Tag: Technology

10 Ways to Break Down Barriers for Entrepreneurs in Your Community

Posted on by robbie

How do you build a thriving community of entrepreneurs? At a time when the doors of economic opportunity seem to be shutting out so many people, entrepreneurship is crucial to local neighborhoods. The Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit brought together more than 400 diverse entrepreneurial community leaders from all over the country to answer this question.
Below, these entrepreneurial ecosystem builders — people who build communities to support entrepreneurs — share their top tips for energizing entrepreneurship in their communities, no matter where in the world that is.

1. Find Common Ground . . .

Participants came to the ESHIP Summit from 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and 10 countries, each facing their own challenges. But as attendee Alistair Brett of Rainforest Strategies in Washington, D.C., says, “What works in one place may not work in another, but the core of this kind of work is the same for everyone.”

2. . . . But Don’t Copy Silicon Valley 

Despite its huge concentration of high-tech startups and venture capitalists,the Silicon Valley model has its weaknesses, particularly when it comes to diversity and inclusion, says Kate Stewart, the executive director of JAXCoE, a network of entrepreneurs and supporters in Jacksonville, Fla. “The more inclusive a company or an ecosystem is, the more robust it is,” she adds. Philip Gaskin, the director of entrepreneurial communities for the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., agrees: “As the demographics in the nation are changing, you need equal representation in your businesses, in your leadership and on your boards to reach your customers and understand their needs.”

3. Unearth Potential 

“The capital of economic development is no longer businesses moving from place to place; it’s talent moving from place to place,” Sly James, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., told the Summit. Many communities also have massive untapped potential in populations that haven’t previously had access to the resources needed to start new businesses. “Women in our state are just now beginning to find their footing” and connect to the support they need, as are minority entrepreneurs, says Shannon Roberts, program manager at the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center.

4. Get Ideas Out of the Lab

Professors and students are conducting cutting-edge research and generating innovative ideas. But the town-gown gap can be hard to bridge. The key is understanding how the motivations of academics differ from those of traditional entrepreneurs, says Lydia McClure, vice president of scientific partnerships at the Translational Research Institute in D.C. Researchers tend to be driven by the impact they can have and aren’t necessarily as interested in creating the next big startup. Everyone involved should be asking themselves, “What do I have to offer?” McClure says.

5. Challenge Stereotypes 

What does the typical entrepreneur look like? Accion, an organization that provides microloans to small business owners, often works with low-income minorities who are opening businesses to provide for their families. But no matter the scale of a business, “entrepreneurship is a source of income, job creation, asset generation, and products and services that create value for the community,” says Anne Haines Yatskowitz, Accion New Mexico’s CEO. And with their tenacity, resourcefulness and perseverance, she says, “entrepreneurs can be incredible role models.”
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6. Reach More People 

Preston James, the CEO of DivInc, a startup pre-accelerator that supports entrepreneurship among people of color and women, is trying to solve a problem he sees in the otherwise thriving startup ecosystem in Austin, Texas. “What we’re doing in Austin is expanding the ecosystem by being more inclusive of a broader audience,” James says. DivInc connects underrepresented entrepreneurs with mentors, educational opportunities, domain experts and other resources that help lay the foundation for successful new companies. “Some of the other hubs that are up and coming, the sooner they can do that, the more successful they will be — faster.”

7. Consider Your Impact 

“I have a fundamental belief that business’s role on the planet is to make life better for people,’’ says Kim Coupounas, the director of B Lab, an organization with offices around the country that supports businesses aiming to be a force for good. Coupounas believes companies should think about their social impact from the beginning. “A huge source of innovation is when companies really consider how they impact their stakeholders,” she says. Ecosystem builders should be thinking about how they’re affecting the world around them too, she says. “It’s not just about creating jobs; it’s about creating good jobs.”

8. Keep It Simple

One successful company can jump-start an entire entrepreneurial ecosystem, and just one connection can help information flow more freely through it. “If one tiny connection fails in your computer, it won’t work,” says Alistair Brett. “But if you make that one tiny connection, it’s back to working.” Adds Wayne Sutton, cofounder of Change Catalyst in the Bay Area, “It’s not rocket science. We’re not talking about going to Mars; we’re basically talking about working with people. You just have to put in the work.

