A Laboratory for Relevance: Findings and Recommendations from the Arts Innovation Fund

Starting in 2006, a group of leading California arts institutions set out to innovate with new ways of working in the 21st century. With support from the Arts Innovation Fund of The James Irvine Foundation, they approached the challenge of innovation in a variety of ways, with a wide range of objectives and results. Across the board, the experimentation process prompted organizational reflection and change. Most grantees developed new levels of adaptive capacity, an attribute that many thought leaders believe will be essential for arts organizations, and the arts sector as a whole, to thrive into the future. After a strategic qualitative review of the innovation projects pursued by organizations participating in the Arts Innovation Fund, the Slover Linett evaluation team offers the following report with its insights and recommendations

US Militia, Wikileaks and the Tea Party: how alternative new media is destroying traditional ideas objectivity (guest blog)

If people feel that mainstream media is ignoring alternative politics, then they can now create their own media. But how should traditional journalism respond? Should it change its ideas of impartiality to reflect the real diversity of contemporary politics? This is Polis Summer School student Steven Linett’s course paper that tackles this complex problem, citing media around the rise of US Militia movement

Campus Art Museums in the 21st Century: A Conversation

In the summer of 2012, the authors of this study brought together a group of campus art museum directors and outside experts to 'think out loud' about the changes already occurring at campus museums and where new opportunities and roles may be emerging. We hope the resulting paper will further the field's larger, continuing exploration of its roles and potentials through dialogue, research, and experimentation -- an exploration that contributes to the continued healthy evolution of campus art museum practice

Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes

As interest in measuring and understanding the impact of arts investments in community development continues to grow, this new study, Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes, commissioned by the Levitt Foundation and led by Slover Linett Audience Research, examines how "creative placemaking" interventions build social capital in communities, using permanent outdoor Levitt music venues as case studies. This research offers insights into arts-based strategies to promote social connectivity, a central goal of many creative placemaking efforts, and is a working illustration of what can and can't be learned from different impact measurement approaches

Fuzzy Measures and Integrals

In this paper, we will study the aggregation problem with intera ting riteria,and we will introdu e the on epts of fuzzy measures and integrals. The fuzzyintegrals are powerful aggregation operators whi h are able to take into onsideration the intera tion among riteria and the fuzzy measures an be used formodeling the importan e of all subsets of riteria.We will on entrate in \the Choquet integral ", this fuzzy integral is a weightedaggregation operator, whi h takes into a ount not only the importan e of the riteria, but also the importan e of all subsets of them. The information about theimportan e and the intera tion between riteria is used in the aggregation pro essof the partial evaluations. This paper analyse some hara teristi s and propertiesof this operator

A survey of the attitude towards research and research education among South African Ophthalmology trainees

Background Completing a research dissertation or Master of Medicine (MMed) degree during ophthalmology specialist training has now become compulsory in order to qualify as an ophthalmologist in South Africa. At a national level there is currently no co-ordinated effort to standardize research training and resources for trainees. Objectives The primary objective was to determine if South African ophthalmology trainees were interested in doing research. Secondary objectives were to determine: whether they felt that their current research training was adequate; whether a national web-based research support system would be desirable; and whether such a support platform would stimulate involvement in further research once training was completed. Methods A questionnaire was designed and anonymously completed by the trainees in each training unit in South Africa. Categorical responses were summarized using crude and weighted means with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Free text responses were analyzed thematically using an inductive approach. Results Out of 81 trainees (registrars) in South Africa at the time of the survey, 64 fully completed the questionnaire - a response rate of 79%. Seventy-two percent (95% CI 57% to 87%) of the trainees reported that they were interested in doing research. Only 28% (95% CI 18% to 41%) of respondents felt that their current research training was adequate. Ninety five percent (95% CI 86% to 99%) of trainees advocate a web-based support platform would be beneficial an eighty six percent (95% CI 74% to 93%) reported such would motivate them to continue to do research once their training was complete. The themes from the qualitative data were in keeping with the quantitative results and identified variation between training institutions in terms of available research resources, supervision and allocated time to perform research. Conclusion The trainee ophthalmologists in South Africa are interested in performing research. They feel that their current research training programs are inadequate. There is a strong need for nationally standardised research guidance to eliminate the current variation between training institutions. Guidance on dedicated time allocation to complete the research component of training should be provided by regulatory bodies. A proposed web-based support system may be a good option to standardize selected available research resources and provide equal access to all trainees nationally as well as to supplement research output during and after specialist training. Further research should address the reported lack of supervision and elucidate additional barriers to performing research in South Africa

Rethinking Relevance, Rebuilding Engagement

The Culture & Community research series launched with a first wave survey in May of 2020 designed to provide actionable information about changing community needs, contexts, and behaviors to arts and culture organizations during a time of rapid change and uncertainty. This report shares findings from a second wave of the Culture & Community research, collected in May 2021, over a year into the pandemic, and at a point when cases were falling before new variants emerged. This Wave 2 survey tracked changes in key questions from Wave 1 and explored new lines of inquiry. We developed a new series of questions to explore the dynamics of race and identity in cultural engagement, perceptions of systemic racism across the cultural sector, and the roles that Americans want arts and culture organizations to play in addressing social issues. Along with our partners at LaPlaca Cohen and Yancey Consulting, we named the second wave of this initiative Culture + Community in a Time of Transformation to reflect our hope that this difficult period -- one in which the country has faced not just a pandemic but also a long-overdue racial reckoning and intense political polarization -- would be an opportunity for genuine, system-level change