Bridging the Capacity Gap: Cultural Practitioners' Perspectives on Data

In the summer of 2013, the Cultural Data Project (CDP) partnered with Slover Linett Audience Research to engage leading researchers in a virtual dialogue about cultural data and its role in supporting the long-term health, sustainability, and effectiveness of the cultural sector. The resulting white paper, New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape: Toward a Better-Informed, Stronger Sector, identified six key challenges that appear to be inhibiting the field from more strategically and effectively engaging in data-informed decision-making practices.With that report as a starting point, the CDP sought to expand the conversation to include the perspectives of arts practitioners, artists, service organizations, and funding agencies working on the "front lines," by hosting a series of town hall-style meetings in five cities across the country. At these meetings, participants discussed the challenges identified in the New Data Directions report, articulated other challenges they're facing, and began to suggest solutions. In this report, we summarize what we heard and learned from approximately 185 cultural practitioners in town halls in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, and Philadelphia

Knowledge hubs and knowledge clusters: Designing a knowledge architecture for development.

With globalisation and knowledge-based production, firms may cooperate on a global scale, outsource parts of their administrative or productive units and negate location altogether. The extremely low transaction costs of data, information and knowledge seem to invalidate the theory of agglomeration and the spatial clustering of firms, going back to the classical work by Alfred Weber (1868-1958) and Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), who emphasized the microeconomic benefits of industrial collocation. This paper will argue against this view and show why the growth of knowledge societies will rather increase than decrease the relevance of location by creating knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs. A knowledge cluster is a local innovation system organized around universities, research institutions and firms which successfully drive innovations and create new industries. Knowledge hubs are localities with high internal and external networking and knowledge sharing capabilities. Both form a new knowledge architecture within an epistemic landscape of knowledge creation and dissemination, structured by knowledge gaps and areas of low knowledge intensity. The paper will focus on the internal dynamics of knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs and show why clustering takes place despite globalisation and the rapid growth of ICT. The basic argument that firms and their delivery chains attempt to reduce transport (transaction) costs by choosing the same location is still valid for most industrial economies, but knowledge hubs have different dynamics relating to externalities produced from knowledge sharing and research and development outputs. The paper draws on empirical data derived from ongoing research in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University and in the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, supported by the German Aeronautics and Space Agency (DLR).

Biotechnological developments, socio-technical processes and materiality : the affordances and constraints of ‘social innovation'

Peer reviewedPreprin

Social networks and performance in distributed learning communities

Social networks play an essential role in learning environments as a key channel for knowledge sharing and students' support. In distributed learning communities, knowledge sharing does not occur as spontaneously as when a working group shares the same physical space; knowledge sharing depends even more on student informal connections. In this study we analyse two distributed learning communities' social networks in order to understand how characteristics of the social structure can enhance students' success and performance. We used a monitoring system for social network data gathering. Results from correlation analyses showed that students' social network characteristics are related to their performancePostprint (published version

Collective awareness platforms and digital social innovation mediating consensus seeking in problem situations

In this paper we show the results of our studies carried out in the framework of the European Project SciCafe2.0 in the area of Participatory Engagement models. We present a methodological approach built on participative engagements models and holistic framework for problem situation clarification and solution impacts assessment. Several online platforms for social engagement have been analysed to extract the main patterns of participative engagement. We present our own experiments through the SciCafe2.0 Platform and our insights from requirements elicitation

The Funder and the Intermediary, in Support of the Artist: A Look at Rationales, Roles, and Relationships

This article, examining the ecology of funders' use of intermediaries and regranting organizations, came about as a direct offshoot of GIA's Research Initiative on Support for Individual Artists, begun in 2011. As the research team worked to map the pathways that support followed from funder to artist, a complex map of options and routes began to emerge, and intermediaries and regranters were often part of that picture. It became increasingly clear that this was an essential and important part of the overall system. It also emerged that this was an area of philanthropic practice that had been little examined, and about which little had been published. Interviews with funders during the research work also revealed that while a number of foundations were using intermediaries, their practices had independently evolved, and a wide range of methods and procedures were in use. What follows is the first tangible product of GIA's Research Initiative on Support for Individual Artists. In her analysis, Claudia Bach provides both an overview of the range of philanthropic practices involving intermediaries and regranters, as well as an exploration of a number of related topics and questions that emerged during the course of this work

FundHer Brief 2008: Money Watch for Women's Rights Movements and Organizations

This Fundher brief is divided into 4 sections. Section 1 looks at the organizational profiles of survey respondents: their scope, size, priorities and other core characteristics. The second section presents the funding landscape for these organizations, exploring some of the existing challenges for accessing funds and advances that have been made in recent years. Section 3 shares the self-analysis done by participants in the research on the state of their organizing, in particular related to fundraising, introducing interesting experiences in collaborative resource mobilization. Finally, the section entitled "What's next" summarizes implications of all the above for women's rights organizations and donors. At the end of the document there are 5 thematic overviews of important funding trends and opportunities for organizations working on those issues