Technology & the Liberal Arts: What Ought We Build
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These are abbreviated notes from my address to Claremont McKenna College (my alma mater) at the 2013 Forum for the Future event.
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Technology & the Liberal Arts: What Ought We Build
- 1. Technology & the Liberal Arts in Action @abhinemani cmc ‘10
- 2. kenya
- 6. out from under the mattress
- 7. enabling a modern economy
- 11. prism
- 12. What ought technology do?
- 13. “software is eating the world”
- 14. the post office
- 15. publishing
- 16. media
- 19. “software is eating the world”
- 20. how will technology reshape society?
- 21. “the greatest minds of my generation are optimizing click ads.”
- 22. the liberal arts teach us how to answer these questions
- 23. the liberal arts teach us values
- 24. technology enables us to put them into action
- 26. “peace corps for geeks”
- 33. “You changed the conversation”
- 34. your values are infused into what you build
Editor's Notes
- How did Al come to be soliciting help? A team of fellows was in Boston last February, and they noticed that the city doesn’t dig these out. They’re struggling just to plow the streets But one fellow, named EMO noticed SOMETHING else that people were shoveling sidewalks right next to the hydrants
- So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app. It lets you adopt a hydrant, agree to dig it out, you get to name it, if you don’t someone can steal it from you, got some game dynamics
- To try to get a handle on this problem, the City of New Orleans implemented an open data portal and began posting information about the blight process there, in an effort to provide better answers to these questions, which was a fantastic step in the right direction. However, data portals like Socrata present data as dense spreadsheets, organized according to internal processes or departments, so for the average citizen, it was still easier for them to call or email someone they knew inside City Hall than to try to navigate New Orleans’ data portal, which meant city staffers were still losing precious time and resources even after the City had made a significant investment in another system. It was clear to us that our best chance to help close this information gap was to take a user-centered approach, to make information about blighted properties not just publicly available, but to provide it in a simple format that makes sense to citizens.
- The tool we’ve created this year is called BlightStatus, and it presents citizens with a simple interface that allows them to search for problem properties they care about by address or on a map...
- That app is simple enough. What’s important about this app isn’t the technology – they built in a couple of months. It’s how it transformed the dynamic. Before the Mayor was frustrated, wanted to help, but unable to know what to do, and the citizens were disappointed, blind to the work and motivations of their servants in city hall. What did technology did, to quote the city’s CIO, Allen Square, was the change the conversation. Or as Fast Company put it, it proposed a new kind of more communication between two key groups in society.