, a dedicated policy analyst produces full independent fiscal and policy analyses.

Community Documentation Network

A Documenters-style program that trains and pays community members to attend and document public meetings. This is the highest-volume civic data collection function and the raw material for much of what the rest of the system produces.

The Info District would support and integrate with the national Documenters Network if it extends to Dayton. If the network does not arrive, the Info District develops an equivalent local program independently. Either path results in consistent, structured, paid community documentation of public governance.

Documenters record not just narrative notes but structured data: who was present, what motions were made, how each official voted, what the outcome was. This structured data feeds directly into the Accountability Tracker.

Community Voice Network

The Information District produces data, analysis, and accountability reporting. But democratic life does not run on data alone. Between the public record and public judgment sits a crucial interpretive step some might mistake for noise or uncomfortable arguing — the space where residents debate what the facts mean, what the community should value, and what kind of city Dayton ought to become. That step is not a supplement to civic infrastructure, it is the reason civic infrastructure matters, and how we handle that step can lead to improved democratic outcomes.

The Community Voice Network is a hub-and-spoke publishing model that cultivates, connects, and amplifies independent community contributors across the Dayton region. The hub — dayton.fyi — curates and presents the strongest community writing, audio, and visual work from a growing network of independent contributors, each publishing on their own platforms and building their own audiences. The hub selects, contextualizes, and spotlights what the spokes create. These independent contributors — residents, neighborhood leaders, subject-matter practitioners, retired professionals, students, organizers, artists — publish on topics they know and care about. Contributors maintain editorial independence over their own work. They are not Info District staff, they are community voices that the Info District’s editorial team identifies, develops, and connects to a broader audience.

The hub editorial function operates on three tracks. First, discovery and development — actively seeking voices that aren’t already in the conversation, not because they lack perspective but because they lack platforms: A retired city engineer who understands stormwater infrastructure; a home-health aide who sees the gaps in the elder care system; a DPS parent navigating special education bureaucracy; a mosque leader bridging immigrant communities and city services. The Info District finds these voices, offers basic publishing support and training through the Journalism Lab, and helps them reach an audience.

Second, curation and presentation. The hub selects from across the network — prioritizing rigor, specificity, lived expertise, and good faith over ideology. The editorial standard for inclusion is not agreement, it is need and proximity to root causes. Contributors who engage substantively with evidence, who argue from experience, and who treat their neighbors as worthy of persuasion rather than contempt earn inclusion in the platform.

Third, connection and context. When the Info District publishes an accountability investigation or a policy analysis, the hub invites network contributors to respond — not as a checked-box requirement feigning as community engagement, but as important perspectives presented alongside the institutional work. The network’s opinion and the institution’s evidence reinforce each other. The argument becomes richer because the facts are accessible. The facts become relevant because people are arguing about them.

The Community Voice Network is not the Info District’s opinion. The institution’s editorial voice — expressed through its policy analyses, its ballot language translations, and its accountability reporting — remains nonpartisan, evidence-based, and neutral. The community voices it platforms are free to argue, advocate, and take sides. Contributors are clearly identified as independent community voices, not Info District staff or representatives.

Preserving carries particular weight in this network: when a returning citizen writes about navigating reentry; when a family publishes the story of a grandparent whose life was never recorded in the paper of record; when a neighborhood elder documents what was lost to urban renewal. These should not be historical footnotes, but living testimony. This is how the Info District serves communities whose stories have been systematically excluded from Dayton’s information ecosystem: not by telling those stories for them, but by building the infrastructure that lets them tell their own, and ensuring those stories endure.

In Tier 2, the Community Voice Network is the Journalism Lab’s most scalable editorial function. The infrastructure cost is near zero — contributors publish on Substack or equivalent platforms at no cost to the Info District. The editorial lift is curation, not production. For the period between Tier 2 launch and any potential ballot initiative, the network is likely the primary driver of community visibility, audience growth, and emotional investment in the project.