9. Forge Connections — and Friendships

“Entrepreneurship is a lonely experience without community,” says Scott Phillips of Civic Ninjas in Tulsa, Okla., a nonprofit whose network of coders strives to solve societal ills through technology. So is trying to support entrepreneurs, particularly underrepresented ones who are up against real economic, political and cultural barriers in their attempts to access to opportunities. “It’s very isolating sometimes to fight something that seems as big as this is,” adds Geraud Staton, founder of the Helius Foundation, which mentors and coaches entrepreneurs in Durham, N.C. The power of connecting with other people doing similar work can’t be underestimated.

10. Focus on the Future 

“Entrepreneurship, to me, signals taking responsibility for how the future develops,” says David Witzel of RASA, an organization in Oakland, Calif., devoted to regenerative agriculture. Keeping an eye on the future makes this work meaningful. “I have two young grandchildren,” says John Bost, the president of the Clemmons Community Foundation in Clemmons, N.C. “They need a future they can grow into, and it won’t be the past I’ve lived out of.”

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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Summit, convening 435 leaders fighting to break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.

Profile: Hadi Partovi

Posted on by robbie

As the son of a college professor who helped establish Iran’s Sharif University of Technology, Hadi Partovi has always had a deep-seated appreciation for teachers.
“Passionate teachers have been my biggest inspirations,” he says, noting that while he was always trying to pave his own path, he’s now doing something very similar to his father.
Partovi’s nonprofit, Code.org, provides computer science curriculum to tens of thousands of educators, empowering them to teach coding in their classrooms. The organization reports that more than half of all students participating in high school Code.org courses are African American or Hispanic and 37 percent are female.
Through the years, Partovi’s appreciation of the impact teachers can have on their students — and the world — has only grown. He illustrates this point with a story he recently heard about a junior high school teacher in Auburn, Wash., that he doesn’t even know.
According to Partovi, this teacher noticed that one of his students regularly missed school two or three days each week. Concerned, the teacher reached out to the child’s family to inquire about having him attend computer science classes (which were introduced into the school’s curriculum with the help of Code.org, Partovi’s organization).
The student started having regular attendance, and his father called the teacher to report that his son liked school, thanking him for recognizing the need for his son to be exposed to new subjects, like computer science.
“The student went from almost dropping out to learning code,” Partovi says. “That, to me, is the strongest example of a change in somebody’s future — because of the teacher.”
Hadi Partovi is a NationSwell Council member. In addition to co-founding Code.org, he is also a tech entrepreneur and investor.

Wave Goodbye to DMV Lines

Posted on by robbie

If the existence of countless online survival guides is any indication, there are few tasks more dreaded than a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Fortunately, in an attempt to modernize (and repair its reputation in the process), a handful of states are revamping the DMV for the better — by offering digital services to drivers.
“People want to access government the same way they access Amazon,” says Mary Lou Prevost, vice president of state and local government and education at CA Technologies, a software company with clients in government and financial industries. “There’s a huge push to move from in line to online.”
West Virginia is speeding driver’s license and vehicle registration renewal by installing three self-serve kiosks across the state, with more planned. According to the state’s DMV, citizens can complete the transaction to renew their license in just a few minutes (the actual ID will arrive via mail); a kiosk prints registration decals and cards on-demand.
In Irvine, Calif., a city about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, the state’s first DMV kiosk was installed at the local University of California in April this year. Since then, the department has added more booths in grocery stores in two other cities, Lancaster and Palmdale.
(The state’s forward progress stalled, however, with Gov. Jerry Brown vetoing a bill that would allow drivers to store an electronic license on their phone.)  
MORE: Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government Into the Digital Age
For the past year, Iowa has been piloting an electronic driver’s license and is expected to roll out a digital ID sometime next year, according to the Des Moines Register. State-sponsored apps that issue electronic driver’s licenses have been proposed in Delaware, New Jersey and Arizona.
But there’s more to bringing the DMV online than just providing a seamless service to drivers. Throughout the U.S., departments are slowed down by outdated software and computer systems in desperate need of an upgrade.
“We think about it as just our driver’s license, but you’ve got to think about vehicle registration, truck registration and health information. It’s a wealth of data they’re dealing with,” Prevost tells NationSwell.
Plus, switching to digital solutions can be problematic, as was the case in Connecticut, where wait times extended to seven hours during a software rollout. While the transition may be painful, says Prevost, “The net result of modernizing will be far better citizen engagement and a far better view of the government.”
Homepage photo courtesy of the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

What’s Next for Clean Energy?

