hello this is suzanne at well commissioner city of sarasota welcoming you to another commissioner corner today it's my honor to welcome john mccarthy of sco now a lot of you probably don't need an introduction to john mccarthy he is a true true son of sarasota he has cut his teeth on everything you could possibly imagine in this city beginning at the age of seven he started with an amazingly keen sense of the history of our community and it's led all the way up to his job at cisco state of the art data and what we're doing for the quality of life in this community john is a true public talk to me about scope and what is the journey of scope or your scope stands for sarasota county openly plans for excellence and scope is founded on the principle that if we know what's going on in our community through data and then we engage people in discussion about that data what it means to them and how they can make an impact to enhance the quality of life that's really what scopes all about so we crunched data so that people can understand really who we are as a community and what's going on we engage them in all different types of conversation and then we've issued over the years reports that help people understand what we can do to enhance the quality of life in sarasota but what also individuals can do to make things better here absolutely and how is your back your your your plethora of knowledge about this community from its history to it state of the art the quality of life here your skills and what you bring to scope and what scope means for today sarasota will scope itself is a very small team of worker bees and most of the employees of scope are new college grads that's been our history over the last couple of years and so what i am able to do is balance the brilliance and capability of young people who are just coming out of college with a deep knowledge of sarasota either the geography or economics or the people themselves and so just by being able to connect people to other people is a big part of what scope does and so every week people call me and say john who do i talk to about this who could i connect with on this who could i partner with on this and so i find myself connecting people pretty much all week long and i think that's one of the roles of scope that just the nature of it right so it sounds like you do you really do have your finger on the pulse of the community and you are enlisting all in everybody in this community to join you what are some of the activities initiatives right now i notice you you talk about who we are in you're having a report card coming out what's that all about sure well the scope starting in two thousand and one began to issue report cards about what was going on in syria soda and every couple of years we would update that in a number of years ago we kind of got away from that and so when i came to scope the board asked me to go out and interview people in the community and find out what did they feel was scope's greatest value in the community what should we be doing and people said bring back community report card so we went to work again utilizing our new college students as  researchers and we compiled a updated community report card which is shown here for twenty fourteen twenty fifteen we worked with the agency to do the art work in the design of the icons and to organize it and what we have within this report art is all types of different information about what's going on in sarasota that we use to inspire conversation amongst the people here in the community want to follow so the hub which is across the street here right right right we kind of they've done a number of  projects for us over the last couple of years but this was one where we really needed a fresh look to the report card in icons that we could use to describe the various chapters or or domains of wellbeing as we call them in our industry so how is this transformed more when every word you want to use from when we think of data we think of statisticians we think of technology how does it work to affect the people of the community the diversity of this community and who all is involved in this that it gets away from the data because some people say data what does that mean with the interesting thing is in two thousand and one when scope created their first report card it was hard to find data about anything and then here we are in two thousand and fifteen data is everywhere we're confronted with it everywhere and so the question now is how do you sort through it so what we tried to do we reached out to the community a year ago with a series of workshops we called them high tech high touch and we literally asked people what would you like to see in the report card what are the what are the aspects of community that you want to see data or measures for and so with that feedback we went back and enhance the products that we've done before an example is and if you can imagine this hit a community sarasota we had nothing in our report cards about arts and culture parks and recreation beaches or anything like that so that was an area where people were very interested in recreational trails on the beaches and natural opportunities that they had in the arts and culture so we worked with people to provide additional data on those but the whole idea isn't just to have the data it's to start a conversation so this year we've had our community report card road show we've been going out to all different parts of the county and in that we show data to inspire conversation then we break out conversation circles we've also had a tremendous partner in a new group in search of so called face to face foundation which was founded by a high school student to engage more conversation amongst students in our schools and so we've actually been working with sam schmidt in the face to face foundation in all of our road show events to get people talking about these things that are important to them whether we're talking about various aspects of the economy a serious soda and some of the struggles that people are having with that or if we're talking about some of the great work that's been done with conservation of water and recycling in our communities where we score higher than anybody in the state or in the country really but then there are some areas like suicide rate where we actually have a higher suicide rate than either the state of florida or the country itself and it's polarized to ins the very elderly and the very young the teenagers so we've had a lot of teenagers by the way coming to our roadshow events and looking at that and giving us more information about why they think some of these things are way they are and what are some of the possible solutions because it's really all about planning for the future exactly i was going to my next question is who attends these workshops and when you go in the road who are they how diverse are the people because that is all changing here demographics are changing and they need this they demand this side quite frankly well we started our first row show event in the community of this and you know it's open invitation for anyone