Matthew Shearing is a private sector consultant working globally in partnership with the public, private and not-for-profit sectors on improving official statistics and other data systems, Monitoring and Evaluation, and embedding official statistics standards in wider international development.
David Stern is a Mathematical Scientist and Educator. He is a former lecturer in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Sciences at Maseno University in Kenya and a founding board member of African Maths Initiative (AMI).
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John Bailer
Today is the last day to make your voice heard in the Stats and Stories 300th Episode data visualization contest. Go to statsandstories.net/voting and select your favorite finalists before it's too late. Last month, I was lucky to be able to attend the 64th World Statistics Congress, hosted by the International Statistical Institute in Ottawa, Canada. While I was there, I was able to talk to a number of amazing statisticians and data scientists for the show, including both of our guests today. Our first guest is Matthew Shearing. Shearing is a private sector consultant working globally in partnership with the public, private and not for profit sectors, on improving official statistics and other data systems monitoring and evaluation and embedding official statistics standards in wider international development. Well, I'm still at the International Statistical Institute, World Statistics Congress. It's been a great, great time. I get to see colleagues that I haven't seen for quite a while, I mean, heck, I get to see people in three dimensions instead of the two dimensions of a zoom conference. So this has been great. And one of the great aspects of it is I've had a chance to host some conversations. Today the conversation is going to be with Matthew Shearing. He is the director of cloud consultants. But for our purposes in this conversation, the most important part of who he is, is he is the co-chair of the capacity building committee. So Matthew, I want to say welcome. Oh, it's truly a delight. And I'm just so excited about the work that you and the ISI capacity building group are involved in. And let's unpack that. Let's start this conversation. So can you tell me a little bit about your perception? What is your perspective on what the ISI does? And who is the ISI?
Matthew Shearing
Great, thank you, John. Well, for me, the ISI is something special. I've worked in statistics for a long time, and mostly in government statistics, official statistics, and I've been a member of the ISI also for a long time. And for me, the ISI is a place where professionals who are passionate about statistics from all over the world can come and talk in an environment without any vested interests, to help each other to learn about statistics and to maximize the impact of what we do in the world. And that's quite special.
John Bailer
Yeah, you know, that sounds bad, does it? What a great opportunity to be able to do that. So let's transition from this hosting umbrella to the idea of capacity building. And you know, when you hear that you have the capacity to do what? And you know, promoting it to do what so can you talk a little bit about how you think about capacity building?
Matthew Shearing
Yeah, well, it's a good question in the sense that I've had to ask myself that question. And actually, I think that most of what the ISI does, or professional statistical societies is capacity building, and that in the sense of helping each other to improve what we do to create knowledge. But I think that, given the ISI, given what it is as an organization, which is truly global, it cuts across sectors and disciplines. People are motivated by a passion for statistics and statistical science for a better world. This is a unique opportunity for us to work together as a community to actually share knowledge across different disciplines. So government statisticians need to talk to academics, more business people need to talk to these other groups even more. And this is particularly relevant in the modern data ecosystem, where boundaries are being thrown down, and new challenges are coming up.
John Bailer
So maybe it would help to give an example of something that might be part of a capacity building effort.
Matthew Shearing
Yeah. So in the case of the ISI, I think using the strengths that we have, I think one of the key challenges of today's society is around the use of artificial intelligence, and the ethical implications thereof. And what we know is that all forms of society, all sides of society are thinking about these issues. But in the ISI, we have knowledge from across different disciplines that can help us solve some of these problems. Official statisticians have been grappling with ethics for decades and decades, and that can be really brought to bear for instance.
John Bailer
Okay, so within the organization, there are groups that have helped define principles and practical ethics in the profession. And so now you're also there. There are other groups that think about artificial intelligence, particularly in maybe a statistical computing or predictive modeling sense or in industrial applications. So those are those teams. As you know, one aspect that I've seen involved in capacity building in the past has included working with some of the mid level managers in official statistics and countries around the world that are trying to increase their ability to do the work. You know, and I think when I think of capacity building that seems to be the important thread that a group recognizes a need within their community, and that they're looking for partners to help them to kind of raise their abilities to address that.
