Watching this made me think about all the ways virtual worlds can change research. What if you, we, or a group of large funders used SecondLife as a virtual philanthropy simulator? This could be a way to build off the the non-virtual, non-simulated funding experiments like that being run by NetSquared.
Here are some questions that a simulated community might be able to help answer.
From the endowed foundation perspective, we/you/they could use the virtual space to see what happens if you show up at a meeting with a lot of money but no ideas.
- What if you show up with a lot of ideas but no money?
- What if you bring both?
- What if you, as grantmaker, were held accountable to how you defined the problem, whether or not you engaged the right partners, and how much of other people's money you could move, by virtue of your own compelling, valuable work?
- What if you tried to rely on markets for every social good?
- What if every market entity had to report out a "triple bottom line?"
- What if every NGO had to earn 50% of its operating budgets from fees?
- What if mergers/acquisitions were rewarded the way they are in market economies?
- What if you ask the community to define not only the problem, but the process, and measure success?
- What if every individual action were matched by an anonymous contribution?
- Is there a level of transparency about grantmaking decisions that is too high?
- What if nothing could be endowed?
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2 comments:
Your suggestion about conducting philanthropy experiments in the virtual world is intriguing. But what Id give to see some of those things tried right now in the real world. Things like:
"What if you, as grantmaker, were held accountable to how you defined the problem, whether or not you engaged the right partners, and how much of other people's money you could move, by virtue of your own compelling, valuable work?"
What if you did that?
You don't need a virtual anything to do this. A good Web 1.0 site could do this just as well. You could probably do this with good forum software. Second Life is generally speaking, a bad simulator -- you can't get good analytics out of it since you don't control server access and don't have access to the server logs.
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