Who’s Missing from this Picture?

This is Ashton Kutcher conferring with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in Moscow on Tuesday. They are part of a delegation of techtopians sent by the State Department to Russia. According to the New York Times straight-faced report of the visit (always missing an opportunity for a delicious satire over there at the regal Times), “Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking..”

Of course, nothing wrong with anyone making the case anywhere in the world of the power of people-to-people activism fueled by social media to make enormous differences in their lives and their governments. Although using my tax dollars to send Ashton Kutcher across the globe does give me pause.

The problem is that there is someone ( a lot of someones, actually) missing from this photo – missing from the whole delegation. The heads of E-Bay and Mozilla were there, as was the brilliant Esther Dyson who has spent a good part of her career focused on ways to use technology for the common good.

But why didn’t it occur to anyone in the State Department to include someone in the delegation who actually does this work – who works to build civic society using social media every day – to the event?

If the purpose of the delegation was to promote the use of social media for building small businesses it would be expected that the contingent would include mainly for profit business folks. So, why doesn’t that same axiom hold true when talking about civic society?

Because, once again and for the umpteenth time, the assumption by outside observers is that what we do is pretty easy. See, all you have to do is log onto Twitter, it’s free and so easy to use that Ashton and Demi do it all the time, and poof! civil society building just magically happens. The strategy and network weaving that are beneath all of the recent successful efforts to use social media for social change are either dismissed, or more likely, not understood and therefore not included as part of the discussion.

So, Jared Cohen or anyone over at the State Department, if you’re listening, why don’t you think about inviting folks like Robert Egger or Beth Kanter or Katya Andresen, or Katrin Verclas to speak knowledgeably about what it takes to use social media for social change.

Database of Social Entrepreneurs From Social Edge

Exciting news over at Social Edge. They have just released a widget for a searchable database of vetted social entrepreneurs. I imagine happy chirty sounds coming from Lucy Bernholz’s boggy part of the world! According to the web announcement:

“This open source database is available to anyone who wishes to query, syndicate, or republish the data on their own websites.  To make it super simple, we have created widgets so anyone can search and add a real-time list of social entrepreneurs to their webpage.”

A few things of interest in this announcement. A group of funders working together to share their databses of people and organizations in whom they’ve invested is a welcome development. Making the database sharable through the widgets is a great idea. And enabling social entrepreneurs to connect with one another by geography or issue area is an important step in the creation of a more cohesive field.

$50K Prize for Entrepreneurship

The Hitachi Foundation is offering a prize of $50,000 for six young entrepreneurs. The Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs program will select up to six winners who meet the following criteria:

• The entrepreneur must have established his or her business with the expressed dual purpose of operating a successful business and accelerating upward economic mobility for low-wealth individuals in America;
• He or she must be at least 18 years old, and must have been 29 years old or younger when the business began generating revenue;
• The business must be 1-5 years old and have been generating revenue for at least the past 12 months;
• The award is open to businesses organized as “for profit” or “nonprofit,” but must depend primarily on an earned-income revenue model.

This is a really great opportunity for some enterprising young person – please help spread the word!

Glasspockets is a Start for Transparency

The Foundation Center announced a new effort called Glasspockets last week. The name comes from Russell Leffingwell, Chair of the Carnegie Corporation in 1952, “We think that the foundation shoudl have glass pockets.”

The site dives deep into the internal processes, rules and procedures of ten of the largest foundations in the country: Carnegie, Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Irvine, Kellogg, MacArthur, Packard, Moore and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Each foundation has a page on the site. On each page is a long list of criteria intended to add up to transparency and accountability. The list includes governance policies, hr procedures, financial information, performance measurement and communications channel. Each broad category is broken down into sub parts. For instance, here is the portion of the page for the Carnegie Corporation dedicated to governance:

The magnifying glasses indicates that those data are available. [Personal Peeve Alert: clicking on a magnifying glass downloads a document. I'd much rather have a pop up window rather than these PDFs now sitting on my desktop.]

