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In many ways I have Grantmakers in the Arts to thank for this blog reaching the people it does today. That’s because, in what can only be called a stroke of dumb luck, GIA Deputy Director Tommer Peterson invited me to be the organization’s first official conference blogger in 2009, which subsequently resulted in bringing Createquity to the attention of many funders who would not have otherwise discovered it. I did not hold any such honor this year, but I’ve decided to write up my thoughts anyway because I’ve since come to realize what an incredible privilege it is that I am allowed to represent Fractured Atlas at this annual gathering of funders that is otherwise closed to non-grantmakers, and I feel a sense of duty to share what I learn and observe with the rest of the field for whom such access is out of reach.

My first experience at this year’s GIA conference, subtitled “Navigating the Velocity of Change,” was the Art & Technology Preconference, which I believe (please correct me if I am wrong) is a first for GIA. Fittingly held in the heart of Silicon Valley at San Jose’s $382 million Richard Meier-designed City Hall, the preconference was the highlight of the trip for me. I was blown away by Joaquin Alvarado‘s wide-ranging opening keynote, which explored issues as diverse as the open-source ethos, participatory web projects (Popcorn, a tool to integrate text, video, and other media from anywhere on the web, and Universal Subtitles, a crowdsourcing platform for translation into foreign languages, were particularly attention-grabbing), and evolving trends in the demographics of tech-savviness. Alvarado is Senior Vice President for Digital Innovation at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, and he shared the details of an intriguing model of knowledge-sharing for journalists he is working on called the Public Insight Network, as well as a “balance the budget” game his team created that has garnered some 6,000 comments from all sides of the political spectrum. Through his talk, I learned that the #1 generator of data on the planet is the United States government; that a $35 tablet computer has been released in India; that the free and open internet is fast becoming a thing of the past; that internet service providers have more unionized workers than anyone in technology; that the fastest growing segment of video gamers is women over the age of 60; that the library is where 20% of Americans get their broadband; and that there were more votes in American Idol last year than there were votes in all democratic societies combined. Whew! We also had a funny moment when we realized that no one in the room had played fantasy football, causing Alvarado to quip (referring to those in attendance), “This is not America!”

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Another standout session from the Technology Preconference was “Supporting the Ecology of Awesomeness,” led by Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences co-founder Tim Hwang. I’ve written here before about the Awesome Foundation, which is a kind of giving circle model for the 21st century sprung from the minds of irrepressible techies. Every Awesome Foundation chapter (of which there are now 29 around the world) is run by ten board members, who pool $100 each every month and award one grant to…well, pretty much anything that seems really cool. (The inaugural Awesome Foundation grant was for a giant hammock in a Boston park that could hold up to 20 people at a time.) Prospective grantees need only fill out a 10-minute online grant application, and the model is so lightweight that many chapters don’t even have bank accounts. (The 10-member limit is also interesting; Hwang moved from Boston to San Francisco and was only able to join the local Awesome Foundation board because there happened to be someone leaving the very month he moved.)

Hwang and his mates have created an infectious language around what they have created that is full of self-deprecating irony. Calling the concept “micro-funding for micro-geniuses,” Hwang noted the “Virtuous Cycle of Awesomeness” that takes place as a result of the funding opportunity receiving more attention. Each board member occupies a “Chair” that is named after the original board member to occupy that spot – so, someone could be the “3rd David Fisher Chair” of the Boston chapter, for example. When it came time to finally incorporate the Awesome Foundation as a centralized nonprofit, it wasn’t called the Awesome Foundation – it’s called the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies! They’re even planning on publishing a journal.

