Taking a page out of Ezra Klein’s playbook (and continuing our trend here of shamelessly copying features from other blogs…ahem), here are a few things I keep meaning to write about:
- The NC legislature commissioned a study report by a few of the best environmental and public policy academics in the state to look at water quantity and allocation. The report, currently in draft form (PDF), is very well done and a nice synthesis of policy and science. Water quantity is not the sexiest issue, but after recent severe droughts I think more folks are starting to give water policy the attention it deserves.
- The Acumen Fund invests in social enterprises around the world–businesses, generally operating at a below-market return for investors, that have as central tenets to their mission alleviating a social problem or improving lives of vulnerable populations. A recent think piece by Acumen’s Chief Investment Officer, Simple Measures for Social Enterprise (PDF), is a good reminder for social investors and philanthropists alike that sometimes just capturing consistent and reliable data can lead to greater improvements than the thorough impact assessments we all think of as ideal.
- I’ve been meaning to write about Nate Silver (creator and whiz behind fivethirtyeight.com) for a while. Even though the election is long past, this NY Times profile is worth a look.
- Speaking of the NY Times, this piece from the Magazine about the Netflix recommendation engine and the “Napoleon Dynamite problem” is fascinating (apparently Napoleon Dynamite is a love/hate kind of movie, and it’s nearly impossible to consistently predict whether someone will like it based on their other movie preferences).
We like getting e-mail, tweets, and feed shares about cool stuff that you think we should blog about. We also like creating new “series” of posts to a) establish sub-themes for the blog, b) encourage us to keep posting, and c) give us some shadow of legitimacy to hold onto. Additionally, if you can’t tell, prepositions are my favorite things to end sentences with. Thus is born a series we’re going to call “People Send Us Things”, and this story passed to us by Brika is just what we were looking… for.
Not too many people can legitimately include anything approaching the following in their bio/resume:
In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web.
Boom. Street Geek cred: check. The man who created teh internetz is none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and he’s on to a new project — the World Wide Web Foundation. This organization seeks to do the following:
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
Huh… that mission statement kinda reminds me of this little start-up in Mountain View. Anyway…
Continue reading ‘People Send Us Things, Part I: The World Wide Web Foundation’
I have another guest post up on Tactical Philanthropy today, this time talking about a number of different foundations that are using technology in innovative and effective ways. This post is essentially a recap of my favorite session from the conference I attended a few weeks ago. It’s been a hectic few weeks, which is why my post is so delayed.
While I recognize that few of Tropophilia’s readers are involved in formal philanthropy or the foundation world, I think many of these tools and lessons learned should be interesting to a variety of folks in many different types of organizations or fields.
Here are a few snippets of my post, you can read the rest here.
Amy Luckey from Blueprint Research and Design pointed out a number of examples of foundations using technology well, including [...]
A personal favorite, the Packard Foundation’s wiki on nitrogen pollution and agriculture strategy
[...]
Marc Osten, from Summit Collaborative, offered advice for those in the room who are facing an uphill battle bringing technology into their organizational culture OR are simply unaware of how to get started using these tools. First, he warned that getting caught up in specific tools (“We need a blog!”) without first carefully considering your organization’s goals—and what tools might help accomplish those goals—is a recipe for failure. This is a point that I think deserves highlighting, because it’s the reason (for example) that so many organizational blogs are launched with enthusiasm and then updated once a month or less. All the while, those (limited) resources could be more useful if deployed on other tools that better address the needs of the organization.
In a guest post on Tactical Philanthropy, I write about a session at the Council on Foundations conference called “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose.” This post might only be of real interest to folks who are involved in nonprofit fundraising or organized philanthropy, but I found the session really useful. Here’s an excerpt of my post:
I attended a session Monday afternoon that, frankly, won’t sound nearly as sexy and exciting as some of the topics covered recently by my fellow bloggers (micro philanthropy, socially responsible investing, venture philanthropy, etc). And yet “Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted from Purpose” spawned a great discussion about desperately needed measures for improving the grantmaking process that (I hope) a number of funders will implement when they return home from DC.
I go on to describe a few ideas that–while certainly not revolutionary–would help funder-grantee relations significantly, and help nonprofits (AND foundations) focus more on the important elements of their work. One example:
“Start[ing] from Zero:” the notion that foundation staff and board members should start from scratch and ask themselves “what information do I absolutely need?” to evaluate a grant proposal or project. Starting from zero means that funders should always be able to articulate to their grantees WHY they need follow-up materials, grant reports, a letter of support, etc. Many nonprofits interviewed for the study reported frustration from submitting reports to funders and not hearing any feedback. One nonprofit executive quoted in the study quipped: “We assume that [the funders] feed everything to a giant fiery furnace.” Starting from zero encourages funders to only request information that will be used in learning from grants or evaluating past and future efforts.
You can read the rest here. I should have one or two more guest posts at Tactical Philanthropy as I look back to my notes from the last few days. But let me take the opportunity to express what a pleasure it’s been to meet Sean and my fellow guest-bloggers this week, and to see segments of such a traditional-minded sector embrace blogging wholeheartedly. Good stuff; many thanks to Sean and Tactical Philanthropy for the opportunity.
I attended a fascinating session this morning on Social Entrepreneurship. I wrote up a bit of a (lengthy, but informative) play-by-play for Tactical Philanthropy. I’ll put a piece of it below, but you can check out the whole thing here.
How do we create a culture of social entrepreneurship in our community/funding area?
Bill Drayton spoke of the need to reach individuals at an early age in order to build successful adult social entrepreneurs. He emphasized what he termed “applied empathy” as a crucial component for change-makers.
Gregory Dees stressed that entrepreneurship—in the business OR social benefit world—is not easy to create. He argued that building the capacity of social entrepreneurs will depend on inspiring creativity, celebrating successes in a public way, and not stigmatizing failure. Failure is a natural part of the for-profit entrepreneurial world, and yet social entrepreneurs often face unrealistic expectations of success all the time.
I would add that one thing I didn’t cover too much in the guest post was the limitations of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Those themes weren’t covered very much in the session (to be fair, we were just touching on those topics when time ran out). BUT it should be stated that there certainly seems to be an environment (and perhaps a subset of problems) that are best-suited for social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, or social ventures. What exactly those conditions and problems are is still unclear to me, but it certainly seems that health issues and youth development in the developing world is one area where social entrepreneurship has had an enormous impact. More blogging to follow–it’s great to be blogging quasi-professionally!
Subscribe by feed
Subscribe by email
Follow on Facebook
