Information Arbitrage: The data scientist v2.0
I’ve been thinking deeply about the need for more people facile with extracting meaning from data - or a “data scientist” for lack of a better term. My friend and colleague Drew Conway developed a useful model for thinking about the attributes of a data scientist. He essentially views this…
Edelman Trust Barometer
I’m not sure I buy the relationship between trust, business and government. Runs completely counter to the kinds of evidence #lessig provides in Republic, Lost.
Also interesting data on NGOs
Data visualization on @knightfdn and Macon Money connections
Evaluating Innovation
…It’s not an oxymoron. It’s the title of the just released paper on Evaluating Innovation in the Social Sector. Now available http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/2889713
Source: http
Disrupting Philanthropy discussion video from Somerset House, London, March 2011
Snarkiest Embedded Giving Responses
How did I miss this? From The Atlantic , July/August 2010, @Atlantic
“Every time I go to the supermarket, the checkout person asks me if I would like to donate an extra dollar for children with cancer. I want to support charity, but I don’t want to be confronted like this when I go shopping. What should I say?
H. W., Arlington, Va.
Dear H. W.,
You should say “I’d love to, but I’m late for my massage.” Or “I can’t today, I have to get my Range Rover detailed.” Or, alternatively, “How do I know that you and your fellow Safeway clerks aren’t going to spend the money on hookers and blow?””
Thoughts on Crowds + Digital Public Library
Today’s NYTimes ran three stories that my brain connected into an idea. The paper had a story on a wikileaks-type information site to “hold Obama administration accountable.”It’s really about crowdsourcing information and analysing it with a political agenda - but it’s the crowdsourcing role that interests me.
They had an OP-ED on a new IRS designation for nonprofits that do political advocacy that would have to reveal their donors.
And they had a piece on the impact of the Court decision against Google Books might have on a noncommercial Digital Public Library. One line in this jumped out at me - “Meanwhile, others are chipping away at the millions of orphans [books], trying to find rights holders and to determine which books have fallen into the public domain.”
These ideas all came together fore me as these questions “Can we use the crowds to find the rights holders to these orphan books? Is there a role for a digitally enabled crowd in creating this type of public resource? An Ushahidi of rights sleuths and “title sourcerers? And can we think of changes to 501c code of the IRS that take advantage of the power of digital crowds to create public goods, not just benefit from them?”
I’m a big fan of the Digital Public Library idea and hope that the funders and institutions involved will engage the public in ways that recognize the power of the crowds and feedback to build the library, not just benefit from it.