I love the Awesome Foundation’s low barriers to entry (it’s particularly impressive and important that they don’t arbitrarily restrict the pool of potential recipients by legal status or force them into categories that may or may not fit what they do), the lightweight and portable nature of the model, and most especially, the sense of pure fun that Awesome Foundation trustees bring to the practice of philanthropy. At the same time, the model has its downsides, and I hesitate to leap to too many conclusions regarding its applicability to the rest of our field. There’s an inherent lack of scalability within a particular locality, given the limit of ten trustees (and $12,000 total annual giving) per city. Tim mentioned that several chapters were exploring the possibility of starting another chapter in the same city, but there was no information provided on how, if at all, those chapters would coordinate to prevent duplicate applications, much less grants. Hwang and company believe that accountability is a barrier to innovation, but the absence of strong central coordination means that data collection is, understandably, haphazard, and sometimes the main organization doesn’t even know what all the other chapters are up to. Finally, although I personally love and relate to the word “awesome” and the language and ethos around it, I sometimes wonder if that’s because it resonates with certain aspects of my background – white, male, young, educated, tech-savvy – and whether it would feel a little or a lot exclusionary to people who don’t fit one or more of those descriptions. Hwang reports that the Awesome Foundation boards are gradually diversifying with the growth of the chapter network (the average age of the Florida chapter trustees apparently is far higher than that for the rest of the country), but it’s still kind of hard for me to imagine some of the attendees of the Art & Social Justice preconference being down with the Awesome Foundation. (I would love to be proven wrong on this, by the way.)

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My experience at the main GIA conference was more mixed. A number of the sessions I was most interested in were scheduled against each other, and I was sorry not to have been able to attend several that seemed to get quite a bit of buzz, including the announcement of the NEA/Knight Foundation’s first-ever Arts Journalism Awards, the unveiling of the Irvine Foundation’s new grantmaking strategy; and the release of Holly Sidford’s controversial report on equity in arts funding for the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy. Fortunately, those sessions were covered in depth by “official” GIA bloggers at the links above.

Three sessions I found particularly interesting were Manuel Pastor’s Monday keynote on changing demographics, an offsite session focusing on the evaluation of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, and a “video game salon” organized by Ron Ragin of the Hewlett Foundation and Marian Godfrey of the Pew Charitable Trusts. (Disclosure for those who don’t know: Ron has been my close colleague for the past several years in helping Fractured Atlas build Archipelago and the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map.)

Manuel Pastor is a remarkably engaging speaker. Clearly accustomed to the lecture format, he delivered a tour-de-force presentation on the changing demographics of California and the nation at large. Given the work I’ve been doing around California cultural geography for the past couple of years, many of his revelations (for example, that California is already a majority-minority state and that the US as a whole is headed there by 2042) were familiar to me, but even so I learned that the demographic picture is more complex than often painted. For example, people often think that the explosion in growth is primarily coming from Latino immigrants, and that used to be the case. But immigration is no longer what’s driving growth. Developing nation economies are doing better, and birth rates in those countries are going down. In the meantime, the percentage of foreign-born individuals in California is going down, and Los Angeles was the only metropolitan area in the top 100 to experience a decrease in the number of Hispanic children under the age of 18 in the past decade. Meanwhile, the share of recent immigrants to California that from Mexico was just 1 in 3, although many of the other top countries of origin were in Central America and the Caribbean. I also learned that many Hispanics insist on calling themselves their own race, even though the Census doesn’t classify them that way – in every Census since the question was first asked, approximately half of all Latinos have marked “Other” for race.

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Although I missed Holly Sidford’s session presenting her report on equity in grant funding, I did catch her and the Helicon Collaborative team at “Cultural Equity Grantmaking: How Far Have We Come? What’s Next?” The San Francisco Arts Commission, whose Cultural Equity Grants program was the subject of the titular study, has gone through some tough times recently and as a result the evaluation is apparently suspended from public release for the moment. But we got treated to a preview of the results, which let us know that (shocker alert!) a grant program amounting to $2 per citizen per year and representing only 4% of city funding for the arts has not succeeded in achieving cultural equity. But that’s not to say it hasn’t made a difference. Funded groups reported that the grants helped leverage other funding, enabled risk-taking projects, and deepened artistic relationships. Perhaps more significantly, fully a third of the city’s Grants for the Arts funding now goes to “culturally diverse” sources, although it’s hard to know how much of this increase was influenced by the existence of the Cultural Equity Grants program and how much was due to other factors.

