There was a moment yesterday when Nathan (@ngill, frontman of The North Lakes and all-around great guy) retweeted a post and I stopped to consider who might stumble upon this blog. And I realized that, so far, 100% of my posts (2/2!) have referenced technology and government.
I would like to note quickly that I fully intend to address other topics. I suspect music, political science, economics and science will creep in a lot.
However, the reality is that, these days, I spend 37.5 hours a week in a work environment, and this leads to a lot of thinking of engagement, management, the general administration of the Public Service, technology, and the like. The reality – let’s be clear – is that I’m a dork. I enjoy my job, which at one point I thought would slowly crush my soul, and I enjoy worrying about such things as, for instance, employee engagement.
With that in mind, I’m going to delay a post on music (my position? I’m for it) and talk about data.
I’lll start with Jer Thorp. With, give or take, 650 independently organized TEDx______ events happening around the globe, it would be easy to miss this talk (it would also be easy to miss if you didn’t follow TED, a fantastic annual ideas conference held in California).
Jer Thorp is the Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times, and he talks about the possibilities for data, open data, and big data in his talk. I’m particularly interested in the convergence of data and art, and the appreciation that data visualization can be a powerful storytelling mechanism to affect change. This is true of TED Talks (check out any of Hans Rosling’s brilliant presentations) and of presentations to senior management within the Public Service. There is a time and a place for statistics, and there is a time and a place for visuals. In a complex world, visuals can carry more weight, allow a greater degree of comparability, and can tell a deeper story. Most importantly, when meshed with art, they can attract and keep an audience’s attention. It would be great if ideas garnered attention purely on merit, but we’re not wired for that. I feel as though we have a responsibility to ensure that good ideas can compete with well-marketed superfluity, negativity and superficiality.
This post could go in a number of directions at this point. I feel strongly about the necessity for good storytellers (e.g., the impact of science communicators and role models (such as Neil deGrasse Tyson) on the numbers of future scientists), the need for data-based decision-making in civil society (why is there any other kind?), or the need to create momentum around good ideas within the Public Service. However, I’ll leave those as future posts and stick to data.
Alongside cloud and mobile computing, one of the major buzzwords in technology right now is Big Data. We’ll throw in Open Data and Analytics, all capitalized despite the conventions of grammar. The long story short is that companies and governments are realizing that there is a staggering amount of data available; a stunning amount of latent knowledge. This data comes in the form of, among other things, smartphone-enabled location data, trends on Twitter, or company HR records. Google carries out stunning analysis on its own human resources database and turns data into management insights that drive hiring for skills gaps, improving employee engagement, and succession planning. A website called OpenStreetMap crowdsourced a map of Haiti to help the humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake. Closer to home, every 3 years Statistics Canada runs a Public Service Employee Survey, which represents a massive data set with which Public Service managers can improve their organizations.
Or, more on the amusing side, OKCupid uses the massive data set of questionnaires filled out by would-be internet daters to calculate the overlap between people who enjoy vigorous sex and those who like oatmeal. Or that the three questions that provide the best indication of long-term compatability are “Do you like horror movies?,” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?,” and “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?”
To return to the point. The staggering amount of data available needs interpreters. I’ve heard senior businesspeople suggest that, in some cases, the IT folks know more about the business than the management types, as they are immersed in the data, day in, day out. The role of art, visualization, and, less sexily, statistics, may grow significantly as we get increasingly proficient at converting the world’s growing data set into insight. And that could mean a lot for our collective ability to innovate, as well as our ability to avoid unnecessary resource use by making business and government more and more efficient.
Lastly, a quick mention that Open Data is one of the key themes for GTEC 2012.