Matthew Shearing
Yeah, that's a very important part of where I think the ISI could have more impact. And actually, it's about not thinking about statistics in a very technical sense, and not thinking about the science of it, but thinking about how we can share our knowledge and experience of how to operate as a professional, high impact individuals within any teams that were brought in to work in and think traditionally, statisticians are, at least stereotyped to be introverted, and actually very highly technically, well, skilled. But we know across different fields now that we need to grow statisticians and data professionals to have good communication skills to have great leadership skills. Otherwise, there's no point in doing what we're doing. Because especially in the modern era, the people that are playing fast and loose with statistics and data, they're the ones that will their voice will be heard.
John Bailer
Yeah, it's and I think that it's it's important to note that, that the the availability of people with these skills is differs dramatically across the world, you know, and in some countries, it's it, there are a lot of people that are getting degrees in statistics and data science and are well positioned to assume responsibilities to help countries, you know, say collect the official statistics that they need for making the decisions based on evidence in their communities. Whereas in others, there's just a tremendous deficit, a paucity of people that can move into such roles. So I see they're just as critical piece. You know, let me let me follow up with something that I know is you've been talking about or that the that within the the statistical capacity building committee, you started to talk about this idea of an ISI Academy. And that, you know, so Academy brings lots of images to mind wandering, when you think when you Why did you use that term, that expression, that description? And what is it that you're picturing in terms of the capacity building efforts that would be promoted through the academy?
Matthew Shearing
Yeah. So Well, first and foremost, we wanted to come up with a way of a way of rethinking what we do on capacity building in order to energize that environment. So coming up with a new concept, a new word, a buzzword, if you like, a new way of branding, what we do is actually an important part of getting the community to think differently. And an academy is what is one thing to call it, and I think it's a good one, because it brings about trust in what we're saying and doing. I think there's a lot of trust in the word Academy, and we want to be trusted in what we do, because we're statisticians, but it also implies about teaching about transferring knowledge. So we really want to make our members transfer what they have to the members.
John Bailer
Yeah, you know, and I think that it's a it's a mistake to think of capacity building as being just, you know, just for someone else. I mean, I, I think of my own career trajectory as one of ongoing capacity building, internally, purse personally, but also within my own community of practice. But this is actually extending, you know, recognizing not only that for us, but for for the entire community of folks like us, too.
Matthew Shearing
Yeah, exactly. So I think for every isI member in the future, that that the concept of the Academy can be motivational in that in, in teaching and sharing knowledge, you actually gain knowledge and you actually develop yourself. So what we want to create is, is a community of statistical professionals, which can find benefit in transferring knowledge, discussing and growing it with others. So there's, there's a win win for all of our members. And actually, that wider society because we're helping to solve problems in a more innovative way breaking down those barriers, which stopped academics, talking to government statisticians in the past these kinds of things. Well, look
John Bailer
at this. I mean, we have an academic talking to a former academic and a former government statistician talking so you know, there's hope there's, there's hope here. So it let's, let's think about a future where this is wildly successful. I'm pretty optimistic person. So if you were to project into the future, if this isI Academy really is, is me, just achieving the dream that you have for it, what might that look like?
Matthew Shearing
Well, I think for me, that would first and foremost rely on people buying into the idea to give to give more momentum to what I've just talked about. And that means increasing our membership by a large amount. And that actually means redefining ourselves from just being about statistical science to be inclusive of data science, to be inclusive of a data industry where people can coalesce around those kinds of principles I suggested earlier, scientific independence, a passion for impact these kinds of things. And once we have that we have we have a solid base to take things forward. Those members should be actively involved in solving some of the greatest challenges we have around the globe today, which which numbers can help to solve?
