Council Members, Beware! New Wiki Will Examine Campaign Contributions

A prototype of Councilpedia.

City Council member items, the discretionary money Council members can give to community groups in their districts, have come under a great deal of scrutiny in the last few years. There was the slush-fund scandal, and following that, a series of revelations about Council members handing out money to organizations that employed family members (helpfully rounded up in today's Daily News). There are also several organizations that received member-item money that are currently under investigation.

These are the types of story that Gotham Gazette, a daily online news digest of New York politics and policy, hopes will be unearthed when it launches Councilpedia, its planned wiki of City Council voting records and campaign contributions that will fuse citizen journalism with reporting and fact-checking by the Gazette's editorial staff.

“Sometimes you’ll see a Council member make a vote or take a position on something and you’ll wonder why this person is doing that,” said Gail Robinson, the Gazette’s editor-in-chief, “and sometimes the history of who his or her supporters are can inform that.”

Ms. Robinson was speaking from the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at M.I.T. on June 18, where, a day earlier, Gotham Gazette had received a $250,000 grant for Councilpedia’s third-place win in the Knight Foundation News Challenge, an annual contest for innovative digital journalism projects. The Gazette-produced Web site, a primitive prototype of which can be temporarily viewed at councilpedia.org, will build on the Gazette’s existing database of City Council members, candidates, and elections, she said.

Once Councilpedia is up and running, readers will be able to submit tips on campaign contributions, like the one someone gave the New York Post back in June 2007 about Queen's Councilman David Weprin, then a vocal opponent of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, raking in more than $40,000 in campaign contributions from parking-garage interests. (Ms. Robinson said this story played a role in triggering the idea for Councilpedia.) The tips will initially be flagged as unconfirmed, and the Gazette’s editorial staff—which consists of an editor, two reporters, several interns and a handful of regular freelancers—will either confirm and report them out, or take them down. Ms. Robinson said the site wouldn’t target people or try to follow the “trail of contributions” for one particular politician.

The mission of the site falls in line with a growing push for openness in city government, as well as recent initiatives to involve everyday citizens in community journalism.

“It’s ultimately an experiment in crowd sourcing,” said Amanda Hickman, the Gazette’s tech director, who will develop Councilpedia on the programming side.

Ms. Hickman said that aside from hammering out Councilpedia’s technical aspects, the next few months would consist of outreach to community groups and other parties that might be interested in participating. She said she expects the site to launch in the fall, and that down the line it might expand to include state legislators and un-elected officials.