In Tier 1, the network grows alongside the professional newsroom. The hub editorial curation function becomes a defined staff role. Stipends or per-piece payments become possible for contributors whose work meets publication standards, following the Documenters logic — community members doing civic work deserve to be paid for it.

Citizen Journalism Training and Publication

The Journalism Lab’s existing core function, expanded: training community members in journalism skills across written, audio, video, and photographic disciplines. A publication platform at dayton.fyi connecting community contributors. Youth journalism programs through DPS and higher education partnerships. Media literacy education for immigrants, refugees, and underserved communities.

The training function feeds directly into both the Documentation Network and the Community Voice Network — building the community’s capacity to document, interpret, and argue on its own terms.

⚙ The Infrastructure Layer: What Makes the Work Possible

These are the systems that collect, organize, and make accessible the raw material that journalists, analysts, Documenters, and residents use.

Public Records Archive and Proactive Disclosure

In Tier 2: voluntary aggregation of public records that are already publicly available but not consolidated or navigable — city contracts, property transfers, building permits, zoning decisions. Obtained through standard records requests, organized geographically, made searchable. A demonstration of what becomes possible when public records are treated as a navigable resource.

In Tier 1: proactive disclosure mandates requiring city agencies automatically publish structured public records without individual records requests. This is the single most transformative element of Tier 1 — and the most operationally demanding. Records covered include: all city contracts over $10,000 (full text, vendor, amount); all use-of-force incident reports (non-restricted fields); all property tax abatement agreements; all TIF district financial reports; all commission voting records and meeting minutes; all budget amendments; all zoning variance decisions; all city employee salary and overtime records; all building permit issuances above a value threshold; all competitive bid results and sole-source justifications. Implementation would be phased, beginning with records that are easiest to publish in structured format and expanding over a defined timeline.

All proactive disclosure is subject to the data governance principles described in Section V — institutional transparency and personal privacy are serious commitments.

Open API

All collected data available through a public API, free of charge. Other news organizations, researchers, app developers, and community organizations can build on the Info District’s data without permission or payment. Bulk access to datasets containing personal identifying information is subject to the responsible access provisions described in Section V.

Civic AI Tools

Conversational Document Assistant. A working interface where any resident can ask questions of dense public documents — the city budget, the zoning code, a TIF district agreement — in plain language and receive sourced, cited answers. “How much did the city spend on sidewalk repair?” answered with the relevant line item and page number. Individual query data is not retained in a manner that links questions to individuals — the tool serves the resident, it does not surveil them.

Pattern Detection. AI systems continuously scanning the public records database for patterns that humans would miss due to volume — contracts sharing a registered agent, permit spikes correlated with TIF approvals, statistical anomalies in use-of-force data. The AI surfaces potential red flags. Humans investigate.

Automated Translation. Translation of public documents for non-English speakers. While some agencies and organizations already offer some translation services and individuals can use their own translation tools and resources, there are significant gaps in our public document accessibility that exclude sections of our community.

Five Civic Participation Tools

These tools share a common data layer and continuously reference each other. Together they provide the permanent, nonpartisan, structured information layer that makes every resident’s civic judgment better informed. The full set is the aspiration; Tier 2 begins with the Civic Calendar and elements of the Civic Map, expanding as resources allow.

1. Civic Calendar. Everything that’s happening and every deadline that matters. Public meetings with agendas linked. Public comment periods with plain-language explanations of what’s being decided. Election dates and registration deadlines. Petition filing deadlines. Board and commission application deadlines. Budget hearing schedules. Every entry tagged by geography, government body, and topic. Automated alerts could be tailored to look like: “The zoning board hears a variance request for a property two blocks from you on Thursday. Here’s what’s being proposed.”

