Earlier this year, the Bridge Alliance and the National Academy of Public Administration launched the Fellows for Democracy and Public Service Initiative to strengthen the country's civic foundations. This fellowship unites the Academy’s distinguished experts with the Bridge Alliance’s cross‑sector ecosystem to elevate distributed leadership throughout the democracy reform landscape. Instead of relying on traditional, top‑down models, the program builds leadership ecosystems: spaces where people share expertise, prioritize collaboration, and use public‑facing storytelling to renew trust in democratic institutions. Each fellow grounds their work in one of six core sectors essential to a thriving democratic republic.
Recently, I interviewed Joel Gurin, who founded and now leads the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) and wrote Open Data Now. Before launching CODE in 2015, he chaired the White House Task Force on Smart Disclosure, which studied how open government data can improve consumer markets. He also led as Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission and spent over a decade at Consumer Reports.
His Fellows for Democracy and Public Service Initiative will create a set of public-facing tools to help users interpret trustworthy information, develop measures to assess information reliability, and produce actionable recommendations for citizens and policymakers.
Below is a transcript of an edited interview with Joel, followed by a link to a one-minute video of Joel describing the project.
Question: Tell us a little about your journey to this NAPA/ Bridge Alliance Fellowship. What experiences or feelings led you to believe that this, this project is necessary and important?
Joel Gurin. The overall direction and goals of strengthening democracy at this particular time are very well timed. I have personally been very involved over the last year as there have been some real changes to the federal data ecosystem and in looking at what that means and whether this is a moment of disruption. So, this could be an opportunity to build a more effective national data ecosystem and to build more public trust in that ecosystem.
Question: Could you describe your project, including listing the project title, your approach, and who you anticipate being potential collaborators and stakeholders?
Joel Gurin. My part of the project falls under the heading: “Trustworthy Information leads to Trust in Government.” And I think the idea that was really framed by the fellowship program was that democracy really depends not only on what we know but on how we know it, and the need to focus on restoring a sort of shared civic reality. A place where we all acknowledge the same information as reliable, and where there's real public trust in that information.
This whole question of trust and information is very multifaceted. Over the next year I’ll be diving into some of these key areas and expect that there will be an opportunity to talk to people who are looking at different aspects of these problems, from people who are working in federal statistical agencies, to people working in non-profits, or even businesses that rely on this kind of information and data to folks who are at the cutting edge of looking at alternative data sources.
Question. How might citizens or other key stakeholders utilize your work on this project to improve American democracy?
Joel Gurin. I think we're living at a time when people are very unsure about what information to trust and how to communicate trustworthiness of information to others. There are issues around disappearing data, particularly federal data issues around the validity of surveys and sampling around how we define the gold standard of science and around the impact of AI. I'm hoping to lay out some frameworks for thinking about these issues in a way that can then help people engage with them individually, organizationally, allowing them to develop some of their own thinking to address the ways that our whole information landscape is shifting very rapidly.
Enjoy the short video:
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Bradford Fitch is the former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, a former congressional staffer, and author of “The Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials."
