The Problem: Poor Access to Data

Understanding the public sphere--and developing good public policy to support it--requires access to data about media and the public sphere: data on industry structure, audiences, programming, internet traffic, and other basic measures of our increasingly convergent media environment.  In the U.S., much of this data is privately collected, and priced for large corporations.  Independent researchers, public interest groups, and policymakers operate at a major disadvantage in this environment.

For many reasons, unequal access to data is a recipe for poor public policy.  Notably, it makes the examination of policy proposals and evaluation of policy outcomes difficult at best.  As this situation becomes the norm, media policymaking moves away from basic principles of public accountability. 

The Data Consortium

The consortium is a vehicle for expressing the data-related concerns and collective bargaining power of scholarly and public-interest communities in this area.  The consortium is organized around a few core objectives:

• Improve educational and other non-profit access to commercially-produced datasets, especially through cooperation with commercial data providers.
• Facilitate projects that address persistent ‘data gaps’ in our understanding of the public sphere.
• Expand researcher engagement with datasets, in part by collecting and disseminating information about the uses and terms of access of different datasets.
• Advocate for the principle that public policy should be based on publicly-available data.  

We believe that the interests of researchers, public-interest groups, policymakers, and commercial data providers come together around these simple goals.

Membership in the consortium is open to educational and non-profit institutions, as well as interested individuals.