2. Civic Map. Everything connected to a place. Property ownership and transfer records. Building permits and code violations. Elected and appointed officials by district and office contact. Polling locations. Government body jurisdictions. Community milestones. And — with potential integration of the Kettering Foundation’s asset mapping initiative — community assets: organizations, institutions, gathering spaces, and service providers mapped alongside governance data. When a resident looks at their neighborhood, they see both the governance layer (who represents me, what’s been decided, who owns what) and the community layer (what resources are here). The Civic Map publishes institutional information, not personal information. Property transfer data is presented to illuminate neighborhood-level patterns — buyer types, investment trends, ownership concentration — not to build a searchable directory of individual residents. The data governance principles in Section V govern what the map displays and how.

3. Policy Evaluator. The public-facing expression of the independent policy analysis function. Published analyses of significant proposals. Ballot language translations, fiscal impact summaries, comparable city research, etc. All published before votes happen, all permanently archived and accessible.

4. Accountability Tracker. The permanent, structured, searchable archive of what officials do in office. Voting records for every tracked government body, categorized by topic. Attendance records. Campaign finance summaries from public filings. Public statements on major issues, sourced and cited. For incumbents approaching an election, auto-generated term summaries: the most consequential votes, attendance rate, major positions taken. For every candidate in every race, a structured profile built from public records. This is a living document updated continuously — the election version is just the current state of an ongoing record. Down-ballot visibility: enter your address, see every race you’ll vote in, with candidate profiles and incumbent records linked.

5. Community Pipeline. The mechanism that turns community experience into structured input for the policy process. Documenters notes, neighborhood patterns, community forum outcomes, and public records synthesized into policy briefs when clear, systemic issues emerge. A drainage problem documented across multiple meetings, a cluster of code violations, a service gap identified through testimony — the Info District gives the problem the analytical backbone it needs to become actionable policy. The Info District does not lobby. It does not advocate. It does not tell the commission what to decide. It ensures that community knowledge enters the policy process with the rigor and structure it deserves — and that the public can see what happens after it does.

🏢 The Commons Layer: What Belongs to the Community

These records accumulate over time and become more valuable with age. They are the permanent memory of Dayton’s civic life.

Community Milestones Registry

A free, permanent, publicly searchable record of community life across its full arc — births, graduations, marriages, military service, retirements, community achievements, business openings, and deaths. Newspapers once served as the chronicle of a community’s key celebrations of life and acknowledgements of death, functions that newspapers have shed or that have splintered off into other, private enterprises. Their loss is one that will be felt acutely by future historians and documentarians. Returning these Daytonians’ important life milestones to the public record will re-center the idea that these stories should be owned by the community and are not reserved for only those who can afford hundreds of dollars for an obituary in a newspaper or funeral home, where data security and archival processes are questionable at best. Milestones are voluntary and submitter-controlled. Families and individuals choose what to share. Removal requests are honored.

Prototype Demo

Current: Dayton Daily News

Obituary hosted by Legacy.com through the DDN. Originally cost the family hundreds of dollars to publish. Record is dependent on a third-party commercial platform with no archival guarantee. The DDN page itself may be paywalled, broken, or removed at any time.

Community-Owned: Dayton.FYI

Lois Cromes

1935 — August 15, 2023

Dayton, Ohio · Southminster Presbyterian Church

Below Lois’ high school yearbook photo it said, “Her smile describes her.” And that was true her entire life. She loved life, her family, her friends and co-workers. She made friends quickly and kept them forever.

Lois was the eldest of six children, born in West Virginia in 1935. She moved to Dayton after high school and got a job as a phone operator at Ohio Bell. She met Robert Cromes at a roller skating rink and they married in January 1957. She went on to work at Sears as a Telex operator and then as a cashier for more than 30 years.

Lois and Bob were married 50+ years until he passed in 2013. They lived in the same house which they bought new in 1957.

She was a people-magnet, meeting and making friends no matter where she went. She spent her senior years as a volunteer at Children’s Medical Center at the information desk, greeting and guiding countless families.

