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work on other stuff.”

Weber directs the project while Brown holds the lone paid position maintaining the Council Data Project. Brown is pursuing a Ph.D. at the iSchool in information science with a special interest in open infrastructure. More than 50 people — including several iSchool alums — have volunteered on the project.

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Brown said she was taken aback by how opaque city government can be. “One of the things I’ve discovered that surprised me is that most city council websites do not even have a page for a voting record,” Brown said.

One of the hard decisions that the team made early — and a decision that has paid off — was to upload committee hearings onto the website, Weber said.

“If you think city councils aren’t studied, committees in city councils are not studied at all,” Weber said. “When you have arguments about budgets and you have arguments about union contracts, those debates get settled in committee before it even comes to the city council. It is shocking how little attention is paid to committee deliberations.”

The Council Data Project hasn’t incorporated some other local governments, such as school boards, into its work. The reason is that the meeting laws are slightly different at school boards and recordings are not as dependable as municipal government.

The goal for the next two years is to have the Council Data Project host pages for the 50 largest cities in the U.S. The challenge is funding. While most of the work is automated, there is a cost to set up each location. It’s been hard to communicate the need for a searchable council database and its uses to philanthropies and other funders.

“Everyone that we talk to that’s either a researcher, a journalist or even just a civic technologist, it takes five or 10 minutes to explain the premise of the project, but once they start playing with it, they get it,” Weber said. “Our infrastructure really changes the kinds of questions you can ask, and ultimately what you can answer about local governance in action.”

Visit the Council Data Project at councildataproject.org. • The American Library Association awarded Spectrum Scholarships to seven MLIS students . They are (top row, from left): Mei’lani Eyre, Danielle Galván Gomez, and Nestor Guerrero; (bottom row, from left): Michelle Noriega, Hayley Park, Bianca Phipps and Dev Wilder . The Spectrum program increases diversity in librarianship through recruitment and scholarships .

• iSchool Ph .D . students Tessa Campbell (Tulalip/Tlingit) and

Mandi Harris (Cherokee Nation) were among the seven recipients of the inaugural ALA Spectrum Doctoral Fellowships —

Catalysts for Change . Recipients of the fellowship receive tuition and stipend support along with opportunities to participate in specialized coursework grounded in social justice and anti-racism to inform fellows on equity in action . • Dean Anind K. Dey and Professors Batya Friedman and Jacob

O.Wobbrock were recognized as ACM Fellows by the Association for Computing Machinery . The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community . • Professor Amy J. Ko was inducted into the CHI Academy, the top honor in human-computer interaction research . She joins

Dey, Friedman and Wobbrock as UW iSchool faculty who have received this recognition . • Harry Bruce, UW iSchool dean emeritus, is the 2022 recipient of

Association for Information Science & Technology’s highest honor, the ASIS&T Award of Merit . The award recognizes an individual who has made particularly noteworthy and sustained contributions to the information science field .

• Nicola Kalderash, a Master of Science in Information Management student and Informatics alum, was named a Slade Gorton

Leaders Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research . • Devin Barich, MSIM ’21, won a Presidential Management

Fellowship . Awardees have the opportunity to interview for jobs in government that fit their professional skills and academic background . Barich’s information management training made him a candidate for jobs that involve supporting organizations in their technical operations and artificial intelligence policies .

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