 I know what you people are asking for. Late afternoon, let's talk some data. Yeah, let's geek it out. Data, data, data. We hear about it everywhere. And it seems like data is what makes everything tick in the digital age. But what does data mean for the arts and cultural sector? How can policymakers incorporate the latest and most accurate information to better understand what's going on in America's creative communities? How can data help shed light on the role of the arts and everything from education to economic development to transportation? Today, we are thrilled to be joined by some experts who will talk us through the dizzying intersection of information technology, policymaking, the music, and the arts. Please join us in welcoming Ian David Moss, research director of Fractured Atlas, Josh Geyer from the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Steven Schufeldt, the deputy director at the Office of Research and Analysis at National Endowment of the Arts, our virtual panelists, who I am hoping and trusting is with us. Awesome, Derek Slater, who's policy manager from Google, who's joined us in the Bay Area and our moderator, Jean Cook, the director of Programs Future Music. Thanks. Enjoy. How are you guys feeling now? I know we're getting to the point in the day when the panels start to look less like ways to learn more about the music industry and more barriers to your time at the bar. But we will try and be entertaining. And to the point, we've got some very knowledgeable panelists with us today. And it's a pretty important conversation that we need to be having because, ultimately, when we look at the future of our field, data is going to play a critical role. So first, Derek, are you there? Yeah, I'm here, Jean. OK, cool. And those of you guys who are in the back, you could probably see him. He looks OK. He's in a good mood. All right, cool. So we do have a great, very distinguished panel. Maybe what we could do is we could start with Steven. You can talk about what's been going on over at the NEA. I think that, initially, we could just have everybody start by talking about the work that they're doing, from their observations about how is data collected, about the arts community, how is it used. If you want to talk about how it's evolved, that's cool too. But I am very curious, and I think it'll inform the panel conversation, if we hear from you about data-related initiatives that you've been involved in so people can understand that the perspective that you're coming from. And then, eventually, I think we also want to tie it to the impact on public policy. So we'll start with Steven. Great. Thanks, Jean. Hello, everybody out there. So as Jean mentioned, I'm going to talk just for a few minutes here about some of the work that NEA's Office of Research and Analysis is doing as relates to data. And similar to the structure of our office, I think I'll actually talk about two dimensions of data that we are connected to. One is the side of our office that is focused on research, which has to do more with, I think, what we mean when we talk about big data, is data out there in the world that we want to capture and use and figure out ways to help us understand better the role of the arts in society. And so we do a lot of work there, both capturing data and being involved in collecting data as well, and then figuring out how we can use it. And then on the other side of our office is our evaluation, which is more internally focused and focusing more on the work that NEA is doing as a funding agency and what is coming data to help us better understand what's coming of that kind of work. And so just briefly, there are more projects than I have time to go into right now. So I'll just touch on a couple of the highlights from each of those areas. But on the outward focus area, the research area, I would say one of the big items that is sort of we're just beginning the process with the Bureau of Economic Analysis to develop what's called a satellite account that will, in the same way that the Bureau of Economic Analysis, does estimates of GDP and that become the official estimates for all of policymaking throughout the government and they have what are called satellite accounts that estimate the contribution of particular sectors to GDP. Well, through the hard work of Sunil, who's the director of the Office of Research Analysis and some of the other folks in our office, we've reached an agreement with BEA to do an arts and culture satellite account. And so the purpose of that, and it's a contract that'll go over the course of several years, but they'll be basically figuring out ways to try and estimate the role or the contribution of arts and culture enterprises to the overall GDP, the overall economy. That's a big, long-term project that NEA is involved in and it's being led by BEA. We also have a lot of work that we do, which is sort of in the data collection field. The most, the one that's actually, we are expecting to get the new version of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts in shortly, which is a data collection supplement to the current population survey that Census conducts. And it's conducted every five years. The supplement is, which is a way of collecting information about how Americans participate in the arts. And so we've got a lot of work going on that front. And once we get the data, we'll be doing various kinds of analysis on that to try and help us understand