Survived by: Sisters Virginia Lynn Lovell and Sherry Graley. Children Donna Hrkman, Peggy Ichinose, and Larry Cromes. Grandchildren Nicholas, Michael, and Brandon Hrkman, and Jessamy Ichinose.

Permanent record · Free · No paywall · Community-owned under CC BY 4.0 · Searchable · Family-submitted

A real example demonstrating the Community Milestones Registry. Top: the current state of this obituary, dependent on a commercial platform. Bottom: how the same record would appear in a community-owned, permanent, free civic archive. Nick Hrkman, as staff of the Dayton Daily News, did not have to pay the estimated $1,200 placement of the obit that was placed when his grandmother died in 2023. He doesn’t feel any family should be charged that exorbitant amount to be included in the permanent record of their community, especially if the record is subject to be removed or lost, as seen in the screenshot of the daytondailynews.com website above, taken on April 1, 2026.

Election Results Archive

Precinct-level election results, permanently archived, mapped geographically, searchable across election cycles. How did your precinct vote on Issue 9? How has turnout in your neighborhood changed over the last four cycles?

📡 The Distribution Layer: How It Reaches People

dayton.fyi — the primary web platform, organized geographically (neighborhood as primary navigation, not chronological feed). Every piece of content linked to pertinent, related items with source transparency throughout.

Neighborhood email digests — segmented by geography and topic. A weekly email for your specific area: milestones this week, the next neighborhood meeting with agenda, building permits issued on your block, a property that just sold, the nearest Documenters-covered meeting.

SMS civic alerts — high-priority items and opt-in only: public comment deadlines, emergency civic information, election reminders. A reliable way to reach low-income residents or those who otherwise lack reliable internet access.

Print digest (Tier 1) — weekly via USPS Every Door Direct Mail, reaching residents without internet access and to meet the needs of those who might find themselves losing access to a regularly printed local news, should the DDN cease print operations. Costs for printing and distribution are discussed later, and are not insignificant, but a weekly (or bi-weekly) replacement of a Sunday paper that summarizes the most important news and updates of the week, in addition to giving a calendar of upcoming events and civic deadlines, remains one of the most durable and time-tested tools of modern journalism. Like the SMS messages, this is a commitment to equity: the information commons serves the whole community, not just the internet-connected or digitally savvy portion.

🌱 The Capacity Layer: How the Community Gets Stronger

Citizen journalism training — the Journalism Lab’s core function. Training community members to tell their own stories and hold their own institutions accountable.

Youth journalism programs — partnerships with DPS and area higher education institutions. In June of 2025, The Journalism Lab worked with a Meadowdale sophomore to help her publish her investigation into school busing issues in Teen Vogue, demonstrating the strength of the concept.

Media and AI literacy education — helping residents understand how information ecosystems work, how AI tools function, and how to evaluate what they encounter. Targeted programming for immigrants, refugees, and underserved communities.

Community education about civic process — demystifying how government works, how to participate in public meetings, how to file public records requests, how to apply for appointed boards. The Documenters program is itself the most powerful version of this: a paid, structured, supported first experience with civic participation.

IV. AI Policy

Why does the Info District use AI at all?

Because a nonprofit with extremely limited resources cannot offer conversational access to a 200-page collective bargaining agreement, translate public documents into six languages, or scan thousands of public records for patterns without it. AI is what makes a small institution capable of performing functions that would otherwise require a staff of fifty. It extends the reach of human effort — but only when the humans remain in control of the judgment, the values, and the editorial decisions that give that effort meaning. But AI is a tool that operates on information produced by humans in a community — it can process, organize, translate, and surface patterns in that information, but it cannot produce the judgment, the relationships, the local knowledge, or the editorial discretion that civic journalism requires. The line between what AI does and what humans do is not a technical distinction. It is an editorial and ethical commitment.

In a region where data centers have drawn opposition, where AI is associated with job displacement, and where trust in institutions is already fragile, the Info District’s AI usage will be and should be scrutinized. This policy exists to make that scrutiny productive rather than paranoid — to give residents, board members, and critics a concrete standard against which to evaluate every AI-assisted function the Info District operates.

