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The New Data Imperative
The document discusses the shift from previous scientific paradigms of theory and experimentation to new paradigms of computation, simulation, and data mining. It argues that nonprofits must embrace the new "data paradigm" by using data to understand their own work, contextualize their work within other data sources, tell stories to stakeholders, and share data. It raises questions about how to raise the importance of data across the nonprofit sector through funder reporting, data sharing principles, and structuring unstructured data.
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The New Data Imperative
- 1. The Data ImperativeHollyRoss, NTEN Kurt Voelker, Forum One Communications
- 2. !Ideas from:The BigIdea: The Next Scientific RevolutionHBR, November 2010, by Tony Hey
- 3. Jim Gray1944 -2007
- 4.
- 5. Paradigm 1: TheorySorryZeus, you’ve been voted off the island.
- 6. Paradigm 2: ExperimentationWherebythe apple does not fall far from the tree, but it DOES fall.
- 7. Paradigm 3: Computation& SimulationI’m sorry Dave, you’re theory isn’t statistically significant.
- 8. 4Jim Gray GaveUs Another
- 9. Paradigm 4: DataMiningBut who plays the part of the canary?
- 10. ?What does thedata mining paradigm look like?
- 11. Odds that Karlends up back here?Turns out, data mining can predict that.
- 12.
- 13. ?And this isimportant to the nonprofit sector because…
- 14. 1The Data ParadigmMandates that Nonprofits:Use Data to Understand their Own Work Better
- 16. 2The Data ParadigmMandates that Nonprofits:Use Other Data Sources to Contextualize their Work
- 19. 3The Data ParadigmMandates that Nonprofits:Use Data to Tell Stories for Our Stakeholders
- 23. 4The Data ParadigmMandates that Nonprofits:SHARE DATA
- 25. Discussion Q’s:How dowe raise the importance of data across the sector?Funders: Can you make grantee reporting data valuable for more than your annual report?What’s the sector’s data sharing manifesto? What would you sign?What’s the low hanging fruit?Can we structure unstructured data?
Editor's Notes
- #4 Let’s begin with this man, born in San Francisco, raised in Italy, Virginia, and the Bay Area, and most importantly from my point of view, a fellow UC Berkeley Alum. Go Bears! Here in Redmond, he is perhaps best remembered as a Technical Fellow who joined Microsoft in 1995. Not to get too nerdy, but among his best known achievements are granular database locking, two-tier transaction commit semantics, the "five-minute rule" for allocating storage, and the data cube operator for data warehousing applications. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_%28computer_scientist%29
- #5 Before Jim, there were three paradigms of Science.
- #6 The shift from explaining surroundings as supernatural or mythological to natural laws.
- #7 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soulmate02/4800670024/sizes/l/in/photostream/
- #8 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jvk/10227059/sizes/o/in/photostream/
- #10 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marymaddux/4801937864/sizes/l/in/photostream/Rather than solving theoretical problems to understand the world around us, we start with the data and direct software to mine enormous databases for relationships. We discover the rules by studying the outcomes.
- #12 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bopuc/1771812/sizes/o/in/photostream/Eric Horvitz was working at a VA hospital and realized that patients with congestive heart failure seemed to flood the hospital during the holidays. The reason? All that salty food (gravy!). It got him wondering – what do the patience that keep ending up in the emergency room over and over again have in common? So he developed a program that scanned 300,000 patient records, involving hundreds of thousands of variables to “learn” patient profiles. Adding new patient data – like if they live alone – allows the program to determine the probability that the patient bounces back into the hospital system.
- #13 In the data mining paradigm, more data is almostalways better. A patient’s health, especially for a patient with congestive heart failure, is certainly tied to the medical system. But health is not determined solely by medicine. It’s a multi-dimensional problem that is influenced by the food we eat, what we do for a living, who we live with, and how we live. These are all types of data that the medical profession is not usually privy to, but are collected in all kinds of ways – in weight watchers databases, social worker files, HUD housing information and more. If we could tie all these data sets together, what could we learn about these same patients?
- #15 Pre-req: Nonprofits have to understand what data they have, and they need tools to move and report on data. I’d say that the sector is getting ready for this.
- #17 Pre-req:Easily ask questions of disparate data. Understand that data about oceans may be important in understanding the spread of infectious diseases. We have to both think about data beyond our organizations, and beyond our sectors. We have to get very multi disciplinary here.