that domain a little better. And then a third sort of area under this category is compiling information. This is something that's actually, Josh and I have begun to work together a little bit on to help us better understand, in particular, the activities we have under the creative placemaking rubric, which is a big emphasis at NEA right now. And so we're working on projects that are designed to help us use existing data sources out there, things from Census, things from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, things from various others. I don't remember them all off the top of my head, but various other data sources that we're going to use to help shed light on, well, our first phase is actually to help us better understand how those sources reflect the conditions that we think creative placemaking can have an impact on. So we've got a big project that we're undertaking right now in that domain. So that's just a snapshot of a couple of the different activities we've got going on in the outward-facing research domain. On the inside-facing side, we are regularly, and have been for years, collecting data from all of the applicants for NEA funds, both those who apply directly to NEA and those who apply to states that are receiving support from NEA. So we've got a wealth of data that we collect from applicants and then from grantees at the conclusions of their reports. And we're using that data and continuously working on improving our ability to use that data to help inform our grantmaking activities and help inform our understanding of the role NEA's grantmaking is playing in society. And the area that overlaps between those two is bringing together existing national level data sources and those kinds of local NEA collected data as well to help us get an overlay two different kinds of data and help us better understand that. So that's just a very quick overview. And I'll stop there, but I'm happy to answer more questions as we move along. Thank you. And I have to echo the fact that artist's contribution to the economy is now being calculated as part of the GDP. I think it's a huge step. And I was very, very happy to hear about that. I'm sure that all of you guys were psyched as well if you hadn't heard the news before. Maybe you're psyched right now. I can see it in their eyes. I can see it in their eyes. I know they're all so excited. This is really not exhaustion. It's totally exciting. We're going to skip over to Ian, actually, because what's interesting is at the tail end of what Stephen was talking about. It's like taking different kinds of data sources and figuring out ways to bring them together so you can learn new things about the data. And that's actually very relevant to the work that Fractured Outlets has been doing with the Archipelago Project. So maybe you could describe that for a minute. Sure. So Fractured Outlets is a, for anybody who doesn't know Fractured Outlets, we're a national arts service organization with about 25,000 members across the country. We sometimes talk about ourselves as focusing on the unsexy infrastructure of the arts. Because we're very interested in how systems work and using technology to make those systems better. And so the focus on research fits very naturally into that. We are both an aggregator of data and a producer of data or a generator of data. And the project that Gene was referring to is the aggregation piece of that. It's called Archipelago. This is a software platform that we developed originally in connection with a large private funder in the San Francisco Bay area. And it is now sort of in the process of being expanded and rolled out to there's going to be sort of a free national version and then also we're a part of a large collaboration with the Harvard Kennedy School on a project called the Initiative for Sustainable Arts in America. So what is Archipelago? It basically is an experiment in trying to answer this very question. How is data collected about arts communities and used and what is out there? We're trying to sort of bring into one place every bit of information that we can find that is relevant to the cultural sector and available in some kind of replicable way in the sense that it is available in multiple geographies and also that it is collected on a continual basis. It turns out that the number of data sets that fit that description are relatively small, but we are able to bring into one place information about arts and culture nonprofits, both arts organizations and what we call arts-relevant organizations. We have information on spaces. We have information on audience members through mailing list collaboratives as well as information from the census and to give context to all of this as well. So this is basically the beginnings of a project to really sort of be able to see all of that in one place and understand how regions, for example, are similar or different to each other. What is the average square footage per capita of rehearsal space, for example, in one city versus another or in one neighborhood versus the next one? And is there an optimal sort of number for that? We don't know the answer to that right now, and this could help us sort of along the way. Fractured Atlas, as I mentioned, also has data that it generates itself through its own programs. One of those is our arts-based solutions network, which is sort of a set of aforementioned spaces, directories in a number of cities across country, including New