The discussion following the presentation posed some important and intriguing questions. Although everyone seemed to be in agreement that organizations representing non-European cultures should get a bigger piece of the funding pie as a basic tenet of fairness, the picture of what that would actually look like in practice seemed less clear. Many of the largest investments in traditional SOB (symphony, opera, ballet)-type organizations have gone to bricks-and-mortar purposes like new buildings, expansions, renovations, etc., but several in the room commented that the building of massive institutions was not necessarily a priority for organizations that would be the beneficiaries of increased funding. Another interesting strand of conversation related to the question of whether having a separate, dedicated stream of funding for diverse programming, as in the case of San Francisco’s Cultural Equity Grants program, is helpful to the cause or only serves to justify the much larger investments made in the “regular” pool. Finally, as discussion continued regarding the needs of culturally-specific organizations, I kept hearing a lot of the same themes that I hear in discussion of the needs of small to medium-size organizations in general: more general operating support, capacity building, risk capital, etc. Recognizing that I still have more to learn from than to contribute to these conversations, I was nevertheless left wondering whether culturally-specific organizations are really so specific, once you get past the content of their programming and the composition of their audiences.

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“Don’t Get Pwnd! | A Video-gaming Salon for Grantmakers“ was a great way to round out the conference, bringing things full circle from Joaquin Alvarado’s revelations about gaming three days earlier. The session was presented by Jonathan Blow, an independent game developer, and Alice Myatt, director of the media arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Blow spoke first, telling of the trials and tribulations of the indie game market. Once again, I found it remarkable how a creative industry that is outside of what we typically think of as “the arts” can sound so familiar in conversation. According to Blow, creatively speaking, this is the best time in history to make a game. It’s easier than ever before to find an audience through independent distribution, and one no longer need rely on the giant game companies as a bottleneck. Yet there are challenges: intense competition for people’s time means that everything in the game matters, because your audience could lose interest at any moment. And game developer conferences are extraordinarily expensive, sometimes as much as $2,000 per person in addition to travel and lodging, shutting out those with less financial wherewithal. Ring any bells? For her part, Myatt spoke of the recent round of grant applications in which the NEA opened up the process to video game developers for the first time. Of 360 electronic media proposals, 20% were gaming-related.

The session was a veritable coronation for video games as an art form, Roger Ebert’s notorious assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. More than once, the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring video games a constitutionally-protected form of expression was mentioned, along with the fact that the same recognition was granted to film 60 years ago and literature before that. Blow noted that while everyone in America watches movies, it’s not cool to admit to playing video games – yet. But that’s bound to change soon, now that video games are now bigger business than music and film combined. Myatt opined that games need to be put into the public media pot in order to stabilize society, but complained that she rarely sees her colleagues at the video game conferences she attends (such as Games for Change). Funders outside the arts are on the case, though: next year’s Council on Foundations conference will actually have a gaming track – including a video arcade at the conference!