Posted on by robbie

In June 2017, President Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, a landmark agreement aiming to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
“The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, but begin negotiations to reenter the Paris Accord — or an entirely new transaction — on terms that are fair for the United States,” President Trump said.
In March of that same year, the president also issued an executive order to undo the Clean Power Plan, which tightly regulated power plants burning fossil fuels in an effort to reduce U.S. carbon emissions.
“My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” said President Trump during the signing.
But for more than a decade, natural gas and clean energy sources, including wind and solar, have become increasingly affordable and reliable. The Paris agreement and the Clean Power Plan may have been scrapped, but clean energy remains (very much) part of the American energy market.
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The Tweet That Launched a Movement

Posted on by robbie

Two thousand and forty-four miles.
A distance that would take 677 hours to walk.
A distance that would take around 30 hours to drive.
A distance that technology immediately obliterated as four passionate citizens united against police violence.

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Just days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, civil rights activists DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie were on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., documenting on social media the unrest that ruled the streets. Shortly thereafter, the two connected with Brittany Packnett, the then-executive director of Teach for America in St. Louis.
As #Ferguson became a rallying cry on social media, Oprah Winfrey leveled a critique at the Black Lives Matter movement (which used Twitter to mobilize its followers), saying that it didn’t have clear goals, leadership or asks. Mckesson tweeted a reply, listing demands of the protesters.
Meanwhile, more than half a continent away, Samuel Sinyangwe spotted Mckesson’s response and felt compelled to reach out.
“I replied to the tweet saying that I could help develop a policy agenda that implements these demands in practice. I didn’t know who DeRay or anyone was,” says Sinyangwe, who was doing policy work for a nonprofit in Oakland, Calif. “As a policy analyst, I wanted to contribute policy.”
Two thousand and forty-four miles separated Sinyangwe from Mckesson and the other protesters in Ferguson. Yet Mckesson’s 140-character post forged a virtual connection and jumpstarted a conversation that would, in just a few short months, result in the formation of the far-left leaning nationwide organization WeTheProtesters.
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Initial phone calls between Sinyangwe and Mckesson (and later, Elzie and Packnett as well) focused on a shared understanding that data needed to inform policy making so that it would gain traction with both the public and government officials at all levels.
“What made it work was that we’re all committed to the same goals, and we each have a particular skillset that added value to each other’s work. It was all about the commitment to work; it was not about our own personalities,” says Sinyangwe. “I can analyze the data and identify policy solutions. DeRay can communicate that very well in relationships with media. [Joh]Netta can make sure the information — this sort of ivory tower research — is accessible to people and Brittany has institutional access to make sure these recommendations are embedded in some of the foremost institutions of government.”
Not surprising to the activists, their data mining uncovered systemic problems with policing use-of-force practices nationwide. Taking that information, they developed and launched Campaign Zero, a series of 10 proposed policing policy solutions, like ending broken windows policing, community representation, demilitarization and fair police union contracts.
“No other group had ID’ed solutions and grounded it in data and evidence,” Sinyangwe says.
Sinyangwe and company also leveraged data to create a second resource, a groundbreaking interactive map that provides comprehensive information (name, location, description of incident and a link to related, authoritative news coverage) for each police-involved shooting in the United States.
“In the beginning, it was all about convincing the country that it was a crisis — that police violence was happening everywhere, not just in St. Louis or Baltimore,” says Sinyangwe. “No one is going to read a 30-page report on this, but people will look at something that looks high quality and communicates [the information] in much less time.”
Using off-the-shelf technology (often free or free-trial versions) as they continued to collaborate virtually, Sinyangwe and his WTP cofounders built a tech-powered infrastructure that overcame geographic limitations. (“It was literally a period of months before I met everyone in person,” says Sinyangwe.) They shared information in Google docs and sheets, held meetings in Hangouts, designed infographics with Piktocharts and created data tables using Tableau.
Typeform proved to be particularly valuable to WeTheProtesters in recruiting volunteers. The group used the platform to increase its ranks by around 16,000 people in just two weeks. These helpers were then organized into groups and used Slack to communicate, building a bond in cyberspace.
WeTheProtesters is supported by Fast Forward, an accelerator for tech-focused nonprofits and a partner of Comcast NBCUniversal. Today, the group’s biggest challenge is scaling its systems so that more citizens can become effective advocates.
“Across the country, as I’m meeting people and speaking at various venues, people come up to me and ask, ‘How do I get involved?… I want to do something, but I don’t know what to do about it,’” says Sinyangwe. “In today’s day and age, when you see the hyper-targeting of every political campaign, there is no excuse to not have a pathway to get involved. People shouldn’t have to ask anymore.”
But just in case, WeTheProtesters created a Wikipedia-style guide known as the Resistance Manual. The crowdsourced webpage tracks local, state and federal issues, offers resources on effective organizing and lists upcoming teach-ins, town halls and marches across the country. It’s part of a wave of new digital tools created since the 2016 presidential election in response to people’s renewed interest in politics.
Sinyangwe believes that it’s possible to awaken and amplify more voices, “in part because of the tools that we have available to us, because of the platforms and technology and the creative ways we’re using it.”
If he’s right, this tech-driven era of activism may bring about a level of civic engagement unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Additional reporting by Chris Peak.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