No complaints here about foundations sharing more information about how they operate. However (you kinda knew a “However” was coming, didn’t you?) I wouldn’t call it Transparency 2.0 as the site claims. This is Transparency 1.0, and again, it’s a good thing, however, it just scratches the tip of what transparency in philanthropy could be.

There has been a lot of discussion of transparency and philanthropy over the past six months. I’ve written about it from the nonprofit perspective, Lucy and Elizabeth Miller have from the philanthropic side. And each one of us have urged institutions to think of transparency as a value not a process or a tool.

Standing behind a glass wall isn’t transparency. Taking the wall down, whatever it’s made of, is what we’re aiming for. In our book, The Networked Nonprofit, Beth and I call this acting more like sponges – the natural kind, that are anchored to the ocean floor but open themselves to a huge amount of water and nutrients rushing through. As Michael Hamill Remaley writes on the Public Policy Communicators blog, “But until foundations are willing to simply open themselves up publicly to examination and critique, they will never truly be understood or accepted as leaders in social change.”

Yes, it’s good to know how the Ford Foundation compensates its executive staff and I certainly don’t want to go back to not knowing. But Transparency 2.0 means that the foundation’s program officers, not just its communications staff, was on Twitter discussing what they were learning, what they were planning, and their struggles. Here’s my advice to the Foundation Center. Keep going wiht this area of the site, but call it Transparency 1.0 (I didn’t say they would do it, just what my advice would be!) Then create another area of the site called Transparency 2,0 with examples of Foundations like the Case Foundation using social media to really engage with world.  H and maybe we shouldn’t expect the largest, most visible foundations to get there first, but we can start to define what we hope, ultimately, philanthropic transparency will look and feel like. We’re inching our way there.

Beth Shulman in Remembrance

Last Friday my friend Beth Shulman passed away. She had been battling brain cancer for about a year and died from complications from pneumonia. Here is an obituary from the Washington Post. That article will tell you all of the facts of Beth’s life. I want to tell you about my friend.

We were Fellows together at Demos, but I met Beth earlier when we were both clients of Pro-Media. Passionate is the best word to describe her. She was passionate about the need for us, as a country, to find mechanisms and create policies to treat all working people with dignity, to provide living wages, paid sick leave and paid family leave. She wrote a seminal book on low wage workers, “The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans” (2003).

It would have been very easy for Beth to pick an easier cause. Advocacy of low-wage workers has never been sexy or popular, particularly during the go-go years when they were invisible. But Beth’s passion and determination never wavered, her commitment never waned. I will miss her voice and passion, we will all miss her leadership.

One thing that Beth was passionate about was leaving a tip in her hotel room for the underpaid, underappreciated, nonunionized hotel cleaning staff. I call it Beth’s tip. I hope you’ll consider leaving Beth’s tip the next time you stay at a hotel.

I Have a FREE HP Laptop and Printer to Give Away!

Morning, peeps, I’ve got a special surprise today!  Beth and I have helped to plan and assess online contests such as America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation over the past several years. Now, we’re part of a group of bloggers who get to help sponsor a contest and give away free HP stuff!

The giveaway is part of the HP Create Change effort. For every purchase from the Create Change site that is part of the HP direct purchase website, HP will donate 4% to one of the following seven nonprofits that you can designate. The nonprofits are: American Red Cross, CARE, DonorsChoose.org, Junior Achievement, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure, World Wildlife Fund.

You can download a widget for the HP Create Change effort form their site and follow their conversation on Facebook.

Back to our contest. HP has asked me and a few fantastic bloggy friends: Beth (of course!), Tom Watson, Katya Andresen’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog, Jolly Mom, and Amy Sample Ward to ask our readers a question about social change. And then each of us bloggers will pick a winner from the comments on our blog.

So, here’s my question to you: What conversations on which social media channels do you  most want to have with your community this year?

Extra points will be given to anyone who works Foursquare or Tumblr into their answer!

AF Note: The contest closes on February 26th!

