Data is the most powerful tool we have available to change American public policy. If feedback from the bathroom scale has ever changed what you decided to eat that day, you’ve experienced the power of data changing behavior. What’s true for us personally is also true of complex systems. Data can shift awareness leading to changing entrenched public policy. America’s leading social entrepreneurs are using data to create awareness that will lead to lasting social change. A great example is College Summit , a program that helps low income students transition successfully from high school to college and career. They educate students on the importance of going to college and the process for getting there. In 2005, College Summit’s founder, JB Schramm , faced a dilemma: he could grow his program school by school, “selling” it to thoughtful superintendents, or he could look for a larger, systematic change that could shift the entire education system. He decided to take on systems change. Schramm concluded that states first need to know how many of their high school students are going to college. Without data to measure the success or failure of U.S. schools to get their students into college, the problem went unaddressed. The hope was to use data as a proof point, raise awareness and create concrete policy changes. The strategy has paid off. Over the last decade, College Summit has succeeded in shifting most major education bills, regulations and waivers toward requiring high schools to measure the number of students that went to college after graduating. In 2000, no states provided comprehensive data measuring students going to college. Today, working in conjunction with the leading U.S. education data consortium, The Data Quality Campaign , thirty six states have the essential data. For the first time, Americans are getting hard data on the success or failure of our public schools’ ability to get kids into college. As hoped for, once there was proof in numbers, awareness went up and parents began demanding that schools do a better job of getting their kids into college. College Summit is experiencing the change, too. Instead of banging on the doors of local schools to “sell” their training, schools concerned about their fail rates are calling College Summit to help them. The result: many more young people who would have never considered college are now enrolling in higher ed. Instead of addressing the symptoms of education failure, College Summit changed the education system by using data to create awareness. To change the world, we need to change the rules. Data is the best lever we can use to begin the awareness process. Posted by Rich Tafel , Founder of Public Squared
With last week’s signing of the JOBS Act, startups will, for the first time, be able to raise capital from ordinary people through crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the crowdsourcing of investment in growing companies. Crowdfunding expands the pool of capital available to startups by including unaccredited investors and pushes the whole process online so it doesn’t matter whether you are in San Francisco, California, or Sioux City, South Dakota. Crowdsourcing is used successfully to solve difficult scientific problems and to answer everyday questions . Taking the process of innovating and accessing information out of siloed government and corporate institutions, crowdsourcing provides solutions in an efficient way while simultaneously gathering valuable social proof from a large sample size. While often ineligible for regular bank loans because of lack of assets, startups in this country have a couple of options when seeking financing as they grow. SBA-backed lending and community development banks offer loans to small businesses; however, these loans can be 3.5% above market . For high-growth startups, equity financing makes more sense, but less than 3% of startups receive any financing . Less than 1% of Americans are angel investors. But, if Americans invested 1% of their total existing savings and investment capital in startups, there would be more capital available than all VCs and angel networks combined. The U.S. stands to gain from having more startups. According to the Kauffman Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research, new companies are the primary driver of job growth in this country . An NBER study on job creation found that new companies create three million new jobs a year while older companies lose one million jobs annually. As President Obama said last week when he signed the bill into law, “new businesses account for almost every new job that’s created in America.” So, let’s crowdsource job creation. Let’s crowdsource the financing of the companies creating jobs. This is the new meritocracy of financing—where anyone can compete and everyone stands to win. The U.S. is a nation of entrepreneurs, so let’s invest in each other. Posted by Melanie Plageman, Co-Founder of Motaavi