York, here in DC, at the San Francisco Bay area, as I mentioned before. So each of these is a directory of venues and information about them. And they're all kind of participating in this online marketplace where you can go and sort of book space. So there's information available about the spaces, but then also about the activity that happens through that platform as well. And then we also have the nation's largest fiscal sponsorship program, not just in the arts, but in any field. And so we're just beginning to sort of mine the potential of that data set. It's really information about individual artists and this sort of under-the-radar arts projects are one of the hardest types of data to collect about the arts, because there's no sort of defined artist population that you can just put a box around and say, these are the artists who live in the world. And so this isn't that, but it gets us a little bit. It is a defined population that is pretty large. And we're able to, we just recently sort of changed our reporting mechanisms to align more closely with something called the cultural data project that a lot of nonprofits used. And we just published a study recently that looks at that in the case of New York City dance makers. And there's no reason that similar research couldn't be done for the music community as well. I believe with the Archipelago Project, which is one of the first things that you and I talked about with respect to the fractured out list research, that what's interesting about it is that you're able to juxtapose all of these different data sets, but also make it available to people who want to learn more about their communities. And including, in addition to the arts organization information and the other publicly available information, you were also considering putting in congressional districts and putting in tools that would help people to increase their civic engagement around the arts and understand the arts community in that way. That, I think, is actually a good transition over to Derek, who we are going to turn to now. Can you guys see him? Is he showing up in the video yet? OK. So we're going to turn to Derek now and talk actually a little bit about how data gets used in the public policy debates. How does it inform policy making? Obviously, this is something that you've spent a lot of time thinking about. And I know that you've written about it as well. I don't know if you want to talk about that. Yeah, happy teaching. And thanks again for having me. Can you hear me OK? Great. So yeah, I work here on Google's public policy team here in Mountain View. And one of the things we do here is a lot of research around the economic impact of the internet, including focusing on things like the arts, creativity, and its relationship to innovation. And as we looked more and more about the way innovation is currently measured, it was really striking to see that in many of the typical measurements of innovation we're measuring the information society by industrial society metrics. That is, traditional measures of creativity tended to focus on particular industry rather than content creation by individuals. And obviously today, when anyone can be a content creator, anyone can be an artist, lots of people are generating music and video online, sort of the metrics of innovation and creativity have been an ill fit. So one of the things we did last year was work with the World Intellectual Property Organization to contribute to their global innovation index, where they had typically measured creativity by things like the number of newspapers produced and now start to add on things like the number of top level domains, number of websites, number of Wikipedia edits, and the number of YouTube uploads across countries. That's on the creator side. And I think one of the other pieces that tends to be lost in public policy debates when looking at creativity and innovation are metrics around consumer surplus and consumer gain. And one of the great things that we see about the internet is that because there's such an abundance of creativity, oftentimes consumers are getting great content in new and different ways and sometimes getting it even cheaper, or still illegally, but cheaper than they did before. And when that happens, that's a great thing for the economy. We saw last year in a report from the Boston Consulting Group in Australia that the consumer surplus value of online creativity is around $24 billion. So no longer really a small number. And these are just sort of a couple of the ways that we think when policymakers look at measuring creativity today, it's really important to take into account how creativity is changing. Was that a period, or did you freeze up? Sorry, I froze up there, but that could be a period. Now, if you have more to say, please, by all means, continue. Thanks, Jean. Now, I think it's especially important, I think, as we look towards a new Congress next year that as sort of debates around copyright and culture continue to evolve. We really take it close like at how is creativity happening today, because when we just look at traditional measures like record sales or newspapers produced or ticket sales, we're missing a big piece of the puzzle that's happening online. And it's not to say we should get rid of old metrics. Just we need new compliments that really take into account user-generated content and just the abundance of creativity. Thanks, Derek. The idea, it's really