9 Questions with Ross Katz, ActWorthy Maestro
Ross Katz, Founder and Maestro of ActWorthy, wants to change the world.
After being born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Katz attended Duke University to study Public Policy and Economics. After college, he took a job as a consultant for corporate strategists in Washington DC, which he loved, especially the civic portion — -the Gettysburg Address, the Lincoln Memorial.
But he had always wanted to travel and learn another language, so after consulting in DC, he moved to Nanchang, China to teach English for a year. In Nanchang, he taught students at the university English, while he himself learned Mandarin through the web. Because of this, he discovered a passion for technology to facilitate learning and habit forming.
After Nanchang he went back to consulting, this time for media nonprofits. He soon discovered other passions: data science and social entrepreneurship. From this realization, he decided to go back to school and receive a masters in Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley in 2015.
ActWorthy, a web service that seeks to help grassroot movements by aggregating and organizing local events and actions, started as Katz’s capstone. The website tailors its events based on a user’s interests, values, and location.
ActWorthy just celebrated its launch party in January. The for-profit company moved into their official office space in MERGE last week. While this company is just starting out, Katz explains how and why ActWorthy is trying to change the world, starting in Iowa City.
- Tell me a bit about yourself, how did you get started?
In 2016, from a personal perspective, broke me a little bit. I had this belief that regardless of what your political beliefs were we had a shared set of values. 2016 sort of convinced me that I was naive to believe that. I started thinking about how I could make a difference, just as a citizen who had a full time job and was taking an online master’s degree. And I just found the entire process of trying to get involved really frustrating and challenging.
I was a data scientist with a degree in Public Policy. If it’s challenging and frustrating for me, how are people with none of that background trying to get involved? In the process of getting involved, I started donating to nonprofits and I signed up for the email lists and their newsletters and their text message alerts. And what I discovered was that they were all competing for my attention in my email inbox or my Facebook feed or my Twitter feed. And a lot of the messaging I was receiving was redundant and not reflective of what I care about or what my values are. They were mapping a set of values into me.So we created ActWorthy [to address that].
2. Has your passion for activism developed over time? Has it always been in the same place as this strong, or have you had challenges to it?
It has not always been this strong. I had this naive belief that the people who are in leadership roles broadly shared my values and were going to the things for our society, maybe not exactly what I would want, but close enough that I didn’t need to get involved in order to push them in my direction.
I also had this naive sense that I couldn’t make a difference. Even if I could, I hadn’t figured out how I wanted to make a difference. The barriers to entry seemed so high — -how much time I would need to invest, I was investing in my own career, investing time in my family, investing time in my education. So the sense that I could be civically engaged and politically active while doing all those things, I didn’t really feel like that was possible or necessary. Just the incentive structure wasn’t out there for me to do it.
3. How has your background in data science prepared and influenced you for this startup?
Without my background in data science, I couldn’t have thought through everything that would need to happen. I couldn’t have been able to conceive the way it work. I feel like I’m much more grounded in the concept of what’s possible than I ever would have been. It’s also helped me to consider how something scales and the way that these social media platforms work from a data perspective, help me to think through, “Ok, how can we create that, at a small level so that it can grow organically from something small to something much larger.” At least I believe that data science has prepared me to answer those questions — -only time will tell.
Data science has also given me the ability to do consulting work outside of this project that helps to pay my bills during the process of starting this up. Because if I was unable to pay rent while I was starting this up I might have approached it a little bit differently. I might have rushed it a bit faster than I did.
4. How come you chose the platform that you did as a mobile site, and not necessarily an app, or use a different platform like Google or Twitter?
Mobile apps are specific to your mobile phone. So if we create an iphone app, then we have to create another Android website. But all cellphones can go to a website. So building a website is a good way for us to prototype all the things that we would want in a mobile app without having to build a mobile app all the way. Over time hopefully the website becomes something that some people will use, but we will know what functionality people need so we can build a mobile app for Apple and a mobile app for android.
Why isn’t this just an app for Facebook or Google or Twitter? The answer is that all of the major platforms that we utilize on a day to day basis, they all have something in common: they’re all advertising supported. And the way that ad-supported platforms work is that the more attention that they can generate for their content, the more money they make. The way that you measure attention on these platforms is eyeballs and clicks.
Psychologically speaking, there are these really well-defined and refined ways of getting people to click on things and getting people to pay attention. And what you discover is that the way you get people to click on something is by evoking a really strong, powerful response to something. So that can be a really strong negative response like anger or jealousy or fear; or that can be a really strong positive response like awe, or elation or humor. So what you discover is that these are two polar opposite responses. The more your content can be both of those standards simultaneously, the better of it’s going to be at. So that creates an incentive for these platforms to magnify polarizing content in order to gain more eyeballs an clicks.
