Nonprofits and Transparency

Lucy Bernholz, in her usual smart and insightful way, has written a terrific post on philanthropy and transparency, Downsides of Transparency. She is riffing on an article that Larry Lessig wrote for the New Republic entitled, Against Transparency.

Lessig’s arguments are more provocative than right. There is, of course, nothing inherently bad with opening up the black hole of government and sharing data with the public. And the Sunlight Foundation, of which Lessig is oddly an adviser, has led the charge in making data available to the public to enable it to connect the dots of connections between contributions, lobbyists and legislation. Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, the co-founders of the Sunlight Foundation, make a terrific counter argument to Lessing writing, “we argue that more transparency in politics will enable a healthy dynamic of rising public attention and engagement in demanding more accountability from government.”

As one would imagine, there was considerable pushback against Lessig’s take around the web. You can see different opinions here, by Patrice McDermott a long-time advocate for government openness, and David Weinberger here, and in the incomparable way that only he can, Micah Sifry here.

I don’t buy Lessig’s argument that there is such as thing as too much transparency in government. But I do buy Lucy’s concern that requiring too much transparency of foundations may drive them into the dark, back rooms without any sunlight of donor advised funds. The difference is that government is public and foundations are private entities. Even with their enormous tax breaks, foundations are private entities that more than any other kind of  institution has very little incentive to make their operations and programs more open and transparent except out of a noble assumption that by doing so they will be more effective.

My area of interest is in nonprofit organizations, which I think in some ways are harder to get our hands around in regards to transparency (does everyone thing that their sector is the most important?)  because nonprofits aren’t public entities and aren’t as private as foundations. We’re somewhere in between. Esther Dyson was right when she said at Transparency Camp a few months ago, “You cannot be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.” And, of course, no one would want a social service agency to reveal the private files of their clients or a clinic to reveal their health records. So, where is the transparency middle ground for nonprofits?

We need to begin from one fundamental premise: Transparency is not a technology tool. It is aided by technology. At its core, a value that creates organizational norms. The default setting for too many nonprofit organizations, to date, has been to the closed, proprietary side of the dial. We need a new transparency default setting and err on the side of openness, or sunlight as Ellen would say!

Nonprofits need to begin to ask themselves questions about transparency to guide their work. These questions include:

1. Will sharing this information advance our mission of benefiting our community?

2. How can others build on our content and make it better?

3. Will revealing this information improve morale and make staff feel better informed and able to make decisions on their own?

4. Will sharing this information better connect us to our network and help us to build relationships that we need to be successful?

Nonprofits spend too much time worrying about things that could go wrong or how they might be able to create a new revenue stream with their content. Both conversations are time spent putting up big walls between organizations and their communities. Take the walls down, make transparency the default setting.

Our “Aha” Moments

I had a terrific time as part of a panel yesterday at Baruch College called Social Media and Technology: What Nonprofits Need to Know. The event was co-sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum. The other panelists were:

• Andrew Rasiej, Founder of Personal Democracy Forum
• Deanna Zandt, Media Technologist, Consultant, and Author of the forthcoming book: Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking

The moderator was the spectacular Kyra Gaunt, muscicologist, anthropologist, technologist and every other ologist you can think of!

Farra Trumpeter was in attendance and wrote a terrific summary of the event. But a conversation began during the session on Twitter and continued afterwards that I thought was great fun. Micah Sifry, Andrew’s co-founder at PDF, was tweeting the event. Kyra asked the panelists about their personal “Aha” moments with social media. Mine was the amazing story of the women of Kuwait who used their blackberries, often beneath their burkas, to successfully pass full women’s suffrage in 2005. That was the story that led to my writing Momentum. The end of that story was this spring when, again using their blackberries and personal networks, four women were elected to the Kuwaiti legislature!

Micah started to use the hashtag #aha on Twitter and asked others to tweet their own personal social media aha moments. For hours last night, people around the world were sharing their stories. They included:

• Micah kicked off the tweets by writing: My SocMed #aha moment was when someone in a #SXSW panel asked the mod for a #hashtag & neither of us knew what he meant
• antheawatson: Arriving May 08 in rural IN as an Obama FO + finding group of vols with an office doing voter contact. They met on MyBo.
• Sarah Granger: My #socialmedia #aha moment: launching Gary Hart’s presidential exploratory blog early 2003. Instant community.
• Pierre Omidyar: @pierre: My #aha: 1996: people using eBay to defy stereotypes and connect unexpectedly with strangers over common passions.

What a great way to extend the panel beyond the walls of the conference room and an absolutely perfect way of using Twitter to share experiences. Thanks, Micah!

Note: Micah just spotted a mistake here with his eagle eye. The tweet attributed to him above about SXSW was actually from Hash Tager. Micah’s “aha” moment is here.

Off to Politics Online

I’ll be speaking at the 2008 Politics Online Conference tomorrow.  I’m on a panel moderated by Micah Sifry with Ben Rattry of Change.org and Randall Winston of Project Agape which manages the Causes application for Facebook.

I’ve been thinking about the intersection of causes and  social networks for a while now and am intrigued more by what we don’t know than what we do.  It seems to me that there is something about the networks that catalyze a cause that are fundamentally different from those that don’t.  Maybe, it’s in large part serendipity, a volatile mix of people and issues at a particular time that has folks talking about Darfur or Obama or Jena Six.  But, I think it is more complicated than that.  I’m still exploring and open to suggestions.

One thing that separates this conference out from most others is the inside-the-Beltway make-up of the attendees.  I’ll be very curious to see what their take is, so far, on the primary elections.  Stay tuned!

I’m Not Sure We Are Having an Election

My friend, Micah Sifry, writes here about the woeful information on the Board of Elections websites for New York State. According to the Board, the next primary election in New York is last September, to match last November’s election. It wouldn’t be quite so woeful, I guess, if the primaries were scheduled for next fall, about a year away, but we’re having a presidential primary in New York State in two months!

This is similar to what I saw and wrote about in California on Election Day (here), it didn’t appear that California’s officials who decertified almost all of the machinery used on Election Day, have a game plan for their primary that also happens in about 60 days.

This may be one of the few instances when when we should be thankful that the Board of Elections in New York State is so utterly incompetent — at least we haven’t spent millions of dollars on election machinery that doesn’t work!