John Bailer
Yeah, I know, when I, when I was looking through some of the things that were listed as part of the topics that this isI Academy might address, I, you know, there was the climate change was one of the things that that was sort of the big pictures. But there would be professional development, the idea of statistical and data literacy, ethics, the idea of statistical and data communities being part of the the who would be addressed by this, and the idea of scientific independence and public voice, this particular effort on on forming an ISI Academy is going to involve a lot of really big ideas. And it's, it's both exciting, and I'm sure a little scary, because because there's stuff to be done. So why don't you tell me if you can tell us share with us a little bit about what are the next steps?
Matthew Shearing
Well, for me, it's about generating generating interest in priority areas. So things which our members are really interested in, that can also have a big impact on the world. So we can prove that we can add value as an ISI institution, working together, and capacity building. And for me, actually, it's about thinking big, we do a lot of capacity building at the moment in terms of statistical literacy. So thinking about how to better educate people in the use of data and statistics, which goes on at school level, it goes on a graduate level, and it should go on at the ministerial level decision making level, so supporting all sections of society. And what I'd really like to do is bring together thinking about, well, the theory of change here. If we put effort into these, into these all these areas, how in 510 years time, will that mean that we have a we produce better societies based on evidence informed decision making? These kinds of things? So it's me, it's about thinking big, and thinking about we've got tremendous influence on really important areas of society. So how do we bring together our skills and knowledge across these disciplines to actually implicate it implicate change across society?
John Bailer
You know, I find myself thinking of this as a real meta question, how do you build the capacity to do capacity building? You know, and that sounds like that sounds like it's foundational to the effort that you're going to be believed at, oh, 100%.
Matthew Shearing
So we can envisage that we can work together as professionals to do some of these things. But we also need to realize that we need to develop our capacity internally, to be able to deliver on some of these promises that we might make to society. And I think largely, some of that is around going beyond our technical skills. So thinking about how good I'll be at teaching, we might be good at statistics, or data science or whatever, how good are we at transferring that knowledge? And what about the mechanisms for doing it? Do we have sustainable ways of doing this? It can have long term impacts?
John Bailer
You know, that's that is it's a great aspiration. I mean, I'm, I'm very hopeful, and I'm very excited about the prospect into this future is sort of how might someone get involved in capacity building with this effort?
Matthew Shearing
Well, first and foremost, become an ISA member, which gives you an access to being involved with this development. But I'm just really willing to hear what ideas people have that are based on these, these, this, this this concept that we have. And essentially, if people have got ideas about how we can make a bigger difference in the world, working across the sectoral boundaries, disciplinary boundaries, using our network of people based on scientific independence and scientific methods, then I just want to hear about them. And then we can feed that into the development of what we do.
John Bailer
I'm very hopeful that we're going to find partners around the world, and they may be partners that are national, statistical societies, you know, like the American Statistical Association would be one, the Royal statistical society is another there's so there's so there are lots of colleagues, you know, that many of us have Holmes, both in our national societies, as well as the international operation in the thing that I find really encouraging and exciting is that it's often capacity building, the thought of being engaged and involved in it that that will attract people to think about this, this international connection.
Matthew Shearing
Yeah, and I also think it's also important that we look outside those usual the usual suspects in our community. So actually, in building building, building capacity is about building out building our ability to work with partners we've never worked with before. But partners are interested in making the world a better place. And they know that data and statistics are one way one way of doing that. But we have to do is present ourselves as a professional community but statisticians data scientists in a way that appeals to people outside of this community that they can work with us. The funders provide resources to provide momentum. And that way we work together with a wide range of partners to make the world a better place.
John Bailer
Well, I'm hearing a really great opportunity for people to be involved, that this is a call and an intimate Haitian for folks that have a passion for for kind of partnering to help help make things work better. And gosh, it's it's hard to imagine something that would be a higher call. So Matthew, I want to thank you again for taking the time but but thank you for providing the leadership and envision in the partnership that you have with with others, such as Oliver Jean Ganya, or with you know, David Stern with some of the other partners that I know are working with you. It's it's just an outstanding effort and much appreciated.
