Recently by Ian David Moss, Research Director, Fractured Atlas

A few years ago, when I first went to graduate school, I was convinced that the arts were antithetical to data. I vividly recall a Thanksgiving conversation with my cousin in which we were talking about why I was so passionate about the arts. He was finishing up an MBA at the time, and as I waxed eloquent about the impact of arts activity on real estate, the relevance of the arts to innovation in business, etc., his ears perked up with clear interest. "But I would never say that's why the arts should be funded," I finally concluded. Surprised, he asked, "so why should they be funded?" "Because they're great," I responded definitively. But it was obvious I had lost him. And I didn't know how to get him back. He didn't have an arts background. How could I explain to him why the arts were so great when they hadn't been a formative part of his life experience? How could I ever convey to him the depth of that intensity in words, in a few minutes no less?

Now, a few years later, I have come to the conclusion that it's not quite so black and white. If the arts do, in fact, make our lives richer in ways other than money, there are means of figuring such things out. I'm really excited for the intrinsic impact work that Clay mentions because for the first time, this line of research attempts to delve into some of these "unmeasurable" ways that the arts give meaning to our lives. Other methodological innovations like these are bound to proliferate in the coming years, propelled forward by the increased access we'll have to more and more meaningful data. One area where I think our research could improve is more sophisticated segmentation of our subjects. I suspect a big part of the reason that some of the arts literature seems inconclusive is that it tries to lump people or activity or contexts together when it would be more interesting to look at a subset of cases. For example, there's a long tradition in our field of trying to universalize the arts: this idea that all of us have some hidden yearning to be creative and that our lives are forever impoverished by the lack of access to the symphony/theatre/museum etc. Yet my cousin's experience and those of many like him seem to belie this notion. He may not realize how much art is part of the background of his life, but he appears to be perfectly happy and fulfilled without it in the foreground. So what if it's the case that art is really important -- important enough to save lives -- but only for a minority of us? We'd have to figure out the policy implications later, but that would be important information to have. By the same token, most research in the arts that deals with events treats all arts events as the same - 1:1 equivalence. Yet any artist can tell you that the "impact" of one arts event to another can vary immensely, depending not just on the show/production but even from night to night. And even at the level of a single event, goodness knows people, even knowledgeable experts, can have incredibly divergent judgments as to the quality of the experience.

I mention this because I think our policy, and by the same token advocacy, similarly risks putting too many people in the same bucket. I take to heart Molly's example of the copyright views of the MIT scientist and the television writer being affected by how they each pay the rent. In a way, when we talk about "artists' creative rights," we're really talking about two different things that our copyright laws and systems have artificially mushed together: the right to control who gets to use your work, and the right to an opportunity to make a living as a creator. If we segment our interest groups by who depends on copyright to pay their daily bread and who does not, and open up the possibility of dealing with those groups differently, the path forward may become a lot clearer.

At Fractured Atlas, as a national service organization ourselves, we're starting to think about arts advocacy in a new way. Since our focus is on using technology to build infrastructure for the arts field, naturally we see the future in that frame. What if there were a way for artists to engage with policy issues directly rather than through the intermediary of a service organization with which they might or might not have any meaningful relationship? What if there were a way for them to obtain crucial, unbiased information about their own communities, their own representatives, and how the arts fit in? What if there were a way for them to organize themselves around that information, determine their own agendas and priorities, and create email/social media/grassroots campaigns centered around specific actions? What if there were a way for them to hold elected representatives accountable for their decisions by easily and conveniently tracking legislative outcomes, whether at the national, state, or local level? What if there were a way for them to actually play a role in drafting legislation itself, in collaboration with their peers?

We've been laying what could prove to be the groundwork for a system like this as part of a project I'm currently working on in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map (BACAM). BACAM is a one-year pilot effort to create a suite of tightly integrated, map-based web applications that collectively aggregate, analyze and publicize data on the Bay Area cultural sector. Commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Performing Arts Program, the short-term vision for BACAM is a tool that will enable the foundation's staff to make better funding decisions and track progress against their outcomes.  One of BACAM's innovations is that it employs a modular design that allows the same information to be reused and repurposed for several different applications. So, for example, the high-quality database of cultural activity that the foundation uses to understand the impact of its own grantmaking will sync up with the database of performing arts spaces that we're building in collaboration with two local service organizations. This hub of centralized public knowledge can then be put to use in all sorts of contexts, even potentially by third-party developers (rather like a Facebook or Twitter app).

One of the tools we're developing for BACAM as part of this pilot is something we're calling the Advocacy Module. In this first year, the Advocacy Module is going to focus primarily on aggregating and displaying data, both in map form and in reports that can be shared with others on the web or in print. If all goes well, our intention is to build it or a variation of it into a platform looking much more like what I described above: an interactive, flexible, social-network-driven tool to empower individual artists and arts advocates to learn about the issues that matter, mobilize others, and take action.