Streaming Government in a Smartphone Era

Posted on by robbie

Provoking a citywide debate about the safety of downtown Eugene, Ore., isn’t what Matt Sayre set out to do when he put together a three-minute video of a passionate citizen speaking at a City Council meeting and posted it on Facebook, where it reached an audience of 40,000 people. But that’s exactly what happened.
“Not everyone makes it to the meetings, so to be effective, we brought the meeting to where [citizens] are: on social media,” Sayre says.
Sayre stitched the clips together using software created by Open Media Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit. Its Open Media Project initiative transforms traditional local government meetings into modern, in-the-palm-of-your-hand video streams.
In today’s increasingly hectic world, constituents don’t have time to track whether their state and local politicians are upholding their campaign promises. Combined with that is a decline in local news coverage. The outcome? Power is being handed to lobbyists, says Tony Shawcross, the foundation’s executive director.
“We’ve seen trust in government and voter turnout drop for 50 years, and we think the reason is because government is falling behind the times. Our big-picture goal is lowering the bar for what it takes to be engaged,” Shawcross says.
Accessible via desktop or mobile, school boards and municipal and state governments can use the foundation’s cloud-based platform — Open Media Project (OMP) — to give citizens quick access to what’s going on. Constituents can watch live webcasts of government meetings and search through archived agendas and transcribed video files to jump straight to points in the video where specific topics of interest (like “homeless shelters” or “tobacco”) are mentioned. If users find a moment worth sharing, they can, like Sayre, package a video to share on social media.
The tools themselves might not sound flashy, but the transparency they promote is what makes democracy function, says Neil Moyer, director of the Lane Council of Government’s Metro Television, which coordinates with the foundation to stream meetings for Eugene and other nearby cities.
“Our driving motivation is not just to replay meetings but to help our community thrive, and I really believe we thrive only when we have good governance. We only get good governance when people are paying attention.”
Sometimes, politicians push back on OMP’s capabilities, hesitant to practice full disclosure online. But as a nonprofit, the Open Media Foundation prioritizes what its beneficiaries — constituents themselves — need above all else. “We’re putting in features that are above and beyond what governments demand and expect in terms of accessibility,” Shawcross says.
The Open Media Foundation was founded in 2001 under its original name [denverevolution]. In 2006, it helped the City of Denver set up a new public broadcasting station on the cheap. That project attracted the attention of Andrew Romanoff, then speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, who was trying to set up a state version of C-SPAN.
In 2013, the foundation created a video-on-demand tool for the legislature’s web portal. The number of visitors to the site doubled and inspired Shawcross to replicate the idea on a smaller scale. By the end of 2016, 10 local governments in Colorado used the service.
The Open Media Project is supported by Comcast NBCUniversal and Fast Forward, an accelerator for tech-focused nonprofits. It makes its software available through an online portal, and the video is streamed through YouTube. The basic software package is free for towns with less than 5,000 residents, $3,000 for cities of 5,000 to 50,000 residents and $6,000 for cities of more than 50,000. The organization’s founders hope the software’s low cost will help spread it to local government websites across the country.  
Back in Eugene, Sayre’s video posts have increased attendance at city council meetings where community safety is a key agenda item.
“To hear what someone is saying at a meeting and to see their body language is engaging,” Sayre says. “Energy attracts energy.”
Sayre hopes that this rise in community involvement in the political process will lead to greater safety in downtown Eugene.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo by iStock/Getty.

