THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF CRISIS MAPPERS
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Peter Burgess
- Male
- New York, NY
- United States
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How good is this "The CGI has helped more than ten million children gain access to better education, ..." ... it sounds pretty impressive ... it is a good "sound byte" ... but does it really have any meaning? Looked at from the perspective that ther…
Dear Colleagues
There are hundreds, if not thousands of initiatives to mobilize resources to help people in Haiti ... and the organizations are proudly announcing how successful their fund raising has been. Good ... but the feedback about how well t…
Profile Information
- Organization / Affiliation
- Tr-Ac-Net Community Analytics
- Website
- http://www.tr-ac-net.org
- Email
- peterbnyc@gmail.com
- Keywords / Tags (expertise, interests)
- Transparency, accounting, accountability, value, costs, prices, ecology, environment, sustainability
- Bio
- Read engineering and economics at Cambridge. Learned Chartered Accountancy in London with Coopers and Lybrand. About 20 years professional and corporate management experience including CFO of US based international company. About 20 years of international relief and development consultancy with focus on planning and evaluation at all levels from national to sector and community.
- Project(s)
- Currently engaged in the development and deployment of Community Analytics (CA) to provide a rigorous system of metrics for socio-economic progress and performance at the community level. The system combines accounting from both the perspective of the organization and the perspective of the community (the place). The system incorporates both the money cost, money revenue and money profit dimension and the value consumption, value creation and value change dimension. It is value change in the community that is the key metric for understanding sustainability. The system functions using the technology of the 21st century ... mobile phone text messages, relational databases, Internet and the web cloud!
Why is value important?
Community Analytics uses "value" as the metric to bring quality of life and sustainability together ... it is so much better than money wealth and money profit as a measure of progress and performance ... it is so much better than the growth of GDP (gross domestic product) as a metric about the health of the economy.
Some elements of value are subjective ... and that is all to the good. If everyone had an identical perspective of value, the world would be a boring place! The fact that value is subjective and difficult to measure, does not mean that value is unimportant and should be ignored. The fact that value has been ignored, and only the metrics used are those about money in the form of economic activity money costs, money revenues and money profit ... and GDP that confuses costs and consumption and activity all in one money metric ... while totally ignoring the flows of value associated with activities that consume value, create value and produce value change. When value change is positive ... society is sustainable. Where there is value destruction from economic activity, at some point there is a limit and society crashes.
When resources are consumed and there is value adding with quality of life improved ... this is progress. For community based activities, this is a pretty obvious process with an observable outcome. For big organizations the value proposition is less obvious. But big does not stop organizations do the accounting for money and the reporting of profit ... even while it cannot (maybe better, it will not) do the same accounting for value and the reporting of value change or impact.
Community Analytics (CA) looks at socio-economic progress and performance through the eyes of the community as well as from the perspective of organizations. CA is relatively simple though not simplistic. Some of the methods have their origins in corporate accountancy, including the idea of balance sheet and operating statement, of cost accounting and standard costs. In corporate accounting this is only about money, while in CA it is also about value, with standard value used to bring value into account.
Some elements of value are subjective ... and that is all to the good. If everyone had an identical perspective of value, the world would be a boring place! The fact that value is subjective and difficult to measure, does not mean that value is unimportant and should be ignored. The fact that value has been ignored, and only the metrics used are those about money in the form of economic activity money costs, money revenues and money profit ... and GDP that confuses costs and consumption and activity all in one money metric ... while totally ignoring the flows of value associated with activities that consume value, create value and produce value change. When value change is positive ... society is sustainable. Where there is value destruction from economic activity, at some point there is a limit and society crashes.
When resources are consumed and there is value adding with quality of life improved ... this is progress. For community based activities, this is a pretty obvious process with an observable outcome. For big organizations the value proposition is less obvious. But big does not stop organizations do the accounting for money and the reporting of profit ... even while it cannot (maybe better, it will not) do the same accounting for value and the reporting of value change or impact.
Community Analytics (CA) looks at socio-economic progress and performance through the eyes of the community as well as from the perspective of organizations. CA is relatively simple though not simplistic. Some of the methods have their origins in corporate accountancy, including the idea of balance sheet and operating statement, of cost accounting and standard costs. In corporate accounting this is only about money, while in CA it is also about value, with standard value used to bring value into account.
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