Nonprofit Disaster Accountability

The epic earthquake in Haiti was notable for the horrific damage it left in its literal wake. The aftermath has been notable for the huge amounts of private money donated for relief efforts. The combination of urgency and ease of giving through tools like text messaging has added up to$644 million to date according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This is still considerably less than the $2 billion pledged by governments around the world according to Chronicle reporter Ian Wilhelm. Still that’s a heck of a lot of money donated to Haiti.

A heck of a lot of money without any accountability.

There have been recent efforts, such as Recovery.gov and the Disaster Accountability Project are web based efforts to track the expenditure of public funds.

Is this part of the Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund effort? Hard to tell, they appear to be still in the fundraising mode. It is curious to me as to why these kinds of focus point funds for disasters aren’t ready to go before disasters strike. Why don’t we just make a permanent past president’s fund for disasters that is ready to go within minutes of an effort to focus giving?

OK, back on topic. Some entity, somewhere needs to provide an outside accounting of how these private funds were used – otherwise, we won’t learn how to efficiently and effectively use an enormous amount of money to meet an enormous need in a timely way. And this effort needs to be as transparent as possible about the criteria for assessment and results. And it needs to start now.

Demand Question Time!

As always, my friend Micah Sifry and his pals at Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident are up to some good fun!

If you didn’t see the debate that President Obama had with the House Republicans last week, you absolutely must. It was inspiring to see elected officials have real, civil dialogue about real issues. Here’s a clip:

This needs to continue, it’s good for the country, for the citizenry, for these kinds of exchanges to continue. to that end, Micah and friends launched a new site this morning called “Demand Question Time!” It’s pretty self-explanatory, let’s get our elected leaders to keep doing this. Micah asked me to sign onto the effort on Monday and it was a no-brainer for me. Of course, Micah has a cross-partisan group of supporters working with him on this including Mike Moffo, David Corn, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds.

Please go and sign the petition and share it on Twitter and Facebook – no more politics as usual!!

Ushahidi Puts All the Pieces Together

Ushahidi is the Swahili word for testimony or witness. It is also a relatively new organization that represents all of the pieces of the digital convergence to crowdsource crisis information.

Ushahidi began in 2008 in the wake of the stolen election in Kenya. The government controlled television and land line telephone service, but it couldn’t control cell phones. The Ushahidi organizers used text messaging and a website to track incidents of violence around the country and keep protesters informed of the government’s response. Ushaidi then replicated its efforts in Congo, Gaza, election in India, and to track the outbreak of swing flu. Ushahidi enables local people to report on a situation. Those reports are then mapped and displayed in creative ways to get an immediate idea of what is happening during a crisis in one country or around the world.

Now Ushahidi is tracking the crisis in Haiti. On a page designated for Haiti, Ushahidi provides a map that one can zoom in on and see reports according to a reporting scale of: emergency, threats, vital lines (meaning, I think infrastructure systems in place or not like phone lines and sewers), response, news about people. [Note: I wanted to show you a map and a graph of when reports came in here but, alas, they didn't copy clearly.] So go to the site and take a peek, it really is a smorgasbord of information about what is happening where in Haiti since the crisis.

But there is a larger narrative going on with Ushahidi. The ideas and social media channels it utilizes didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Ushahidi is building on a history of on-the-ground activism using mobile phones that goes back to 1992 when thousands of young Filipinos used text messaging to get out the vote in their national election. In 2005 the women of Kuwait used mobile devices to successfully advocate for full women’s suffrage. In early 2008, Andy Carvin and a team of independent techies used mobile and web technologies to track people’s needs during hurricane season. That effort morphed into Twitter Vote Report during the 2008 election, and that informed the Crisis Commons, an amazing network of individuals using their technical skills to create a wide variety of tools, databases and maps in a crisis like Haiti. We can trace the genealogy of Ushahidi to these efforts that all have common DNA that includes large crowds of people sharing their stories using mobile devices, open source software that can be adapted and improved by new communities, and great mashups of the data that creates moving visualizations.

Ushaidi has hit all of the right notes in their efforts – it will interesting to see where the geneaological tree grows next!