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And that was that. My overall takeaway? It’s hard to generalize from my experience this year, and I am always conscious of the fact that the intellectual diet that I feed on at the conference is shaped by my own tastes. But in general, there seemed to be a real thirst for innovation that was just a bit more urgent than in previous years. The sessions that drew the most positive attention were, by and large, the boldest: the ones that dared to seriously question the status quo or chart forward a path that hasn’t been tried before. It’s as if, having been buffeted by the winds of change for three years now, funders have been convinced of the futility of fighting back. Perhaps, next year, we’ll see some folks getting out the sailboards, ready to ride this gust wherever it takes them.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Steve Gunderson is stepping down as CEO of the Council on Foundations.
• Social justice groups are freaked out that the previously-reported departure of Gara LaMarche from Atlantic Philanthropies will mean less money for social justice.
• Will Miller is the new President of the Wallace Foundation.
• Luis Cancel is out as head of the San Francisco Arts Commission. There’s apparently some intrigue around this one, as Cancel was under pressure for his treatment of staff and for working too much from home – his second home, that is, in Rio de Janeiro. Vice President JD Beltran has been named interim director.
• Congratulations to Arts Council for Long Beach Executive Director Craig Watson, who has been announced as the new director of the California Arts Council. Culture Monster has more.
• The Joyce Foundation in Chicago has a new senior program officer for culture: Angelique Power. Power replaces Michelle T. Boone, who left earlier this year to become the new commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
• Dave Dombrosky is no longer the executive director of the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, proprietors of the Technology in the Arts blog.
• Finally, a special thanks to Grantmakers in the Arts, from whom I get most of my foundation personnel announcements. Tommer, Steve, Abigail, and Janet have seriously been doing a great job over there this year.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• The NEA has announced the inaugural round of Our Town grants. Rocco’s signature program got an extra $1.5 million in the end despite midyear cuts to the agency, and a total of 51 awards were announced rather than the 35 originally anticipated.
• In a new partnership with the Knight Foundation, the NEA is funding a new arts journalism challenge grant program. On the NEA’s Art Works blog, Kerry Lengel offers a post-mortem on the recent pop-up journalism experiment Engine28.
• Unfortunately, the NEA’s funding is being chipped away at again by the committee in the House of Representatives that controls appropriations. They’re now looking at $135 million for FY2012, which would be the largest cut in 16 years. Not only that, Congresscritters are now trying to micromanage the NEA’s awards programs. There’s still time to act.
• Finally, some good news from the states on arts agency appropriations: Ohio is looking at a 30% increase, Pennsylvania avoided a drastic cut, and in New Jersey a Republican governor actually removed budget language that would have reduced appropriations by a further 27%. ARTSBlog has the skinny, and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies looks at the big picture.
• Wise words from Think Progress’s Alyssa Rosenberg, in response to those who might think fighting for public arts funding isn’t worth the trouble: “If you’re thinking strategically about the long-term argument between progressive and conservative worldviews, it’s conceding a lot of ground to walk away from programs where government investment is small as long as we think it might still be useful.” Alyssa has been doing the yeoman’s work of looking up the arts records of each of the 2012 Republican candidates or potential candidates for President. I wish there were more of interest to report, but basically they all suck for the one-issue arts voter (of which there are, like, dozens I’m sure). If Mike Huckabee were running, it’d be a different story. Anyway, here are Alyssa’s profiles of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, Gary Johnson (who?), Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and good ol’ Newt Gingrich. (Speaking of Alyssa, she kindly picked up our Createquity Arts Policy Library block party and offered some commentary.)

ARTS POLICY ACROSS THE WORLD

• Arts Council England unveils a plan to increase private giving to the arts in the UK.
• Simon van den Berg gives a great first-person perspective on the why, how, and what it’s like of recent cuts to arts funding in the Netherlands.

GIVING NOTES

• Alec Baldwin takes to ARTSBlog to talk about a giving campaign from CapitalOne to support Americans for the Arts. I was impressed to read that CapitalOne is actually including an insert with the monthly statement (with him on it) to get the word out.
• Phil Buchanan notes that foundations can’t expect grantees to measure effectiveness without help.
• The fact that the Gates Foundation has a philanthropy program is news to me, but it’s welcome news. Gates’s Darin McKeever posts on Tactical Philanthropy about an 18-month planning process for the program as well as the directions in which it is heading (part I; part II).
• There’s a new Awesome Foundation chapter in Seattle, and this one features Grantmakers in the Arts Deputy Director Tommer Peterson. Read all about it here; the blog is worth reading for other reasons as well.

ETC.

• Wondering what a millennial generation’s approach to dealing with our budget deficit would look like, since they’re the ones who will be most affected by it? The Roosevelt Institute and Peter G. Peterson Foundation did too, and convened a gaggle of 18- to 26-year-olds to come up with a plan (which has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office). Freakonomics has the details here; from the highlights, it sounds center-left and quite sensible.
• Chad Bauman points out differences in how nonprofit and commercial arts organizations approach dynamic pricing.
• Over at Technology in the Arts, Createquity Fellowship alum Crystal Wallis walks us through some examples of participatory performing arts.
• Alex Ross finally weighs in on the NYC Opera meshugas, which seems to be getting uglier by the day. My take: I don’t know that NYCO has much choice but to move from Lincoln Center or drastically change its union contracts, given the disastrous financial situation that George Steel inherited from Gerard Mortier and Susan Baker. I have a great deal of respect for Steel, but he does seem to be losing the PR war, which is an important leadership task. I suspect it would help matters greatly if there were a clearer, longer-term artistic vision expressed than what has been shared to date – and if Steel offered to take a (temporary) pay cut.
• Want.