I believe that our public sphere should be separated from those incentives. We’re creating ActWorthy to create a new incentive. Which is that the more action you can provoke, the more you can get people to get involved in their community by feeding them really good ideas on how they can get involved, the more attention you can get. Because we’re going to help to magnify the actions that people are taking that are really making a difference.
5. What has been your experience starting ActWorthy? What have been the challenges and rewards?
It has been a roller coaster ride of emotion. I’m a yoga teacher, so being able to control my emotions and concentrate on my breath and be mindful of what I’m doing is a really important part of my life and my value system. I’ve notice that there are certain aspects of a startup that are really hard to deal with, one of which is that it’s hard to separate your sense of self worth from the thing that you’re building, that you really want to see be successful.
So that’s been a real challenge for me, believing in this thing and wanting to make ActWorthy the best thing it can be for the public sphere, but also not wanting to be investing too much of myself such that if ActWorthy fails, ‘I’m a failure’ or if ActWorthy succeeds, ‘I’m a success,” and that’s the only way I can judge myself.
The rewards are is that I wake up every morning, and I believe in what I do. Which is something that I haven’t always experienced in my life, in my career. I get to meet people and talk with people who are doing really good things in the world, and try to make them successful, try to brainstorm with them how they can be successful. And that’s something that I really enjoy and that I’m really passionate about.
6. Tell me about your decision to style yourself as the Maestro of ActWorthy. What led you to this title and what does it mean to you?
I believe that the words that we use have meaning. So when you call someone a “Chief Executive Officer”, or CEO, which is the typical title for the head of the organization. What that means is that they are the head, they are executing, they are an officer — which is sort of a military [term]. There’s this connotation of someone who is directing some to do things.
As I thought about what I wanted my title to be, I wanted my title to represent what my role actually is on the team. Maestro is like a conductor. They’re not playing all of the instruments in the orchestra, maybe they’re not even the best musician in every instrument on the team, but their job is to have a vision for what the final piece of art is supposed to look and feel and sound like. Their job is to bring out the absolute best in each of the individual members of the team in order to achieve that desired result.
We’re a diverse team of people who have their own unique skills. It’s my job to try to combine those skills together in a way that leads to a fantastic end product.
7. Can you tell me where the phrase “Get the democracy you deserve” comes from and how that drives your mission?
There’s two things about that. One is:
I believe that we do get the democracy we deserve. If we’re not happy with the outcomes our democracy is producing, we can point the blame at a lot of different things, but in a fundamental level, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
The other thing I believe is that if people are more civically engaged, the more participatory democracy is a better democracy. So if we can all become more participatory, and say the things that we want, and organize together to accomplish the goals that we want to accomplish, then we will get the democracy that we deserve.
ActWorthy is about taking action, it’s about getting people to act in their communities to make their communities better.
8. How do you think digital activism is changing or not changing?
I think there’s a lot more of it. That was one of the things that made me excited and optimistic about starting a platform like ActWorthy right now. I think there’s a lot more people trying to make a difference and trying to use the tools online to make that difference, I think that people are starting to realize that if they organize together that they can make an impact.
I think that more people believe now. I also see more young people, people younger than me who are raising their voices and getting involved, and trying to figure out the right way for them to make a difference. And that makes me optimistic. It makes me believe that even though our society is obsessed with gaining attention and being sponsored by someone and maintaining that attention in order to spread a brand, there are a lot of people who just want their society to do the right thing for its people.
9. Where do you see the future of digital activism heading, and what role do you see ActWorthy playing in it?
I fundamentally believe that activism by its nature has to happen in the world. If you’re trying to change the world, you can’t just change the internet. You have to change the world. So the tools that people use to change the world can be digital tools. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves is that by agreeing with each other on the internet is that we are somehow changing the world. Because what we’re really doing is just posting more content to the internet.
What I believe is that 10,000 people working on one issue in every state in the United States can change their society in regard to that issue. The question in my mind is how do those 10,000 people find each other and how do they work together to accomplish the goal that they have. I want ActWorthy to help them to find each other and to work together without them having to be all in the same place, doing the same thing.
I also want ActWorthy to set up an incentive structure that encourages those 10,000 people to collaborate and combine forces with the 10,000 people adjacent to them. So that those 10,000 people aren’t working alone, but can activate hundreds of thousands of people to do one thing that really makes a difference.