Matthew Shearing
Thank you very much. But it really depends on those people you mentioned and more. And we only succeed if others also try to lead this process and help shape it in a way which works for everybody.
John Bailer
Well, I have the feeling I may be on your hit list in the future, and that would be a good thing. So thanks again, Matthew.
Matthew Shearing
My pleasure. Thank you.
John Bailer
Our next guest is David Stern. Stern is a mathematical scientist and educator. He is a former lecturer in the School of mathematics, statistics and Actuarial Sciences at Messina University in Kenya, and a founding board member of the African maths initiative Am I at the World statistics Congress, there's been a tremendous number of conversations related to statistical capacity building and what that might mean and what that looks like now, and what it might look like into the future. On this episode of stats and stories, we're going to have a chance to talk with David Stern, who's the co founder of items International, a not for profit, social enterprise organization. But But David has been very involved in the ISI statistical capacity efforts. Currently, he serves as an ISI council member, He also serves on the International Statistical literacy project advisory board, and his formerly was a vice president of the International Association for statistical education. So So David, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
David Stern
It's great to be here.
John Bailer
You know, it's it's such an important effort. I know that isI states as one of its strategic priorities, that capacity building is something that it wants to do well. So I guess I would start with asking you, what is capacity building? What do you think of when you think capacity building, and that's
David Stern
from my perspective, I spend a lot of my time working across Africa, East West Africa, and capacity building is, is to me central to the aspect that a lot is known of how to do things. And it's just that, actually, that knowledge of what is known isn't spread far enough. And so we need to spread it further. And we need to share that know, what is known to the experts, is brand new to other people. And so capacity building is just catching people up with the latest knowledge of how to how to do statistics, why it's important, and how to think about teaching it, of course.
John Bailer
So, you know, what's the advantage of catching people up? What's What, why should? Why should they just keep doing things the way they do it,
David Stern
give you a very simple example, I worked at a Kenyan University for I went there for six months and stay for six years.
John Bailer
These visa visa problems I mean,
David Stern
it's more I arrived. And I arrived as a pure mathematician whose sort of background was really rather theoretical. And I left as the vice president of the International Association Statistics Education, because the need was so great for data. I went in and I was teaching, I was asked to teach on an MSc in Applied Statistics. And I knew enough about applied statistics that having an MSc in Applied Statistics was didn't use a computer, you know, 15 years ago, even that was not appropriate. And so I knew enough that actually those skills, the students coming out of them weren't going to have the skills they needed in less they got that exposure. Very simple example. So that's
John Bailer
an example of kind of working in partnership. And that seems to be a critical aspect of capacity building. Is that that hear you are working with colleagues in this in at this university and saying, Wait, you know, let's, let's talk about how do we bring this this education up to kind of the standard, the standard of current practice?
David Stern
Absolutely. It's that it's this idea that actually, you know, I had a student that who was part of those initial master's students, who now who then became later the vice president of IOC as well, because what he then took away, he then took much further than I did, he was teaching the sort of classes that I never got to teach, you know, basic first year undergraduate classes, and were the sort of ideas I was doing at postgraduate level. You know, he was now taking those same ideas and exposing the first year undergraduates to them, same with another student who then sort of said, well, actually, in I'm teaching in a school, these same ideas what you're teaching me at postgraduate level, I shouldn't be teaching these schools I should be getting my students at school to know about them and so it's not about it's exactly say it's about partnership is about collaboration is about people taking the things they experience, bringing them into their own context and now applying them and sharing them more widely.
John Bailer
So yeah, I'm hearing almost this this in the educational capacity building sense, a train the trainer kind of phenomena.