The policy entails a four-tier disclosure framework:

Absolute Prohibitions

Community Education About AI

Most civic institutions that use AI don’t help their communities understand AI. The Info District should. This means: programming through the Journalism Lab that teaches residents how AI tools work, what their limitations are, and how to evaluate AI-generated information they encounter anywhere, not just on dayton.fyi. It means age-appropriate AI literacy integrated into youth journalism programs. It means targeted programming for communities most vulnerable to AI-generated misinformation — particularly immigrant communities that may encounter AI-generated content in languages where fact-checking resources are scarce. And it means the Info District modeling the transparency it advocates: publishing an annual AI transparency report that details what AI tools were used, for what purposes, what errors were identified, and what changes were made as a result.

Self-Governance Mechanism

AI is developing at a break-neck pace. Who decides when a new AI use case is appropriate? A policy should establish that the City Editor has authority over AI usage in editorial functions, subject to the disclosure framework. New categories of AI use that don’t fit the existing four tiers require board review — not for editorial approval (which the firewall prohibits) but for policy compliance. And the annual AI transparency report, published by the City Editor, serves as the public accountability mechanism.

V. Data Governance: Privacy as a Civic Commitment

The Information District is built on the premise that what Dayton knows about itself should belong to Dayton. But that principle has a necessary corollary: not everything known about individuals belongs to the public. Transparency and privacy are not opposites. They are complementary obligations that a civic information institution must hold in constant, deliberate tension.

The Info District does not need to invent a framework for navigating that tension. Decades of work by organizations that have confronted exactly these questions — the Sunlight Foundation’s Open Data Policy Guidelines, the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership data governance framework, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Ohio’s own public records jurisprudence — provide robust, tested principles. The Info District adopts and adapts these principles rather than building from scratch.

Institutional Transparency vs. Personal Privacy

The Info District’s transparency mandate is directed at institutions, not individuals. The operative question for every piece of data the Info District collects, publishes, or makes searchable is: does this information illuminate how public power is being exercised, or does it expose private details about a person’s life?

Institutional transparency means that public contracts, government spending, official votes, policy decisions, and the exercise of public authority should be proactively disclosed, permanently archived, and fully searchable. This is the core of the proactive disclosure mandate. The public has a right to know what its government does with its money and its power.

Personal privacy means that the Info District does not aggregate, republish, or make newly searchable personal information that could expose individuals to harassment, discrimination, or physical danger — even when that information is technically part of the public record. The fact that a piece of data is legally accessible does not mean that making it easily searchable at scale serves the public interest.

The Aggregation Problem

The Sunlight Foundation’s Open Data Guidelines identified what privacy researchers call the “mosaic effect”: datasets that are individually harmless can become identifying or dangerous when combined. A building permit, a property transfer, and a code violation are each innocuous public records. Mapped to a single address and linked to an owner’s name, they become a surveillance tool.

The Info District will publish each of these record types. It must therefore make deliberate decisions about how they are presented — what is linked, what is searchable by name, and what is displayed only at the aggregate or geographic level. The default should be the minimum level of personal identification necessary to serve the public interest purpose of each dataset.

Specific Commitments

The Civic Map will not display the residential addresses of elected officials, government employees, or any private individual in a manner that links address to name as a searchable feature. In a political environment where elected officials, election workers, and public servants face escalating threats, a publicly funded civic tool must not become a vector for targeting. Officials’ district boundaries and office contact information serve the accountability purpose. Their home addresses do not.

Community milestones are voluntary and submitter-controlled. Removal requests will be honored. The registry is an invitation, not a mandate.

The genealogical archive applies archival standards to historical materials. Sensitive personal information is handled according to professional archival practice, including time-delay access restrictions where appropriate.

Civic AI tools do not retain individual query data.

