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News for November 2007
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 27 November 2007 |
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| The Internet Bill of Rights |
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If you don't focus regularly on topics related to networks and the Internet in particular, you might sometimes lose track of what the key issues are and how they relate to each other. Network neutrality? Open standards? Interoperability? What do all these things mean again? Well, you pretty much have one place to look and it's called The Internet Bill of Rights. It represents the culmination of a lot of thinking into what aspects of the Internet have given rise to so much freedom and innovation, and which therefore must be preserved. This document is actually starting to get some policy traction in Europe and you or your organization can easily add your support. If you or your organization have in any way benefited from the qualities that make the Internet what it is, then you should definitely participate in some way: add your name, print it out and post it, link to it, circulate it, advocate for it.
Posted: 11/27/07; 3:17:47 PM # |
| Five Exercises in Listening |
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We usually associate teaching more with talking than with listening, which is unfortunate. In Exercises in Listening, Asher Bey tries to address that issue at least a bit by offering five incredibly simple pieces of advice to teachers: (1) Stop talking. (2) Stop thinking about talking when you are not talking. (3) Make an opening for the student to talk. (4) Seek moments of silence between you and the student. These are moments in which nothing need be said, and in which perhaps nothing is being said. (5) Ask questions.
Posted: 11/27/07; 3:12:22 PM # |
| The Cuneiform Code: The Knowledge Management Three |
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In The Cuneiform Code (the first of two posts), Gavin Clabaugh presents the "three essential elements of effective knowledge management", which he calls the KM-3: (1) Have a clear idea of the things you want to keep. (2) Know where to keep things: have an organized, centralized place that everybody knows and everybody uses. (3) Have an EASY way to find it again, quickly and easily, without the need for some specialized knowledge or secret decoder ring. As usual, this is practical advice, delivered with Gavin's inevitable humor. I particularly liked the part about "feeding the beast" (getting knowledge into the system on an ongoing basis). Indeed, I would probably push this further and say that the best systems are the ones that are, at least initially, designed around feeding.
Posted: 11/27/07; 3:09:06 PM # |
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26 November 2007 |
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| Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Thanksgiving |
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For a variety of personal reasons - deaths in the family and a European upbringing - Thanksgiving is a holiday during which I prefer to go spend time at the ocean and avoid large groups. Hence I am a little removed from the very real tensions surrounding the holiday. I am to some degree persuaded by Robert Jensen's arguments in Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Thanksgiving, but I tend to think that the tension between the traditional autumnal abundance celebration and a desperately needed "day of atonement" should not be resolved in favor of one or the other. I would love to find a way in which giving thanks and making amends can work side by side. That's how life really is, after all.
Posted: 11/26/07; 10:53:43 PM # |
| Programming Collective Intelligence |
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The more I reflect on Toby Segaran's book on Programming Collective Intelligence, the more strongly I want to recommend it to those who pursue a long term, system oriented vision of civil society. When you think about civil society, democracy, economics, and other structural expressions of social will, the more you realize that a large part of what we are all trying to do is figure out ways of turning a mass of individuals into an intelligent group. That's what Amazon's product recommendation system tries to do. And that's what voting tries to do.
Sometimes the masses are stupider than the individuals and sometimes they are wiser. What determines the difference is a combination of the nature of the problem to be addressed, the scales involved, and the structures (or programs) used to go from individual action to group action. Every method described in the book - from decision trees to genetic algorithms - is a source of inspiration for anyone working to figure out how to empower groups of people. Don't let the very modest amount of math in the book stop you from taking your time with each gem and seeing how it could connect to your work.
Posted: 11/26/07; 10:47:52 PM # |
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18 November 2007 |
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| Charities and the American Police State |
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I got a lot of hate mail when I wrote The Nonprofit Sector and the March Toward Tyranny, but I wasn't wrong. Just look at the fate of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, one of seven Muslim charities that have been shut down by the US government. Not one of these charities and not one of their leaders has actually been convicted of "supporting terrorism", but that innocence doesn't matter. If the government doesn't like what you are doing, they can destroy you with charges and executive orders alone. Chris Hedges uses some pretty strong language in his description of what is happening to civil society in the US, but I agree with every word, including his conclusion: "I am sure terrorists will strike again on American soil. But while terrorists can wound and disrupt our democracy, only we can kill it."