quite a compelling idea to think about how the definition of creativity might change if you change the data sets that you're looking at. And one of the questions that I do like the panel after we talked to Josh for a second is about how is it that you and each of your individual capacities decide which data sets are important and are going to help you? Like in the case of Archipelago, there's a cost that's associated to including a data set into the larger program that you're building. So how do you determine what's going to be useful and what isn't? But before we get to that, I'd like to introduce Josh Geyer. And you're going to talk a little bit about some of the data that you've been collecting over at HUD. Thank you. So I am with the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. We do a number of different things, but the biggest thing we do is we administer sustainable communities planning grants, which we're given out in 2010 and 2011 to, I think, a total of 143 different local governments and regional governments and nonprofits in order to do community planning or regional planning in a more integrated and efficient and engaged way. We do a lot with data. I think that the biggest things that data does for us are helping us to answer questions, first of all, what is being produced by our grantees? What is being produced as a result of the money that we've granted them? And secondly, what are they accomplishing from a larger picture? Are they accomplishing things that move us closer to the goals of our program? So our grants are based on a philosophy that is embodied by these six what we call livability principles. And to just summarize them, they are increasing access to housing, affordable housing, different types of housing, increasing access to transportation, economic recovery or vibrancy, valuing existing communities, i.e. the people who are living in a place rather than people who might want to move there, valuing communities and neighborhoods, which is talking about the look and feel and kind of the activity of a given place. And also coordinating investments. So I tell you this because these are kind of really large questions or they kind of pose really large questions. And it's our job in our use of data to try to answer those questions. And so really what we end up doing is looking at different existing data sources, most of which come from the federal government, but there are other sources as well, to try to codify, first of all, we have to codify what we think it would look like to increase the availability of housing, to increase access to transportation. And then once we've done that, then we can look at the data sources that exist and see if we can use them to measure these things that we care about. And that's how we demonstrate the value that we're getting for taxpayer dollars. So in terms of how this reflects on the arts, I would say that my program is part of a larger place-based policy agenda that the administration has that includes programs like Choice Neighborhoods, Promise Neighborhoods, Strong Cities, Strong Communities, and a number of other programs which all have in common that they try to, rather than have which particular federal agency or federal program focusing on that particular funding source to look at where the funds are going in communities and in place and see how we can leverage those funds in order to have better outcomes. So one way that I would say that the arts are part of place. They are part of what makes a place unique and they are part of what makes a place somewhere that people want to go. So I found a couple of examples of how people have used frameworks for measuring place that the arts could factor into. One is there is a study that's come out and an additional one recently on walkable urban places from the Brookings Institution. Some of you may have heard of it. It's been the lead author is Chris Lineberger. He's been talking a lot about these issues. And they are assessing these different what's called walkable urban places around the DC area according to several metrics, one of which is walkability. And there are 10 criteria for walkability that they've laid out here, two and a half of which I would say are very much related to the arts or the arts could relate to. One is aesthetics, which they define as attractiveness, open views, outdoor dining, maintenance. So these are the qualities of the place. And also public spaces and parks, so playgrounds, plazas, playing fields. So how might these things contribute or relate to the arts? Well, we feel that in order to show that arts are contributing to economic activity, to vibrancy, to having a place be attractive, the places need to be ready to kind of have arts take their rightful place. So we can look at the type of places that arts may be kind of on display or arts may be happening and see whether those might be places that we might want to have a focus on art or focus on different characteristics. And then the other example that I found is from something called the Star Community Index, or the Star Community Rating System. It's a rating system that are trying to rate the quality and the sustainability of communities or allow communities to do that for themselves. And they have several different kind of goal areas. And one of them is education, arts, and community. And so they have, within the goal area of education, arts, and community, they have five objectives. And they are arts