David Stern
Absolutely. And it's not just about training the trainer. And one of the things, which is, there's a wonderful example in Kenya of a cascade model of training. Yeah, you train the trainer of trainers on. And the point is, it becomes, you know, by the time you get to the bottom, all the substance has been lost. And so there's there's also elements. And this is actually one of the big learnings we've had from these sorts of experiences when you're trying to train 10,000 teachers. If you have a cascade model, well, what are you actually trading the ones at the bottom of the Cascade. And so one of the things this is where, to me, the game changer is open educational resources. Because then suddenly, that doesn't change. As you go down the pyramid, you actually get substance which stays the same. And if it stays the same, all the way to the learner, then you've really won. Because then actually, you've got your ideas where your trainers are now facilitators of learning. And this is one of the things which in pedagogical terms, everybody knows everybody talks about, you know, your teachers, your educators shouldn't be the source of the knowledge, they should be the facilitators of learning. But what does that really mean? And if you can do that through open educational resources, then suddenly, you know, that facilitation mode means that you don't actually lose the substance as you go down these pyramids of cascading training. So can
John Bailer
you give an example of some of the open educational resources that you've been involved with helping develop?
David Stern
Yeah, well, my most exciting one, I can't take credit for it to go to University of Edinburgh who's been working on it for about 20 years now. And it's called stuck. And it's an electronic assessment system. It's open source, it's part of Moodle, just learning management system. And it's just a question type. But it's transformed the way universities have been able to adopt learning, because what it means is we can give automated feedback. And so if you have a class with 1000, students, you know, my, I mentioned, my colleague, who's now teaching first year undergraduate, you know, unfortunately for him, when I was there, I set up five new degree programs, and they became very successful. So he now has classes of 1000. So you're not sure whether I was gonna say, appreciate you. But, but now you get clients, these classes of over 1000 students, and how a single lecture of course, no tutorial assistance. And, and so how can you give a good education in that context. And the key point is, you have to have feedback, okay? If you don't have automated feedback, there's no chance of him giving individual feedback to the students. So automated feedback is key. And so these open educational resources, which can enable you to have questions with automated feedback, you know, they're great. And he's been doing it at his university. But then just very recently, we did a workshop at another university, where the statisticians there just said, we want we really need to change the way we're teaching. How are we doing this as well? Have you talked to James, if you've not talked to James, you should talk to James because he's got all these open educational resources. And the whole department then picked it up in his department, he's the only one driving it, but their department picked it up at scale. And this is the real power.
John Bailer
Okay, so you have something like this. And, and you know, some of this, I'm hearing matchmaking of what sort of sort of that at some sense, you need this clearing house, you have both the resources being developed, and there has to be a clearing house that then helps pairing up people that are doing this. So it seems natural that there would be the statistical capacity building efforts that you're involved with at a professional society level, might be one of those were places where the clearing house might start to be developed. Or, or or not, I mean, help help me think about
David Stern
that, it seems to me, what's really interesting is, most of the initiatives I found successful have not come from the societies, they've come from the bottom up. But what the societies provide is they provide the opportunity for essentially acknowledgement of standard differentiation. You know, actually, one of the problems, you know, from the bottom up initiatives is that it's very difficult to tell the difference between good bottom up initiatives and bad bottom up initiatives. And, and that's where the society's potentially really come in. One of the things I'm really excited about, about the vision isI now has for the the academy and so on, so you could play a sort of accreditation,
John Bailer
so quality assurance with the ones you show and,
David Stern
but also then sharing in a way, which is more more informed. So a lot of these things capacity building is really hard. And actually being able to bring in experts in education who can support that and who can make sure that you're bringing in thinking about how to do this well and then help The iterations, all look good initiatives I know. Now, broadly, they've taken 10 years to get to where they are, and they'll take another 10 years to actually reach their potential. You know, this is the thing, there's a journey, and often individuals can't sustain something for that long, it has to go beyond individually,
John Bailer
you use the word that I was thinking a lot about, just as you were talking, and that is sustainability. You know, that in some sense. You know, I do agree with you that having the bottom up, initiatives are critical, having some kind of way to help promote and maybe facilitate sustaining these is something where a professional organization can can help.
