Using the Whole Whale - A Nonprofit Podcast

001: Using the Whole Whale


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The concept of using the whole whole is an idea that looks at how we can treat data and technology the way that the Inuit used the whole whale as compared to the whalers of the 1900’s. More about creating a data culture in your organization.

Transcription

Episode 1

This is using the whole whale, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. my name is George Weiner, your host, and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com, thanks for joining us.

George: Hello this is George Weiner, and this is using the whole whale. Today we’re talking about the actual concept of using the whole whale. So right now it is March, and were in New York City, it is roughly 17 degrees fahrenheit, it’s absurdly cold, let me promise you. But it’s the perfect temperature to talk to you about using the whole whale and the inuit actually. The inuit about 7000 years ago, were the native people of arctic alaska and canada. And 7000 years ago it was also cold up north, and when the communities up there would go out whaling, which was their primary source of food and survival. When they go out whaling, they would go out on these open boats, and they go out on the water, and they work in teams in order to land a bowhead whale, they really had to work for it, we’re talking about things that would make Ahab look like he was on the jv team. They would pull back the whale and bring it into shore, they would have the whole village involved, using every single part of this whale, everything from the blubber to the bone. they were using the skin, they were using the bone for tools, they were turning parts of it into vitamins, they weren’t going to waste any part of it. When your house is made out of ice block you’re really trying to stretch every dollar, or bone in this case. So the idea here is something we’re seeing again and again, where scarcity breeds creativity, poverty breeds innovation.

When were now fast forwarding to the golden age of whaling in america which was around the mid 1900’s, they thought of whales as floating oil wells, they would really go out there in search of whales predominantly for the oil, as well as corsets, corset bone that they were making. These floating oil barrels basically, once you got your oil, the blubber out of the whale, distilled that down, they left the rest of it literally just out in the ocean. Which of course caused some serious problems, when your clear cutting the ocean of whales, you’re really wasting. What the inuit, in their world, it was a religious taboo, literally if you wasted any part of the whale it was against their religion it was so important to use every piece of it.
So in contrast in a world of scarcity, where whales are being treated as oil wells, you had tremendous waste. And eventually what happens actually the oil industry in Pennsylvania saves the whales ironically, and we find a new non replenishable source of energy, which we can save for another podcast as to what that approach is. So you’re looking at how scarcity breeds the innovation, abundance breeds this incredible types of waste. Now I look at, and when we talk about using the whole whale, were looking at how not for profits can look at technology and data, and what I see is we’re wasting a lot of the whale. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity out there when you think about how technology can be leveraged to increase our impact, to automate processes, to help basically more people. Beyond that even reach more people with our causes and our messages. What’s more, the data being created today, under the “big data” that is available, only a small piece of it, just if you will, the oil of it, or the very core parts, are just beginning to be used, when there is tremendous amounts of information that we could potentially leverage to watch what we’re doing. Now, of course this is not a

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