and culture providing a broad range of arts and cultural resources that encourage participation in self-expression, community cohesion, educational opportunity to entertainment, historic preservation, and social and cultural diversity. And I think that if there are any lessons for the arts community, it's that arts are kind of an integral part of how we're starting to think about quality of life and quality of place. And to the degree that they are integrated in the way that we're measuring quality of life and quality of place, we can show how they fit in and the kind of value that having arts creates. So I guess that's what I would say about that. Thank you. I'm thinking about making the case about how creativity, the nature of creativity is changing. That's reflected in the SPPA. They've been changing some of the questions that they're asking, the survey for public participation in the arts. Now, art making is one of the questions that they're getting deeper and deeper into in that area. The idea of thinking about the arts is being tied to economic development. So these are all themes that I'm hearing throughout that are kind of connected. And I'm wondering how much of these themes becoming more prominent is kind of related to the fact that the research exists now? Or is it that people wanted to explore those themes and then they started doing the research? This is kind of tied back also to the question that I was asking earlier that I'm now going to circle back on, which is, is that like how do you figure out what data you're going to be working with? I don't know if any of you want to jump in on that or if Derek wants to jump in virtually. Good. Well, I think that this is an area where it's kind of a constant struggle, I think, for research in general, but especially for research in the arts because I feel like it's kind of a constant theme of my professional life that the things that we would most like to know about are often the things that we don't have the data for. And you mentioned earlier, Jean, that when we're thinking about archipelago, for example, there is a cost associated with any given new data set that we want to include. And sometimes that cost is very minimal and sometimes it might be quite large. And just as that's true for us, I mean, it's true for anybody. It's any kind of data set that you want to create. There's especially if you want to be comprehensive about it and have it conform to strong scientific standards, the higher standards you apply to it, the more of a commitment that requires from whoever is sort of creating it. So I think that there's sort of different kinds of data. There's data that is created specifically to answer a particular question. And the advantage of that is, and we're talking about primary data collection here, that might be through a survey, it might be through an evaluation that's tied specifically to one specific program that you're doing. The advantage to that is that it's super relevant. Whatever questions you have, you're going to be able to get those answered. And they will directly tie into decisions that you need to make and information that you need to make those decisions. So that's great. The downside of that is that it's the most expensive way to go, and it's very hard to replicate that over time in a way that is reliable. Then there's making better use of data that already exists, which is what Archipelago is trying to do. And then there's this interesting third area of data byproducts that are generated from programs that are doing something else. But in the course of doing those things, they generate this almost like exhaust stream of data that can maybe be useful to somebody else. And that's a really intriguing area that I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of in terms of the potential. Because often the reason why it's part of the exhaust stream is because it's not useful to the organization that is generating that data, although it might be. But it may be much more useful to somebody else in this broader ecosystem. And I think we're just starting to talk through the question of how we form those kinds of partnerships and networks and so forth to be able to benefit from each other's data that we're using, even if it wasn't the original purpose with which it was created. I'm kind of curious because we have the benefit of having people from different sectors all on the same panel. But they all are interested in research, and they're all interested in the cultural sector. While I can certainly vouch for the fact that research is very difficult and costly, new data is really hard to come by in the nonprofit arts field, is that also the case for government agencies? Is that also the case for Google? Maybe I'll let Derek jump in. Is he still on? Huge problem in this area. Sorry, did you hear me, Keen? We can hear you now. So yeah, I agree. I think it's a huge problem. And part because a lot of what we're trying to measure is their counterfactuals. We can't say what would have been created if policies were different. And it's very hard to come up comparisons. Every once in a while, I think you get a sort of natural experiment in the field. There's some way to compare different countries in the way their sort of legal regimes or policy regimes have evolved. So for instance, last year, a Harvard Business School professor, Josh Lerner, did a study comparing the growth of cloud computing in both the US and Europe and found that