Trust and Truth in Documentary Filmmaking
Aron Gaudet, Director, and Gita Pullapilly, Producer, of The Way We Get By are describing their experience with broadcast news’ lack of transparency and their motivation for creating a documentary film.
Tagged: panel RSS
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jonippolito
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sunny_hughes
Coming up at 3:30…. Trust and Truth in Documentary Filmmaking: The Transparent Qualities of The Way We Get
Trust and Truth in Documentary Filmmaking: The Transparent Qualities of The Way We Get
Moderator: Ben Fowlie, founder of the Camden International Film Festival, moderator
Aron Gaudet, Director, Gita Pullapilly, Producer, and cast members of The Way We Get ByPlease post your questions by replying to this thread.
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sunny_hughes
Transparency Trends: Getting Beyond the Buzzword (Panel)
Moderator: Irwin Gratz, MPBN
Carolyn Ball, Ph.D., Public Administration, University of Maine
Amy Fried, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Maine
Joline Blais, Ph.D., New Media, University of Maine
Jon Ippolito, M.F.A., New Media, University of MainePlease post questions for this panel by replying to this thread.
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sunny_hughes
Carolyn showed a video that related to buzzwords in transparency. You can watch it again on YouTube.
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sunny_hughes
Meeting the Mandate: National and Statewide Perspectives
Our moderator will be Mark Woodward, former Editor-in-Chief, Bangor Daily News
Panelists:
Amanda Wood, Director of Governmental Affairs, the office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins
Kelly Hokkanen, General Manager, InforME, a partner of Maine.gov
Tarren Bragdon, Chief Executive Officer, The Maine Heritage Policy Center
Reply to this post with questions for our panelists.
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sunny_hughes
Kelly Hokkanen is the General Manager of InforMe, the public-private partnership entity operating the award-winning website of the State of Maine, Maine.gov.
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sunny_hughes
Hokkanen says that there are many steps in Transparency… Putting information online is a first step. Maine.gov has over 300,000 pages of content with over 15 million hits per month.
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sunny_hughes
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Maine.gov is self funded?
Hokkanen says “yes” that they may for example receive an agent fee for issuing a hunting license. This fee can go towards funding the site. Statutory fees can also be used to cover expenses. There is an oversight board to make sure InforMe has sufficient funding and the funding model is adequate to fund the service over time. “We don’t receive any appropriations.”
QUESTION: How do you measure your cost effectiveness?
Hokkanen: There are a lot of ways we accomplish oversight: 1) Our board makes sure our fees and levels of service are appropriate. We contract with an Augusta company to provide the service; 2) We look at return on investment for agencies.
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sunny_hughes
Amanda Wood currently serves as Director of Governmental Affairs on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for Ranking Member, the Honorable Susan M. Collins (R-ME). She supervises federal agency oversight including programs at the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management.
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Tarren R. Bragdon served for five years as the Director of Health Reform Initiatives prior to becoming CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center in 2008. He is also a graduate of the University of Maine.
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sunny_hughes
Want to know how much a Maine public employee makes? You can find that at maineopengov.org
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jonippolito
One of my students created a Web site meant to expose these data more publicly, particularly about professors’ salaries at UMaine. But most of the buzz after his launch centered on the hockey coach’s salary 🙂
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jolineblais
Question for Tarren: You just stated that you fundraise for your $1 million budget in order to help disclose money trails and payroll. Do you self-disclose this data? Do you provide information especially on who funds Maine Heritage Policy Center and who most uses the data? And what ‘meaning’ might be derived from this data? I’d be curious about this for InfoME as well.
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Mark Woodward asks panelists where most of the traffic is on their sites.
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Hokkanen says on Maine.gov the state agency directory is consistently a top hit. The weather is also very popular, as is job information. As far as online services: renewing your vehicle registration, the sex offender search, hunting and fishing licenses, etc. Citizen services are popular, but business services are heavily used.
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sunny_hughes
Bragdon says that on maineopengov.org payroll information is most popular. Bragdon says that search capacity and database limitations prevent site users from knowing they can search for individual people within the records. The Maine Heritage Policy Center has created a blog to help users understand what kind of information is available.
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COMMENT FROM GEORGE MARKOWSKY: He says he is trying to sensitize his students to the fact they have social responsibilities. “In the future transparency will involve many technical challenges and it’s important the new crop of students understand these responsibilities.”
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sunny_hughes
QUESTION FROM VIRGINIA NEES HATLEN, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF THE UMO COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
: There are enormous amounts of information and data, but there is a relatively small use of the sites for complex policy information. Users seem to be going for bits of data or “foxes in the hen house”… How do we get to information that is useful for citizens and taxpayers when we discuss policy issues? On one hand we have all this information and on the other hand we have soundbites. Is there a way to move more towards “meaning from data” in transparency? Bragdon: We maintain a data set on how much government spends to companies. There is an independent group that also maintains this data. This allows users to compare data sets. It requires a sophisticated tool to allow users to perform searches. For us, it is a $100K project that has only been technologically possible in the last 18 months. It’s up to the users to create the information, we just want to give them a tool to extract that information beyond a tabular search.
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jonippolito 8:48 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink |
Aron is describing a news reporter doing a story on a certain company leaving a small town. A survey of people on the street found a majority of people (like 48 out of 50) who were happy a certain company was leaving, and only two who thought it was “devastating.” Because the majority opinion wasn’t “newsworthy,” the station only aired a report featuring the views of the minority that the company’s loss was devastating.
jonippolito 8:53 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink |
Gita is describing the surprising openness of the troop greeters she and Aron portrayed in this documentary film.
Katherine 9:00 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink |
I wonder how they felt when they saw it the first time?
jonippolito 9:02 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink |
Aron is describing how the film created over the course of three years a sense of relationship between the filmmakers and their subjects, and how the filmmakers created reciprocal, long-term relationships, spending time with and without cameras. Aron and Gita are contrasting this approach with the typical reporter who drops in on a person during the worst time of her life–say, when her house just burned down–asks to reveal her most intimate personal feelings, and then never sees her again.
It’s a bit of a surprise to me that the greeters didn’t see the film until it was finished, and I’m curious like Katherine how they felt about it in its finished form. In other respects, however, I do see their story as another version of Joline Blais’ claim that transparency is already “built-in” to local relationships and communities.
Katherine 9:07 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink |
It must be a surreal experience to watch an interpretation of you own life….