These core concepts shape the work we do and how we do it.
The first-hand, longitudinal account of a person’s own lived experience — not a single snapshot, but an evolving experiential record of what someone values, needs, and aspires to over time. The nature and quality of living data is inextricably linked to human agency and well-being.
The capacity to intentionally shape one’s own life — not simply respond to circumstances, but act with forethought, reflect on one’s own choices, and influence the course of one’s own experience. It’s what makes someone a partner in their own story, not a subject of someone else’s research.
The complex, evolving, and emergent account of how the lives of individuals, families, and communities are going — economic, social, physical, mental, and cultural conditions together, that includes how people themselves experience and describe their life, not just what’s easiest to observe from the outside.
The ethical infrastructure that makes living data possible — technology designed and governed in the public interest, not for profit or surveillance. It gives individuals real agency to own, understand, and act on their own information to advance the well-being of themselves, their families, and communities, and it gives mission-driven efforts the information they need to act as responsive, ethical stewards of it.
An ecosystem of interconnected, interdependent parts — people, institutions, resources — whose interactions produce patterns and outcomes that no single part could produce alone. Change in one part ripples through the whole, and impact emerges throughout relationships, not any single actor’s design. Through living data, centering human agency, we listen to this system as it evolves; well-being is the outcome we assess; and public-interest technology is how we act responsibly within.
An explicit account of how and why a given set of actions is expected to lead to a specific, long-term outcome — naming the assumptions and steps that connect what we do to the change we intend it to produce. Where a complex adaptive system describes how the world we work in behaves, a theory of change is the discipline we apply to act deliberately and test within it.