With Just a Cellphone, Factory Workers Are Being Heard

Posted on by robbie

Heather Franzese, the co-founder and executive director of Good World Solutions, has toured hundreds of factories around the world since the time she first started working in the apparel industry a decade ago. “I have seen workers being exposed to toxic chemicals, workers being demeaned and not paid on time,” she says.
The poor working conditions in the factories Franzese visited were impossible to ignore in person. The flipside, of course, is that they’re all too easy to overlook from a distance. “Why do I get to see these conditions,” Franzese started to wonder, “and they’re invisible to the average consumer?” There wa­s something else Franzese began to notice too: more and more of the workers on production lines had cellphones. She started to think that, “there must be a way that we can use this technology to bridge this gap and actually establish two-way communication in real time,” she says.
That idea for two-way communication became Good World Solutions, a Bay Area nonprofit that uses widely available technology to amplify workers’ voices and address their concerns. The organization’s Laborlink platform lets workers take anonymous surveys about their working conditions using their cellphones. Companies and factories can then take action to respond to issues of concern, and ‘push’ information and communication back to workers through their cell phones.
The Laborlink platform launched in 2010 with just 100 workers in Peru. Today, it’s reached over 750,000 workers in 16 countries, collecting 4 million data points along the way. Through Laborlink, Good World Solutions aims to reach 1 million workers by 2018. Cisco has invested in Laborlink since the start and has supported the platform throughout its efforts to become financially sustainable. Cisco has also used Laborlink with its own supply chain.
The platform is highly adaptable. “We can survey workers directly in any language in any country, and all they have to have is a simple feature phone,” Franzese says. “They don’t have to have a smartphone. They don’t even have to be literate.” But the platform can also accommodate the technologies workers are most familiar with. For instance in China, where most workers do own smartphones, surveys are conducted over the popular messaging app WeChat. “We use a number of different technologies, whatever makes sense for the purpose and the local context,” says Franzese.
In the past, companies that wanted visibility of their supply chain relied solely on social audits. Inspectors would visit a factory for a day or two, observe the conditions, and conduct in-person interviews with selected workers. “The information that comes out of those worker interviews is often incomplete or unreliable,” says Franzese. Employees interviewed in front of their colleagues or supervisors may not feel comfortable making complaints. Plus, “it’s well known that in a lot of countries workers are coached on how to answer these questions,” she says.
Because it’s anonymous, Laborlink identifies problems that traditional audits don’t. At one factory where both an audit and a mobile survey were conducted, for example, 41 percent of those surveyed reported verbal harassment on the job. But not a single worker interviewed during the audit said anything about harassment. “What we’re offering is a way to surface more reliable information about sensitive issues,” Franzese says.
The potential benefits for workers are obvious. Beyond the mobile two-way communication, digitizing this type of data means it can be easily analyzed, and insights can be put into action. “Our purpose is to use this data to create safe and respectful workplaces,” says Franzese. Risk-based data visualization and predictive analytics can help identify the reasons for high turnover, bring to light information about critical safety issues, compare different factories, countries or regions, get a 360-degree view of the factory floor by surveying both factory workers and management and measure whether or not conditions are improving over time. For example, Franzese says, if a large number of workers claim they don’t feel safe, a company can dig into the responses and see if they differ by gender or by length of service, helping them determine the best way to handle the problem. And when those surveys do uncover problems, Good World Solutions has partners who can step in with education and training. If workers don’t understand how their pay is calculated, educational materials can be pushed out to their mobile phones. If the issue is more serious, a longer-term change may be implemented.
The system benefits factories and their managers as well. Employee turnover has been increasing in China over the past few years, says Deepak Telang, general manager of Mattel’s factory in Foshan, China. “That’s why I think it’s important for us to engage employees,” he says. “Connected, well-trained employees always give you the best results in terms of quality and productivity.”
Global brands are also starting to see the advantages of uncovering this kind of information about their supply chains, Franzese says. “Aligning business with worker needs is a huge potential win-win for business,” she says, adding that Accenture has calculated that severe supply-chain disruptions can cause a 7 percent drop in stock prices. Plus, companies are now very aware of the reputational risk they face from poor working conditions becoming widely known. “Employees have the best suggestions for how to improve. We just need to surface those voices,” she says.
Ultimately, consumers want ethical products they can feel good about buying, says Franzese. “The average consumer does not want to be associated with or know that the clothes that they’re wearing or the phone that they love was made in sweatshop conditions,” she says. “There’s obviously interest by consumers; the question is just how to tell that story in a way that consumers can understand.”
The very first company that Good World Solutions ever worked with, Indigenous Designs, a sweater company based in Peru, now puts QR codes on its price tags. Customers can scan the codes and immediately see what the workers who made the sweater have to say about their lives, their work and their hopes for the future. Lifting up factory workers’ voices, says Franzese, “is an opportunity for companies to do more to engage consumers on these issues.”
This article was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver — to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur and act as a social change agent.

