Staff

On Nov. 15, the Black Voice News (BVN), a Black-owned-and-led publication in Riverside, hosted a virtual panel discussion titled “Combating Racism as a Public Health Crisis. 

The event focused on a project BVN has developed in partnership with Stanford University using the decentralized web. It holds California elected leaders to account by tracking documented declarations they made promising to address systemic racism after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

      “Our Mapping Black California team partnered with Stanford’s Starling Lab and Esri to utilize decentralized web and blockchain technologies to build an accountability tool to better track the multiple declarations made by government agencies across the state,” said Paulette Brown- Hinds, BVN Publisher and a Fellow at Stanford’s Starling Lab for data integrity. 

      The Starling lab is an initiative that “prototypes tools and principles to bring historians, legal experts and journalists into the new era of Web3,” according to the research center’s website. 

The BVN project collects and archives web pages from government websites and displays them along with tracking tools.

      Panelists participating in the conversation were Ann Grimes Director, Journalism Fellowships, Starling Lab; Alex Reed, Mapping Black California Manager at BVN; Breanna Reeves, Reporter, BVN; and Lindsey Walker, Product Manager, Starling Lab. Candice Mays, Mapping Black California Director at BVN, moderated the discussion. 

      “Our Black Voice News reporting team has been the first to dig into the data and publish a series of reports on the findings. It is our hope that other journalists and media organizations will explore the data in their communities and use it to measure progress and ask important questions that could lead to systemic change,” added Brown-Hinds.