At a moment when Americans can’t even agree on the basic facts that mold our public life, the nation faces a deeper crisis than polarization alone. We are living through a collapse of shared reality. When people lose confidence in the numbers, surveys, and official information that once anchored civic debate, democracy itself begins to drift. Trustworthy government data isn’t a technical issue — it is core infrastructure that holds a self‑governing society together. And right now, that infrastructure is under strain.
The public has lost trust in government information on many levels and across the political spectrum. To restore that trust, we need to address the challenges facing government data — including low survey response rates, data protection concerns, and outdated or flawed statistical methods.
The Bridge Alliance and the National Academy of Public Administration are meeting this challenge through their Fellows for Democracy and Public Service partnership, a cross‑sector fellowship intended to elevate distributed leadership and advance actionable reform and renewal.
Join the webinar on June 30th to hear the fellows discuss issues in federal data, possible government solutions, and the role of supplementary data from nongovernment research, citizen‑generated projects, and “nontraditional” sources.
The Panelists
Joel Gurin (moderator)
President and Founder of the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) and author of Open Data Now. Before launching CODE in 2015, he conceptualized and led the development team for the GovLab’s Open Data 500 project, the first comprehensive study of how the private sector uses open government data.
Chris Jackson
Senior Vice President and Civil Society Research Lead at SSRS. His work integrates politics, governance, media, information, commerce, and the economy to illuminate the full picture of American public life. Chris is an expert on electoral and public polling with deep experience in the American political system.
Beth Jarosz
Senior Fellow at the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University and Vice President of the Association of Public Data Users. With more than 25 years of experience across government, academia, nonprofits, and research organizations, she specializes in helping decision‑makers examine complex data responsibly and effectively.
Francesca Perucci
Director of Policy and Partnerships at Open Data Watch. A global expert in development data and statistical capacity, she previously served for decades at the United Nations, most recently as Assistant Director of the UN Statistics Division. She is a leading voice in using data to inform policy, monitor progress, and strengthen institutions.
Stefaan Verhulst
Co‑Founder of The GovLab (New York) and The Data Tank (Brussels), Research Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, Editor‑in‑Chief of Data & Policy (Cambridge University Press), and Co‑Chair of the Data for Policy Conference. Dr. Verhulst is a global expert on using data and technology for social impact.
Renewing trust in government information is not optional — it is foundational. A democracy cannot function when citizens doubt the integrity of the data that guide public decisions, shape policy, and inform civic debate. Restoring that trust requires transparency, modernized methods, along with a commitment to meeting people where they are — but it also requires leadership.
The Fellows for Democracy and Public Service are helping chart that route forward. By strengthening the nation’s data ecosystem and elevating trustworthy information, they are working to rebuild the shared civic reality on which a healthy democracy depends.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
