Data Science

Andy: “What kind of music do you like?”
Axel: “All kinds of music. But I really like progressive metal. Do you know Dream Theater?”
Andy: “No.”
Axel: “They’re really cool.”

Andy: “Do you know The War on Drugs?”
Axel: “Is that a band?”
Andy: “Yeah, check them out.”

Before we really get going, let me ask you one simple question about the word “data”: Singular or plural?

Social Activism

—  On his former late-night Comedy Central TV show, the Colbert Report, the eponymous host, in send-up character as a conservative, famously insisted he didn’t “see color.” It was his way of mocking those who pretend there is no racial discrimination, therefore nothing needs to be done about it. Jason Murphy is having none of that. Murphy, out on his own now, spent well over a decade as a top brand design director at Nike, playing a prominent role in the apparel company’s famous Equality campaign a couple of years ago. (He has had no role, however, in Nike’s recent campaign around the American football hero/pariah Colin Kaepernick—and he has a thing or two to say about that.) Murphy is familiar with inequality. The Bronx, New York native feels it when the police stop him four times in one week as he drives his vintage two-tone 1968 Buick Skylark around Portland, Oregon. He feels it in the gym if he takes a bit too much personal space. And he feels it as he takes the long way around to avoid police waiting for unsuspecting motorists. This is his lived experience. But Murphy wants change, in the working world and in the wider world, and he has a plan to go about it.

Digital Agriculture

—  There are trade-offs in life. Normally, I spend so much time inside that what’s happening outside isn’t that big of a deal to me. But I realize something now: it rains a lot here in Nashville, Tennessee. Who knew? Unrelenting grayness since October. Reminds me of the great Bruce Springsteen line: “Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does is rain.” But one writer’s rain is a farmer’s sunshine, especially in a time of climate change, is it not? Tennessee seems to be very productive agriculturally. But this is not your great-great-grandfather’s farming. Even smaller farmers are digitally connected, helping their yields, helping to hold down costs. For them, rain is useful. So is the technology that makes sense of it.

And so it is in Nigeria. The African economic powerhouse has 200 million people living in a relatively tight space, and yet it still has room for more than 30 million of them to be small-scale farmers. Oil has been the major player in Nigeria for quite some time now, but agriculture is the country’s beating heart, something that Onyeka Akumah, a digitally savvy serial entrepreneur, surely recognized when he started Farmcrowdy, a digital platform that empowers farmers. Akumah’s goal: improve food security and employ more people in Nigeria’s agricultural sector. Akumah represents Africa’s future, an energetic, intellectual dynamo under the age of 40, willing to tackle Africa’s problems without validation from the West. No wonder Quartz Africa has recognized Akumah as one of that continent’s great innovators, and he’s considered one of West Africa’s most influential people in his age group. That’s why he’ll be speaking on the “Digitisation of Agriculture Value Chains” to the prestigious Mobile World Congress (#MWC19) in Barcelona, Spain, on February 27. To everyone’s benefit, he’s making it rain.

—  We may not be living in unprecedented times, but sometimes, they can feel unprecedented to us. The coronavirus has taken on wings. It’s a great unknown. Many comparisons, most of them intended to comfort (and some intended to scare), are being made to the Spanish Flu that struck in the middle of World War I. But for most of us alive today, the Spanish Flu was not a lived experience. 

On the other hand: racism, sexism, ageism, inequality, intolerance—these a lot of us run into with some frequency. We call these obstacles patently unacceptable, and still they persist. And like the coronavirus, they get around. Geographic borders offer no barriers, but that also means solutions can be found anywhere in the world and possibly be applied more widely.

To that end, Adrianne C. Smith, in New York City, and Kgomotso Taje, in Johannesburg, are applying unique black-female perspectives to problems involving diversity and inclusion. They are working on vaccines of a sort, building bridges by focusing on education, training, conversation and accountability. More prescriptively, they stress the need for people to leave comfort zones behind, open their eyes and mind, and embrace the uncomfortable.

Keeping with OPEN Topics tradition*, we had the pleasure of talking with both Smith and Taje in late February, as Black History Month came to a close and Women’s History Month beckoned. Smith is global director of inclusion and diversity at WPP and founder of the Cannes Can: Diversity Collective, an organization that brings young creatives of color to the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France, imbuing the travelers with an unparalleled sense of possibility. Taje is Senior Content Manager at McCann Worldgroup with a deep, varied resume that would be the envy of anyone, anywhere. The two may be on opposite sides of the management/labor divide, opposite sides of the world, but they share a desire to see those “-isms” eradicated in their lifetimes.