certain parts of copyright case law played a really important role in that field. Now, that's only because we had, he was only able to do that sort of data analysis because we happen to have this natural experiment where a certain case went down one way in the US, went a different way in Europe. In the absence of those sort of natural experiments, it's very hard to come by. I mean, I think it's a problem for everybody in this area. So we're almost out of time. I just wanted to get a sense. Do we have burning questions in the room? Because if we don't, I'm just going to ask a last question to the panel will wrap up. I'm not seeing burning questions. So we do have about five minutes left. I'd love to just do kind of a lightning. Oh, we have a burner. Hi. Is there someone with a microphone that can help this guy out? Mike Nelson with Bloomberg government. Since we care a lot about data, I'll ask a data question. What one data set would you really like to have? Oh my god. That was going to be my question. Brilliant people. So we'll do a lightning round. We'll go through each of the panelists. We'll start with Steven. I don't think my answer will change that much. I think about it longer. I think something that we would love to have in our office and that we're, in fact, exploring how to do so through Google. So hello, Derek. It's nice to meet you virtually. And it actually, I think, is a fourth category of data that's out there. But getting it in a way that we think is reliable is a measure of a way to measure the level of arts activity in locations across the country. And that's a very, that's a broad answer to a specific question. But there would be nuances in there. So like a place-based understanding of arts activity? Yeah, and I should, yeah, that's what I think would be really great to have. OK, great. Shelly? Oh, sorry. Josh. I was looking at your name tag. It says Shelly right in front of you. It's like, Josh? So I'm actually sitting on this panel for my boss, Shelly Petitca. So all of my stuff says Shelly Petitca, but I am actually Josh Geyer. So I'm actually, one of the things that I do is I'm working on generating a data set on the combined cost of housing and transportation at the neighborhood level across the United States. So but something that I would be really, really interested in if there were a uniform universal database on pedestrian access, that would be enormously helpful. Because that is something that varies not only between communities, but within communities. And it has an enormous impact on people's daily lives, particularly people who are at a disadvantage either because they're physically disabled or they don't have access to different types of transportation. I think that would be transformative. Ian, and then we'll let Derek have the last word. OK. Well, as far as data sets, I think I'd agree with Stephen. I think events is probably the category of data in the arts world anyway that offers the most promise. And yet, it's most frustrating because it's completely decentralized. There's tons of data that exists about events, but it's not all in one place. It's not standardized. I know there are some folks in the field who are working on that at the moment. But actually what excites me the most, I'm tempted to be contrary in a little bit and say that what I would love would be to have not a data set, but a set of good questions. So basically, and actually there is a group called Givewell that focuses on international aid giving and so forth. And they've actually proposed the idea of creating something called a Journal of Good Questions. They would essentially focus on what are the things that we wish we knew about but didn't. Not focusing on data sets specifically, but what are the factors in creative place making that make a project more likely to be successful over another. Does it matter if the project is using a storefront space or not, for example? And you could think of a million like that. And I think that if we had one central place to access all of those, that would be really powerful. Derek? Yeah, I think it's both a set of data and a type of analysis that I'm interested in not have good answers for, which is trying to understand the economic value of user generated content that's being created today. I think if you look at the direct GDP contributions of Wikipedia, you come up with zero. Obviously, it's not producing revenue. It's not selling anything, but it's lives, it's the productivity, and so on. I think that's a tough measurement and economics problem, but I'm sure somebody far smarter than I am could figure it out. I hope they do. OK, and then I guess I lied because maybe I'll have the last word since I'm the moderator of the panel. Ian and I have been talking a lot about data kind of across sector, and we know a lot of researchers who are working in a lot of different areas and using different methods to try and understand the arts community. I would love just a list of all the research that exists in our sector, because it's like it's a nascent sector. There isn't a whole lot of work that's been done in it, and it's really hard sometimes to map out, well, who actually has been doing work on individual artists or who actually has been doing work on place-based examinations, things like that. So that would be mine. Please give a very warm round of applause to our wonderful panelists. Thank you very much for joining us. And I guess the next person's coming up.