to come and we had people that were statisticians in that were already heavily into data and some of them were even maybe more advanced than us you know and looking at certain aspects we had city commissioner from venice we had people from faith based organizations that were attracted to the program so they could learn more about the community nonprofit organizations individuals who just wanted to get involved and then we had a high school group come about six or seven high school students that came to participate in that one as well now we went to north port it was different in northport we had about seven adults in the room including again city commissioner and other leaders in the community but we had about twenty students from mr shoots english class at north four high school and he had offered extra credit for the students to come and at the beginning they were there for extra credit halfway through they were loving every minute of it and by the time they were done they were thinking of things that they could do in the community to affect some of the measures and indicators that we have in the report card so it was awesome it spoke to them it spoke to them in gulf gate we had an another group of just people from all over the community we had county commissioner attend we have representatives from vern buchanan is office and then members of the community of all ages races ethnicity it's been a real mix and we've tried to broadly promote these and welcome everyone to come and participate so in the final analysis when you have the right a chance you have all this what's your takeaway what do you want to take away the and what we do that's a great question part of the takeaway is that we want to transition the scope community report card from a book that you hold in your hands to a live realtime social media friendly platform where we can share information with people as it becomes available because as soon as you print something it's out of date because some new stats came out so we would like to create this platform where we would push data out to our followers on a regular basis and then inspire conversation around that so that people can take their new knowledge incorporate it with what they already know and use that whether they're in a nonprofit setting whether they're in a business setting local government setting or what have you and so that's why i think the primary purpose and we've had a survey involved with our road shows where we're gathering information saying how would you like to engage with us on this and then the other thing is that we're having people step forward saying they want to become more active in the community they want to get involved they want to help address some of these things and then scope doesn't do the work of solving the problems scope draws attention to them gets conversations going and then tries to connect people to ways that they can get involved in the community you know that's wonderful because you are some we've got we've got high school students involved in this what what they can do for their community and it's interesting you have this large book and you're right but today in today's day and age with social media with everything that's quick quick quick look how different this is it seems to me than it was in two thousand and one when was the l absolutely and you know we had to go to color this time because if we had not done the color we couldn't just showed all the information that we needed to show in terms of doing both across a time horizon as well as comparables to the state and to the country the other thing is there's a whole movement with data toward info graphics make the data easy for people to understand and place data together with other data that gives them a bigger picture and so in the road shows we've been taking the data from the report card have been turning some of it into more of an info graphic representation that again really people can get a lot of information in just a snapshot view and help them understand what's going on in the community right now a lot of people that are going to be new to our community we talk a lot about what's going to happen in our community over the next five ten years a lot of people coming here living in sarasota county what a wonderful tool to let them know this is what's going on here and there are many many from health care to i mean you've got everything in that but we're right so we start demographics we move to education we move to economics we move to civic engagement to the built environment which includes transportation and all those sorts of things arts culture and recreation health environment and then social which is about our crime rate which by the way is declining steadily you know we have address one steadily declining crime rate and then people say well how's this happening then we go ask questions we find out the sheriff and the police are involved and you know new initiatives to bring down crime in the area through intelligent policing and community policing in those sorts of things so this is a great primer for someone coming to the area and you don't have to have it in book form it's on our website that's it as you know it's on our website and that is scope xcel dot org so it's s e o p e with the east shared with the xcel so that it's ex c dot org and anyone can go at any time and just page through and see what's going on in their community and then the other thing that we're finding that's great is that people are stepping forward to us with me new data that we did not have they're saying hey we didn't see this data we've got this can you use that and we've actually been using some of that data in our road so for instance dr lisa merritt step forward from the multicultural health institute said john we've got all this information we've been gathering over the years can you use this and we said absolutely this is really meaningful for us so we've been using some  merits work in our road shows and other people as well so as we have pushed this out there's been a big push in word of people saying we have admission all information that we'd love to see in the report card that's wonderful well it sounds like you initiatives that you've been involved in the community you go way back on the horse historical perspective of this community and the skills you have the enable you to be at the helm of this organization i mean it's obvious however what is it in your background that makes you so great at this job well i'm still learning how to do the job at scope i have to admit i mean scope is a very unique type of organization there are not many like it around the country i think that my love for sarasota my concern about the future of sarasota and the you know we continue to grow as we have in a healthy way that makes our stay attractive to everyone and then just being able to connect people and connect the dots to close now and i give you a report card in a well read i think it has been a pleasure thank you so much for coming and i look forward to more of scopes work this is the finance i know what you're doing what an extraordinary tool for our