(This is the fourth post in a series on Fractured Atlas’s capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.)

(This is the third post in a series on Fractured Atlas’s capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.) I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a reluctant decision maker. When I go out to eat at a restaurant, I often drive my dinner mates crazy by asking the wait staff for recommendations and then just ordering what I was thinking about getting anyway. In high school, I used to agonize over what now seem like trivial choices like what topic I should choose for my English papers. Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to the science of decision-making.

(This is the second post in a series on our capacity-building pilot initiative, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization. To read more about it, please check out Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization: An Introduction.)

A couple of years ago, we redesigned our fiscal sponsorship annual report to match up more closely with the format of the Cultural Data Project, an emerging data standard for cataloging financial, operational and programmatic information relating to arts nonprofits. In September 2012, we reaped the first fruits of that evolution in the form of “Discovering Fiscally Sponsored NYC Dancemakers,” a research report conducted for Dance/NYC that was the first study we know of to combine data from multiple fiscal sponsors to paint an inclusive picture of the dance community.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to technology trends the past few years, you know that we live in the era of Big Data. All of those videos we upload to YouTube, hard drives we fill with government secrets (or cat photos, take your pick), and tweets we awkwardly punch out on touchscreen keyboards add up to a whole lot of gigabytes, the bulk of which are stored by someone, somewhere, indefinitely.

Ever wonder what it takes to attract and retain really great staff who can move your organization forward? The video below asks 26 really smart people working across sectors to tackle that very question. Last October, I was speaking with one of Fractured Atlas’s incredible Board members, Amy Wrzesniewski. Amy is an expert in Management and Organizational Behavior, and is a professor at the Yale School of Management. Anytime I need to bounce HR questions off of someone, Amy is at the top of my list. While we were meeting, three things dawned on me: (1) Amy Wrzesniewski is a genius. Also, exceedingly kind and generous. (2) The issues around attracting and retaining really great people are universal. They transcend sector. They’re not a cultural sector challenge, or a technology sector challenge. They’re not unique to for-profits or not-for-profits, the military or government. Every organization deals with similar issues. (3) Attracting and retaining great people is the key to solving the seemingly intractable problems facing so many companies today. Following our conversation, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to gather some really smart people from across sectors to discuss this topic? (Yes, that is what I consider fun.) I began mentally listing all of the people I wanted to ask and quickly realized that the scheduling hurdles would be Herculean. Then I remembered that I co-host a little-watched internet television show — #SKYNOVA: Featuring Culture Warriors In Their Native Habitat — and we own all of the video equipment needed to create a virtual conversation.

This is the third installment of a three part series on the history, the legality, and the uncertain future of unpaid internship in the arts and culture sector…

This is the second installment of a three part series on the history, the legality, and the uncertain future of unpaid internship in the arts and culture sector…

This is the first installment in a three part series on the history, the legality, and the uncertain future of unpaid internships in the arts and culture sector…

(This essay was originally written in my role as an outside consultant to the city of Calgary’s cultural plan. For this entry, I was asked to reflect on the possibility of developing a collective impact model for the arts in Calgary. You can read all of my contributions to that process here.)