Internet for All

Posted on by robbie

Between 1979 and 2013, wages of middle-income workers rose just 6 percent. The wallets of low-income workers have been hit even harder: Their incomes fell 5 percent during the same time period.  
As stagnant wages and flat mobility continue to deepen inequality in America, politicians, social entrepreneurs and other leaders are looking to technology for a solution. The number of jobs in computers and information technology is projected to increase 12 percent by 2024 — faster than any other sector. According to industry experts, nearly 60 million of Americans can’t even access the internet in their own homes because of cost.
To spur much-needed job growth, the digital divide must be eliminated. Watch the video above to see how EveryoneOn‘s pioneering model is leading the way by making high-speed, low-cost internet plans, refurbished computers and digital literacy courses available to low-income communities nationwide.

Using Technology to Create a Smart Curriculum

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NationSwell Council member Chris Rush is making the dream of personalized learning a reality. As the co-founder of New Classrooms Innovation Partners, Rush is working with schools in 10 states to customize students’ schedules and tailoring the curriculum to their learning methods. Here, Rush discusses how his efforts are reshaping the future of education.
Why do we need to rethink the way schools work?
The role of a teacher isn’t something that’s set up for success. Maybe the job is just too hard. Maybe it needs to be retooled in another way. You put 30 kids in a room that are all coming from different starting places and have different supports at home. You give every child a textbook, and you’re supposed to meet the student where he or she is. Let’s reimagine classrooms in a way that could help educators to be more successful.

Chris Rush gives a tour of the New Classrooms offices to middle school students.

New Classrooms really got its start back in 2009 at School of One. How does its model differ from a regular classroom?
We are rescheduling every kid and assigning teachers and different third-party activities based on what they did the day before. Think of it like the Pandora music service, but for learning: Every day it gets a little bit smarter. If you tend to be working well with this group of five kids and this teacher on rainy days, we realize that. Or if you’re coming from gym, you might be hyper and need some independent time. Or before English class, you might need to work in a group. Picking up on all of those types of patterns makes it smarter and smarter. At the end of the day, you’ll come back to your main teacher and answer five questions to see whether or not you were successful. And if you were, we will record all those things, so you can get more like it. And if you weren’t, we give all the attributes of the day a thumbs down, and you start the whole process all over again.
Bill Gates, a key funder of New Classrooms, visits Middle School 88 in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Even though this is ed tech software, you’re insistent that the platform isn’t a virtual classroom. Why?
A lot of other online learning platforms customize the “what” of student learning, but it doesn’t allow you to personalize the “how,” “when” and “where.” We can create a sequence that fits with students’ learning patterns. Some need to try it themselves until they get stuck, then really get the most out of being with a teacher; other children won’t touch it independently unless there’s a teacher who already showed them. So, for us, you don’t just log in. It’s technology-powered, but it’s not experienced on the computer. It’s sort of like when you go to the airport. Certain planes can only be on certain gates, and certain crews can only be on at certain times because of delays and weather conditions. But what you do is scan your ticket, look up at the big-screen television, head to the gate and go. All the other stuff is done for you behind the scenes.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
Homepage photo by Darris Lee Harris.

Can Big Data Prevent Unnecessary Police Shootings?

