What’s an information ecosystem?

You’ve probably lived through a moment when the facts technically existed, but they didn’t reach the right people at the right time.

Like, a boil-water advisory that half the city misses. Or a school board proposal nobody understands until after it’s voted into policy. A beloved local business closes and you don’t learn that until you’re at their door, hands cupped around your eyes looking through the glass into vacant commercial real estate.

This is at the heart of the idea here: information is not merely “content,” some package or artifact distinguished by its format or who made it. It is, to use a phrase popular with the kids these days, something more “liminal.”

In systems theory, you’ve got “stocks,” “flow,” and “feedback,” with infrastructure that supports them. You can apply this mental model to our shared resources like water or air — and it applies equally to information, too.

And when a system is also defined in part by interactions of living organisms, that’s how we get an “ecosystem.”

So, an “information ecosystem” is the whole local system by which people discover, receive, trust, ignore, share, interpret, and act on information they need to live together.

Whether we know it or not, if we’re working in the news business, we’re operating on a mental model of an information ecosystem. It comes with a lot of beliefs and assumptions — about how people behave, about what’s important, and about a cause-and-effect role that information plays in our lives.

If our model is strictly limited to “journalists” and “audience,” our model is going to be, let’s just say, incomplete.

An information ecosystem includes journalism, but it is not the same thing as journalism. It is “more than.”

It includes public agencies, libraries, schools, churches, neighborhood Facebook groups, group texts and Whatsapp groups, public records, meeting agendas, rumors, influencers, broadband access, translation, disability access, trust, habits, incentives, and people’s own sense of whether knowing something will matter.

Because we’re also thinking about feedback in systems, this idea of an information ecosystem also adds heavy emphasis on more than just information — the resource in the ecosystem — it incorporates what information does for people.

My light bulb-moment

During the pandemic, in early 2021, I started thinking seriously about how to grow a new local news organization. Though I had lived in my community in Kalamazoo for six years at that point, I still felt basically oblivious to the history, the networks, and the real needs that most people in my county had regarding information. I knew that some sort of survey or census or landscape study would be valuable, if not essential.

So I started researching how people accomplish this in a variety of fields.

At the same time, I was also doing a crash-course in learning about nonprofits. It was this intersection of topics that led to my realization that aid organizations encounter this need to map how information is produced and moves through communities anytime they’re called in to assist in the wake of a disaster.

In the aftermath of a typhoon, earthquake, wildfire, or any other cataclysm that befalls a region, there are often international aid organizations that leap into action. And in addition to organizing supply lines for medicines and medical equipment, food and water distribution gets organized, shelters get erected, and more — including a communications plan aimed at getting the word out about help and resources to a vast swath of people, who might or might not have electricity, internet access, or phone service.

Emergency scenarios like this require a rapid comprehension of how information naturally moves through such places and networks of people. The picture that develops includes formally defined information producers — news organizations, but also civic information producers that no one thinks of as “journalists” — along with informal players, whether they are sources or just translators and amplifiers.

The United Nations has a division for this. For organizations like Internews or Resurgence, this is their central function and mission. Though you and I might not be working in a post-tsunami calamity (even if there are days when it feels like we are), I think we need to come around to this way of seeing a system and our role in it.

Information is not awareness

A community can be full of information and still be information-poor.

If the information ecosystem isn’t healthy and functioning properly, it’s easy to have a “rich-get-richer” phenomenon, just as we do with other resources in a system.

It happens all the time. The city posts the agenda. The hospital issues the guidance. The school district sends the letter to parents. The court record exists. The newsroom publishes heaps of articles. The meeting is livestreamed.

The facts are technically available. And yet the system still fails if the information does not become usable knowledge for the people who need it.

It is tempting to blame people themselves — the residents of a place — for their unawareness. I confess, I have been guilty of this. As a local government reporter, I have seen plenty of upset citizens showing up at city hall to complain about an issue they technically could have intervened on if only, I thought to myself, they had been attending the prior meetings I had and read the articles I wrote about those meetings.

There are financially comfortable people who also like to tell financially struggling people to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” too, and I think expecting the average person to be as informed as every journalist and news-junkie (just because the information is out there, somewhere) is 100% the same.

There is a difference between availability and usability. A public record is not the same as public knowledge. A news story is not the same as comprehension. A social post is not the same as trust. Nor is a livestream the same as people being able to live better because they have civic agency.

This is why just producing more and more “content” isn’t going to have the impact we want.

This metaphor has its limits

“The map is not the territory” is one of my favorite pieces of insight from writer Shane Parish. What he cautions against is forgetting that a map is just a representation. It’s not the real world. Anyone who’s ever been lost while holding a map in their hands knows what I’m talking about. It’s easy to conflate the representation of a thing with the real thing itself.

The idea of an “information ecosystem” has this same risk. It is useful, but it can also obscure things, including power structures (and their inequity), and human agency, and history.

And “natural” ecosystems do and do not have qualities and features in common with human information systems. I would not try to deny the critiques of ecologists on this front.

“Information ecosystem” remains a useful metaphor, I think, but only insofar as we are disciplined in acknowledging its limits. We should use it to notice interdependence, flows, incentives, adaptation, degradation, resilience, and feedback. We should not be pretending information systems are natural, apolitical, or self-correcting.

Why people in news organizations should care

Every cause people already care about — housing, schools, public safety, health, corruption, climate, poverty, development, democracy — depends on whether the community’s information ecosystem can help people perceive reality, coordinate attention, hold power accountable, and act before damage becomes irreversible.

If information ecosystems are a valid mental model, then journalism’s job is not merely to produce information. It is to help a community’s information system become healthier: more accurate, more trusted, more usable, more equitable, more responsive, and more capable of helping people act together.

This is an important distinction: are we producers of goods (i.e information artifacts and media) or are we stewards of a complex web that underpins community well-being and individuals’ thriving?

How we answer says something about how we approach the work. If I am here solely to produce this thing called a podcast, then I’m basically required to think about how to amass a sufficient number of consumers of that podcast to sustain ongoing production of more podcasts.

And if my responsibility is to the vitality of a system, and if I’m just one part of the system — that is, I know I am part of the system, too — my role becomes more like that of a gardener.

The more consequential implication of my argument is that one of these approaches makes a thing, but doesn’t do much to make people want that thing; the other approach wants to see those same things exist, while acknowledging there are a lot of environmental conditions that will influence what grows and what’s viable.

The former take is “audience thinking,” and it asks, “How do we get people to consume what we make?”

Information ecosystem thinking asks, “What does this community need to know, through what channels, with what level of trust, at what moment, in what form, with what feedback, in order to live together and act?”