TALKS AND SPEECHES YOU MISSED

• Marc Vogl and Jeanne Sakamoto of the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations, respectively, hosted a Grantmakers in the Arts webinar on the subject of retaining emerging leaders in the arts field. Here is the full 40-minute presentation, and Marc and Jeanne have also put together a NextGen Arts Leadership microsite with other resources on wikispaces.
• Andrew Taylor gave this keynote at the Arts Enterprise Summit in Kansas City last month called “The Art of the Business Model.” And he had a co-keynote with the wonderful Russell Willis Taylor at American University’s Spring Colloquium, which you can view here.
• Nina Simon’s keynote from the 2010 NODEM conference on design for participation.

THE LETTER OF THE LAW

• Did you know that Canada has a law against the broadcasting of false news?
• Great analysis from my Fractured Atlas colleague Marie Ortiz on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as health insurance reform.

PUBLISHING AND THE ACADEMY

• The American Association of University Presses considers new business models for university publishing.
• Christopher Madden argues for the role of academic publishing in strengthening international cultural policy.
• Lucy Bernholz considers the future of the publishing and information industries.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

• Pianist Vijay Iyer is one of the smartest thinkers in the arts anywhere (his undergraduate degree was in cognitive science). His essay on supply and demand from a jazz perspective is a must read. (h/t Brian Newman, who extends the argument to film.)
  
• Future of Music Coalition looks at how musicians make money.
• If the demand for new teaching jobs is so much higher than supply, why are salaries for newly hired econ professors still so high?
• In honor of Marginal Revolution’s migration to WordPress, here is a quartet of good reads from that site: prediction that small-government policies actually lead to bigger government in the end; considering the consumer surplus of the internet; thoughts on common mistakes of right-wing and left-wing economists, with summary by Arnold Kling; and thoughts on common mistakes of economists in general (thank you Ezra Klein!).

TRENDS AND THOUGHT PIECES

• We focus a lot of attention on using arts and culture to reframe urban life. But what about the suburbs? Yonah Freemark imagines a more sustainable suburbia.
• Doug McLennan writes of the walled garden problem and the economic incentives for new technologies not to adhere to the open-standards practices that have helped us make so much technological progress over the past couple of decades.
• Crowd-curation marches on, this time at museums.

PARTNERSHIPS, MERGERS, AND EXPANSIONS

• CultureBot’s Jeremy Barker marks the public debut of New York Live Arts, the new company formed by the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop.
• Not a merger, but this collaboration between fellow Lincoln Center tenants the Metropolitan Opera and Juilliard does beg the question of why it didn’t happen sooner.
• More on the Awesome Foundation’s, uh, awesome growth.

PLANNING AND EVALUATION

• GiveWell describes an interesting method for self-evaluation: giving an independent observer a chunk of money to allocate using GiveWell and other sources, and testing how useful GiveWell was in the process. It’s kind of like a lab experiment for smart giving.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy has released its strategic plan for 2011-14.

NEW PROJECTS AND RESOURCES

• Foundation Source Access is a new fundraising website from Foundation Source, a company providing back-end services to many small family foundations. While at first glance it might seem redundant with other types of crowdfunding sites aimed at individual donors, this project is interesting because of the audience. The huge national foundations don’t control all that much of the nation’s institutional giving, but it’s always been difficult to tap family foundation money without personal connections because of those organizations’ lack of infrastructure. If family foundations actually use this tool to seek out grantees instead of sticking with the tried and true (and that’s a big if), it could be an important new resource for fundraisers.
• Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) is launching craigconnects, a project to curate nonprofits and get them wider attention.
• TicketForce is looking to sell tickets to your Facebook events…in Facebook. (Thanks to Thomas Cott for the above two links.)
• Travel search engine Hipmunk has a new mapping overlay feature for its hotel searches. You can now see heat maps of food, shopping, tourist opportunities, and “vice” in the area around your hotel. I tried it out in my own neighborhood and found the data a bit suspect, but it’s still an interesting and very practical application of cultural asset mapping.
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies has a cool new resource called “Ask IFACCA.” Not only will they take your questions, they’ll publish some of the answers as well. Geek out alert!
• Great to see the DiMenna Center for Classical Music (new home of Orchestra of St. Luke’s) up and running in Manhattan, especially since the genesis of the project was a 2004 feasibility study by Exploring the Metropolis.