David Stern
Absolutely. You know, I gave a talk about, I think it was about 2015 or so I gave a talk, I think it was the it was over the word sistex Congress or the satellite for the IOC. And, and basically, my talk was explaining how I'd failed over the last sort of six or more years. And every single initiative I'd started had failed. And, you know, they'd been really impactful, and I'd been writing about them, this is why I was well known. This is why I was the vice president. And so I then gave a talk about how all of them had failed, and how all of them being reborn, but not by me, by students, by others. And by taking them up and building on what I've done. And that that cycle is something which was really hard for me to accept of recognizing that they had to fail, because I couldn't sustain the effort that I was putting in at the beginning to make them work. And yet, that failure wasn't a total failure, because they'd say, sowed the seeds for others to pick them up and run with them.
John Bailer
Yeah, I think that's a that's a really important message that that any effort like this, it's it can't be individual, individually sustained, that it has to find some has to be embraced by a broader community to be able to be promoted and and maintained into the future, there has to be, I'm not talking about antibody, it could be individuals to that
David Stern
what this is, this is what I in that particular talk. My conclusion was that yes, there's a, there's a role for societies, you know, like ISI and others to play. But actually, the more important thing is to think about COVID. You know,
John Bailer
it's how I want to think about COVID.
David Stern
But, you know, COVID, was extremely successful, because, you know, generally speaking, the our number was greater than one. So as long, as long as when you've got your interventions, you're our number is greater than one, the intervention will grow, it will evolve, it will become more, we need to think about volume scaling, viral
John Bailer
capacity building, I think, I know now picturing a new organization, the new labels. These See, just to go capacity. I like that you don't you know, one thing I think a lot about in the context of international organizations or, you know, kind of the practice of statistics, you don't want to reinvent what others have done, like you gave the example of one one institution and the work with this open educational resource going to another, you know, in many places throughout Africa, you could have how many official languages and in a country, and you know, even within within ISI, if I were just thinking about? Well, English is great, but you know, the UN has what, four or five other official languages. So you know, maybe you want to think about the Spanish speaking countries, the Lusophone Francophone countries, and then and then Arabic countries and Chinese in terms of other languages. So how, how do we think about taking kind of the good work that that's done kind of in a local context, and add its value to make it more generalizable to other contexts?
David Stern
What I, this is a hard problem that's possible. So we are actually this is, as an organization, this is central to what we try and do that we're trying to rethink how tech is built. And the whole point is that actually a lot of tech, you know, generally speaking, the way Tech's built at the moment, it's come from commercial companies. And it's very simple. You find a market, you study the market, you figure out what will it be successful in that market, and you build for that. And if it's successful, then maybe others outside that market will also use it. But that's how you build successful tech. If you want to have social impact, you're building for the margins, every marginal group is different. And so what happens if you design tech, or if you design solutions, not thinking about a single group, but thinking about how you make it adaptable for the margins? This is what we try and do this is where this is it's a new way of thinking about it. And it's sort of very simple. It's the same thing for the capacity building. Instead of thinking about building a course. Think about how you build components of a course which come together into a course which Now in different contexts, people can adapt. How do you make it easy for them to adapt it to their context. So when you're designing that initial course, with experts, you're not designing a course, you're designing a way for people to adapt and customize and build their own courses. And this is where I'm so excited with the ISI Academy because essentially, there were groups like this who are designing these courses, and they're designing globally, if only now we could say, Well, okay, a group like isI could say, Well, okay, let's take that we're experts on this, take what you've got, let's make this adaptable. So people can customize it, these open educational resources, everybody would be happy with this. But the systems to do that don't exist yet. We need all we need groups who are built around trying to do that make things adaptable, designing for adaptability, rather than designing for a target audience.