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In September 2016, Keith Lamont Scott sat in a parked SUV outside an apartment complex in Charlotte, N.C. As he rolled a joint with a handgun at his side, police officers arrived to serve someone else a warrant. What happened next — a confused and unplanned altercation with the police…multiple warnings to drop his gun…the screams of Scott’s wife who filmed it all…and shots that killed him — is the kind of policing incident data scientists are now trying stop with so-called early intervention systems.  
Their aim: to identify which officers might be at risk of unnecessarily pulling the trigger in a high-adrenaline situation as a result of prior events they might have experienced.
“We don’t want officers to feel like they’re being tagged because they’ve been bad,” says Crystal Cody, technology solutions manager for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. “It really is an early intervention system.”
To be clear, early intervention systems are not new. For years, police chiefs have paged through documentation of officers’ personal and professional histories to help identify cops who might need to be pulled off their beat and brought back to headquarters. Charlotte, where mass demonstrations raged in the city’s central business district after Lamont’s death, will be among the first cities to use a version that utilizes machine learning to look for patterns in officer behavior. If its approach of data collection proves to be successful, other police departments will be able to feed their stats into the model and procure predictions for their city.
Responding to a number of stressful calls is highly correlated with leading to an adverse event, says University of Chicago data scientist Joe Walsh. He points to the widely seen video of the North Texas cop tackling a black girl at a pool party as an example. Earlier that shift, the officer had responded to two suicide calls.
When used as intended, experts say these intervention systems should reduce instances such as this. Police departments are advised to have them, but they aren’t required by law. Historically burdened by poor design and false positives, agencies nationwide have largely discredited theirs and let them languish. According to a Washington Post story last year, Newark, N.J., supervisors gave up on their system after just one year. In Harvey, a Chicago suburb, management tracked only minor offenses (like grooming violations) without notching the number of lawsuits alleging misconduct. And in New Orleans, cops ridiculed the ineffective system, considering it a “badge of honor” to be flagged.
“I think a lot of [police departments] give lip service to it because it’s important to have one, but they don’t really use it,” says criminologist Geoffrey Alpert.
In Charlotte, where the force is reputed to be technologically savvy, the internal affairs division built an early intervention system around 2004. It flagged potentially problematic cops by noting the number of use-of-force incidents, citizen complaints and sick days in a row. Analyzing those data points, 45 percent of the force was marked for review. “It was clear that [the warning system] over-flagged people,” Cody says.
At the same time, the simplistic method failed to identify the cop working a day shift with three use-of-force incidents as more at risk than an officer with the same record walking the streets of a tough neighborhood at night.
Charlotte is now giving the system a second try via a partnership with young data scientists affiliated with the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy. The new version assigns each officer a score that’s generated by analyzing their performance on the beat — data that most police departments are reticent to hand over to researchers.

Data scientists from the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy are using machine learning to predict which police officers are at-risk of unnecessarily pulling the trigger.

After crunching the numbers (more than 20 million records, to be exact), the officers that are more likely to fire their weapon are, not surprisingly, those who have breached department protocol or recently faced particularly intense situations on their beats, says Walsh, the data science team’s technical mentor. So far, this 2.0 version has improved the identification of at-risk cops by 15 percent and has reduced incorrect misclassification by half.
It’s important to note that the databases are not meant to be used as rap sheet of an officer’s performance — nor are they to be used as a disciplinary tool. Conceptually, if the system is effective, it will flag a potential crisis before it occurs and help keep officers safe. NationSwell reached out to the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association in North Carolina, but neither responded to requests for comment.
“We look at the results in context of the history of that officer, where they work and what behaviors they’ve had in the past before we say, yes, this looks like a valid alert. We’re still giving humans the ability to look at it, instead of giving all the power to the computer,” says Cody.
Charlotte residents, for their part, expressed optimism about the system. “We think it’s important to have some type of outside audit,” says Robert Dawkins, state organizer for the SAFE Coalition NC, a group focused on police accountability.
The department isn’t promising the system will be a perfect solution, and it’s well aware it has plenty of jaded officers it needs to persuade. But as the system continues to gather new data — finding out which cops it overlooked or overreacted to — the model’s accuracy should improve, Walsh says. With man and machine taking a more rigorous look at the data, both law enforcement and citizen will be better protected.
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