Perhaps the hottest lingo in Silicon Valley these days is “big data.” Once upon a time, the only folks who needed to worry about massive, unstructured (or semi-structured) data sets were scientists running weather simulators or investment banks designing high-frequency trading strategies. Not anymore. The New York Times recently ran an article on the increasing ubiquity of sprawling data sets , and the growing need for analysts who know how to work with them. Yes, some of this is hype. But the underlying trend is an incredibly important one, and it’s not a fad. I’m talking about the rise of data-driven decision-making . For millions of years, humans have gotten by on our skill at making semi-informed hunches. To be fair, as a species we’re really good at it. We don’t always understand how everything connects, but a combination of intuition, experience and logic leads us to reasonable conclusions more often than not. The world we live in, however, is getting more complicated all the time. Just about everything moves faster, and societies and industries are more interconnected every day. At the same time, the amount of “data noise” is growing exponentially. The 2011 Digital Universe Study reports that in 2011, humans created of 1.8 zetabytes of data (1 zetabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes). By 2020, we’ll be producing 50 times that every year. Extracting meaningful signals from that earsplitting noise, and using that information to make smart, informed decisions, is among the most critical challenges of the 21st century. Needless to say, the arts are not at the vanguard of this trend. Art itself is among the most analysis-resistant of human activities, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that our field tends toward a fondness for intuition and a distrust of cold analysis. Alas, this is a luxury we cannot afford if we want to remain relevant in the future. To thrive in a big data world, funders, policymakers and even individual arts administrators need more and better information about the context in which their work takes place. Fractured Atlas has been working on this problem for a couple of years now, on a couple of different fronts. The centerpiece of our strategy is Archipelago , which is a technology platform for cultural sector data aggregation, visualization, reporting and analysis. Archipelago cross-references data from the IRS, the US Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Cultural Data Project, mailing list co-ops, Spaces and original research, among other sources. The result is a multi-faceted tool that can help funders, policymakers, advocates and even individual organizations get a more comprehensive picture of the cultural assets and activity in a given geographic region. Think of it as Moneyball for the arts! Of course, we’re not the only ones tackling big data in the arts, nor are we naive enough to think that any single tool can crack this nut. But hopefully we’re doing our part to nudge the field towards a better informed, more analytical future. Posted by Adam Huttler, Fractured Atlas's founder and Executive Director
Millions of people have likely heard some version of Stella Liebeck’s story. She’s the 79-year-old woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonalds, winning a multi-million dollar judgement. For those who heard about Liebeck from late-night comedians, this was a story about how the legal system gone terribly awry. For those who watch the documentary Hot Coffee -- where you can see pictures of the severe third-degree burns that covered her skin -- this story may be about justice being served. Regardless, Liebeck’s story is one that demonstrates how numbers -- by themselves, absent context -- can be deceiving when it comes to public policy. ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits" and the case was widely cited a reason for “tort reform,” putting limits on the ability of individuals to be compensated for harms done to them by others. But this one case and massive judgment says very little about whether the massively complex system of torts is actually working well in the aggregate. This point is made very well in an excellent TED talk by Phillip Howard, “ Four ways to fix a broken legal system .” Howard suggests that the complexity of the legal system is pernicious not because of cases that grab the headlines, but rather because of the many individual acts that go relatively unnoticed and are hard to measure. He tells the stories of doctors who fear giving nuanced advice to their patients because it could become grounds for malpractice, and a teacher who, fearing a lawsuit from a student’s parents in retaliation, decided against giving the student a lower grade in a class. By itself, this harm may be trivial -- but aggregated across many different people, it could be quite substantial. There’s no clear right answer here about how to reform the legal system. But these videos make clear that getting the right answer requires looking more closely at and measuring the impact on individuals in context.
Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager
Metaphors comparing the Internet to an information superhighway were common in the 1990s. They’ve since been replaced by other terms and abbreviations, such as the net, but this older comparison to a freeway is still applicable. In particular, digital citizens require a type of “driver training” program to be able to understand the cyber rules of the road and navigate to the online content that’s most important and compelling to them. Without knowing how the Net can change their world, users may not fully benefit from or value becoming digital citizens. In America, it’s common for new automobile drivers to pass a driving instruction test with both a technical component teaching laws and procedures and, for all new drivers, a practical driving test demonstrating their ability to drive a car around town. Similarly, digital citizens that learn the “technical” rules of the road are able to access the Net without revealing private information, avoiding unsafe practices and without leaving digital footprints that could adversely impact their future job prospects. ConnectSafely, Enough is Enough, iKeepSafe, Wired Kids, the Family Online Safety Institute, GetNetWise, the National Consumers League, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Cyber Security Alliance and Common Sense Media are just some of the important safety organizations that help organizations like mine teach non-users how to pass some of the technical parts of their online drivers training program and safely traverse the Net. Unfortunately, some digital inclusion providers don’t spend adequate time on the “practical” parts—asking non-users what’s important to them in the “real world” so they can learn about the related content that is online and will make the Net relevant to them. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, most people that remain offline do not believe that the Internet is sufficiently relevant to justify the time, money and energy for them to become digitally literate. Most non-users haven’t been shown a compelling and personal value proposition, and without one, the Net is much less compelling and useful to them. Last year between May 2010 and August 2011, Pew reported that the number of adult Americans that don’t use the Internet increased from 21% to 22%! Because many users don’t have a personal value proposition that makes the Net important and useful, they exited the highway. Culturally respectful grassroots initiatives with a national direction best leverage the synergies within the colorful mosaic of communities that comprise America. Net Literacy is a long-time proponent of tapping into the tens of millions of digital natives that attend high schools and colleges to form a Digital Literacy Corps that helps to reduce the digital divide. In 2009, the FCC recommended the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps in the National Broadband Plan presented to Congress. One non-user at a time, a Digital Literacy Corps could help individuals discover their personal value proposition and why they should accelerate to the onramp of the information superhighway. Posted by Daniel Kent , Founder of Net Literacy
Roughly 600 cities account for 60% of global GDP, according to McKinsey , and while continuing urbanization creates its own set of challenges , it also brings with it significant opportunities to improve the wealth and well-being of people, including artists. It’s important that we start viewing urban planning—including issues like housing policy and zoning ordinances—as part of what will drive a thriving, diverse artistic culture. Cities are important for artists of all stripes. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts a fine point on this in his book The Triumph of the CIty. Big cities mean bigger markets—these large audiences help cover the significant fixed costs of New York’s Broadway, London’s theater district, as well as other acclaimed and costly cultural centers. At the same time, “city size also enables smaller, more experimental live theater to survive. The Second City [comedy troupe] began in 1959 in cheap Chicago space that had once been a Chinese laundry." Second City went on to act as a farm league for shows like Saturday Night Live ; more generally, “live performance is connected to the spread of innovation in cities because the first stirrings of a new artistic phenomenon are almost always performed live long before they are distributed electronically.” Today, the Internet is creating more economic opportunities for artists, including those who can’t make it to the big city. The suburbanization of America in the late 20th century was paralleled by the rise of mass artistic products—think popstars and blockbuster movies that served a very broad audience. For artists that have niche audiences (say, ukelele players ), the costs of producing, distributing, and marketing one’s work could have been prohibitively expensive to reach a broad set of potential fans, and, without a large local audience, that art may have simply gone unproduced. Now, artists and fans can connect online in new ways that were never before possible. If we want to create a thriving, diverse artistic culture, that means more than focusing on copyright and media policy. It also means focusing on how we design cities and create incentives for how and where people live. In other words, if the rent is indeed too damn high , then that has consequences for culture as well. posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager
At Google, we rely on data. But numbers don’t get (most) people excited, stories do. And we want to get people as excited about the web’s potential as we are. That’s why we launched Think Quarterly —to share our insights and inspirations. Our latest issue is dedicated to Creativity. The web i s the driving force behind an unprecedented creative revolution . There are now more than 800 exabytes of digital information in the world—videos, photos, music, text. Sixty hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute . This is our creative output; the sheer volume is overwhelming. This raises important questions, which senior vice president and general counsel Kent Walker explores in “ 21st Century Copyright .” How do we encourage the democratization of creativity while protecting original work? Which frameworks should we embrace and which do we need to reject? How can technologists, consumers and lawmakers navigate this new world? Read it here . posted by Allison Mooney, Think Quarterly Editor