The Open API includes responsible access provisions for bulk personal data. While all public records data is available through the API, bulk access to datasets containing personal identifying information requires registration and stated use-case justification — not to restrict access, but to ensure the Info District does not facilitate mass data harvesting for commercial or harassing purposes.

What This Section Does Not Do

This section establishes principles and commitments. It is not an exhaustive data governance policy. A complete policy — including specific data classification standards, retention schedules, breach notification procedures, and a formal review process for new data types — will be developed during the community engagement process and refined before Tier 1 launch, drawing on the frameworks cited above and on legal counsel. The community engagement process should specifically surface community perspectives on privacy: residents will have views on what information about their neighborhoods, properties, and civic participation they want to be publicly accessible and what they do not.

The Conservancy District metaphor applies here, too. The levees do not exist to stop the water from flowing. They exist to ensure it flows where it should and doesn’t flow where it would cause harm. Transparency without privacy is a weapon. Privacy without transparency is a shield for the powerful.

VI. Where This Belongs In the Community and Key Partnership Opportunities

The Information District does not replace or compete with existing media outlets such as the Dayton Daily News, The Dayton Weekly News, or WYSO. It is not a government communications office. It is not adversarial to local government — accountability and opposition are not the same thing.

Everything the Info District publishes is free. Everything is licensed CC BY 4.0 — meaning DDN, WYSO, bloggers, neighborhood newsletters, and anyone else can republish it with attribution, at no cost. The Info District is connective tissue for Dayton’s media ecosystem, not a competitor within it.

The Info District should also not duplicate efforts of existing agencies or organizations in Dayton. Wherever possible, it should extend this metaphor of “connective tissue” by bridging services and raising awareness of the excellent work already being done.

Ombudsman Office: The Dayton-Montgomery County Ombudsman has been operating for 55 years — it’s one of the oldest in the country, predated only by Hawaii and Nebraska. It investigates complaints about government agencies and services for residents. It already does several things the Info District needs: It surfaces systemic patterns from individual complaints (the Community Pipeline function). It publishes a regular column in the DDN translating government process into accessible language (a sensemaking function). It partners with the Dayton Metro Library to host public sessions where residents can bring government-related problems. And when the DDN disappears or further diminishes, the Ombudsman loses a key channel for reaching the public. The Info District becomes a potential new distribution infrastructure in addition to an operational partner.

The Dayton Metro Library: Libraries are without question the closest existing analogy to what we’re proposing — publicly funded, levy-supported, editorially independent information infrastructure serving the whole community. Since libraries are and have been so critical to information ecosystems — Nardi & O’Day’s “keystone species” is a librarian — there’s an underlying, open question of whether or not this proposal deserves to live within the existing library network. The library system already has the physical distribution network and levy funding, but is also plagued by its own existential crises, including a recent employee morale and potential management issue that has damaged its reputation and public trust. Asking the system to host and maintain something of this magnitude would be a huge, unrealistic ask at this point. A partnership, however, makes a world of sense, given the mission alignment and deep, physical connection to our communities.

Higher Education Institutions: Sinclair Community College, The University of Dayton, Wright State University (though beyond the geographic scope) are natural partners for several of this proposal’s functions and missions. Info Districts could simultaneously tap into and revitalize local journalism and media programs, while AI research wings could help develop a more robust, locally hosted LLM solution that would be less dependent upon frontier models for sustained use.

The City of Dayton’s Community Engagement Division: Democracy Fellow Mike Squire and his staff already do an admirable job stewarding and coordinating with the City’s 65 different neighborhoods. An Info District would be an asset for them to stay better informed and civically empowered and educated.

DATV: An underappreciated community asset, the station was created by Roxie Cole, who was passionate about providing underserved communities a way to use their voices. This founding mission is essentially the Community Voice Network’s mission stated forty years earlier.

Eichelberger Center For Community Voices: Created with a similar mission, the Center amplifies local voices and encourages community storytelling in a tradition this proposal embraces and should support.