Posted: 11/18/07; 10:20:32 PM # |
| Creating Online Surveys |
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Nonprofits do a lot of surveys, but in my experience most of them are close to meaningless. There are no doubt many cauese for this, among them the fact that our high school science classes seem to fail at teaching people basic experimental design. This is why I'm particularly pleased to recommend Arthur Prokosch primer on Creating Online Surveys at Third Sector New England. Given how much cheaper it has become for organizations to conduct surveys, Prokosch's recommendations (among other useful tips) on how to design questions that will give meaningful results are of timely value.
Posted: 11/18/07; 10:20:25 PM # |
| How to Survive Creative Burnout |
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Connected as it is with the idea of heat and passion, I'm fascinated by the phrase "burn out". Sometimes I think the concept distracts us from the real issues that cause motivation to flag, but sometimes it's a term that can be used constructively. Scott Berkun's recent essay on How to Survive Creative Burnout is an example of the latter. While my own work on this subject has tended to address deeper issues of the creative tension between authentic work and everyday realities, Berkun simply packs in a lot of practical tips, while focusing on some of the classic patterns of burn out among those of us who do creative work most of the time.
Posted: 11/18/07; 10:20:12 PM # |
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12 November 2007 |
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| The Point: General Purpose Critical Mass Organizing |
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I am considering experimenting with The Point, a critical mass oriented organizing tool that can be used for much more than just fundraising. As with other such tools, the idea is that you recruit people to help, but their commitment only kicks in when there is a critical mass of support reached. For example, it can be used to organize boycotts, which are largely ignored when practiced piecemeal, but can have remarkable impact when done in a critical mass.
Posted: 11/12/07; 10:08:25 PM # |
| World Community Grid |
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Distributed computing projects are rarely mentioned when people are writing about large scale volunteer efforts, but I think they deserve much more attention than botnets, their involuntary evil counterparts. For example, the World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. You can volunteer your unused computing cycles (which is most of them) to projects related to climate, cancer research, AIDS, and many others.
Posted: 11/12/07; 10:05:07 PM # |
| Charities Trying Mergers to Improve Bottom Line |
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In an article whose title bothers me slightly - Charities Trying Mergers to Improve Bottom Line - Stephanie Strom of the New York Times writes about some recent high profile nonprofit mergers. She acknowledges that experts are not predicting a rash of mergers, despite occasional pressures in that direction, and goes on to describe collaborations that go a long way toward addressing some of those same pressures.
Posted: 11/12/07; 9:58:19 PM # |
| A Typology of Fairness |
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Over at The Nexilist's Notebook, Burt Webb describes Sandi Greer's typology of fairness. We concern ourselves a great deal with this notion in social change and social service organizations alike. In the former, we want to make things fair and in the latter we want to help those whom we feel life has treated unfairly. But as Burt points out, there are many different notions of fairness. Do we mean equality? Mercy? Justice? How does the context change the meaning? It makes me wonder how often we ask ourselves what we really mean when we say something is fair or unfair. If we pulled at the meanings, would it change how we feel? Would we focus our work at a deeper level?
Posted: 11/12/07; 9:54:11 PM # |
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1 November 2007 |
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| Charity Navigator’s Vital Mission Hides Flawed Rankings |
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My colleague Michael Soper, writing at his blog Rare Medium, looks at how Charity Navigator’s Vital Mission Hides Flawed Rankings. He addresses the obvious flaws of numerical ratios drawn from financial reports and how that methodology contradicts Charity Navigator's own suggestions for evaluating nonprofit success. Obviously, it's much cheaper to use the numbers that are easy to get, no matter how bad a metric that produces. Michael closes by making a case for why it's actually a wonderful thing that there are no uniform metrics and I find that I agree.
Posted: 11/1/07; 10:07:32 AM # |
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