Have you ever wondered what all this impact assessment and evaluation stuff is all about, but haven’t been sure how to get started? I bet you’re not alone! That’s why I’m psyched to be involved with a great and affordable professional development event happening this summer in gorgeous Santa Cruz, CA, called Museum Camp 2014:Read More
Uncomfortable Thoughts: Are We Missing the Point of Effective Altruism?
People who want to do the most amount of good possible with the resources available don’t tend to take the arts very seriously. What if they’re right?
No Strings Attached
A few years ago four grad students from Harvard and M.I.T. decided they wanted to use their brains and dollars to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. They researched different strategies of philanthropy, looked at the data available, and based on the evidence they chose a novel approach. NoRead More
The Cultural Data Project and Its Impact on Arts Organizations
For all of the predictions flying back and forth about what 2013 holds for the arts and culture sector in the United States, one of the few things we can say with near-certainty is that 2013 will be a year of major transition for the Cultural Data Project (CDP). Our sector’s largest-scale effort to quantify andRead More
Solving the Underpants Gnomes Problem: Towards an Evidence-Based Arts Policy
Arts research is broken. Here’s how to fix it.
Economies and Diseconomies of Scale in the Arts – Take Two
(The following post is part of a weeklong salon at ARTSBlog on the subject of “Does Size Matter?” The entire salon is worth checking out, and former Createquity Writing Fellow Katherine Gressel has an entry as well.) How does scale influence impact in the arts? In 2007, back when I was a fresh-faced grad student,Read More
Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative Placemaking Success
One of creative placemaking’s original champions explains why she can’t get behind the field’s latest measurement efforts.
Science Doesn’t Have All the Answers: Should We Be Worried?
On October 1 the science section of the New York Times ran two articles next to each other. One of them describes a recent study that concluded young children at play display behaviors similar to those of scientists, suggesting scientific inquiry is driven by human instinct. The other refers to the alarming extent to whichRead More
Around the horn: Highly Efffective edition
IN THE FIELD RIP Artnet Magazine; more here. I will always be grateful to Artnet’s Ben Davis for being just about the only arts journalist worth his salt during the whole Yosi Sergant debacle. Congratulations to GiveWell, which has announced a not-quite-merger with Good Ventures, an emerging foundation led by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz (the latter is one of theRead More
In Defense of Logic Models
They’re flexible, they’re transparent, and chances are, they’re already in your head.