PHILANTHROPY 2173: May 2016

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Thoughts on democracy from the U.S. capital

I've been thinking...

Suing news outlets with whom you don't agree is not philanthropy. Wealthy individuals litigating an agenda by themselves (and secretly) is different from "impact litigation" led by public interest groups, (even when financed by a few individuals). (see below * on associational power)

The arc of platform consolidation built on the back of personal data that has contributed to the collapse of independent journalism is a story line we may see repeated in the nonprofit sector writ large.

Community-governed, small, independent associations - which de Tocqueville noted as core to American democracy - are threatened by homogenizing pushes for scale, efficiency, short-term metrics, and earned revenue.

These associations are key to what scholars call social capital, political wonks call civic engagement, and neighbors recognize as community. We overlook these roles of nonprofits and associations at our peril.

They are bulwarks against both economic and political monoculturalism. Otherwise known as inequality and tyranny.

Associations fill this role in at least two ways. First, they provide support for a diversity of views.
* Second, their governance structure is intended to involve multiple people as a form of public accountability and mechanism by which power can be scrutinized. Toward this end, transparency and public reporting requirements for associations (and sits in tension with anonymity). We're fooling ourselves if we think concentrated wealth or power is any less threatening in a nonprofit or philanthropic guise.

Pluralism requires a diversity of options, in associational life and digital space, with distributed governance.

There is no independent sector in digital space.

Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Archive are our first models of civil society organizations purpose built for the digital age. We all manage digital resources now. We need new institutional forms.

We need local, community-led associations - distributed, fragmented, pluralistic, and contentious - equipped to help us dedicate our private resources - time, money, and data - to public benefit.

Monday, May 09, 2016

Redesigning civil society organizations

Digital data are everywhere. They are replicable, generative, storable, scalable, nonrival and nonexcludable. Digital data are different enough from time and money - the two resources around which most of our existing institutions are designed - that it's time to redesign those institutions.

It's time for institutional innovation.

Nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations are familiar corporate forms that manage private monies (and time) for public benefit. Their corporate structure, reporting, and governance requirements direct resources to the public mission and provide bulwarks against misuse of financial resources. There is nothing in their corporate code or governance structure that equips them to do the same with digital data.

We need a new type of organization to manage and protect digital data for public benefit, especially digital data that is voluntarily contributed by individuals or other organizations.

There are a lot of building blocks for something like this. We know a lot about governance, digital data, and organizations. We have lots of models from participatory development to community based data collection to trust forms. We have ethical scaffolding in biomedical research and digital data collection that we can draw from. There are legal experts, design thinkers, experienced digital data users, digital rights activists, research reports and people from vulnerable communities who can inform the design of new structures.

There are many driving forces and vested interests. A map like this one - for this issue - would be helpful.

It's time that we:

Assume digital resources are here to stay
Get past pilot projects and stop acting like using digital data is a one-off action
Develop systems and standards for using digital resources well and safely
Use what we know from adjacent sectors, and
Reinvent organizational governance - possibly reinvent organizations - to manage digital data for mission.

The Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford is hosting a workshop on the role of Community Focused Ethical Review Processes as one step. We'll look at how a variety of nonprofits and corporations are developing new mechanisms to inform how they collect and use digital data from their communities. We'll report out on it and use what we learn to inform an ongoing effort to imagine - and reinvent - the institutional forms we need.

Friday, May 06, 2016

Resources - Tech for Social Good

I just finished teaching a continuing studies class at Stanford on Tech for Social Good. My colleague and co-teacher, Rob Reich and I assembled this list of free online sites to follow/ newsletters to read for the class. I thought I'd share it here as well. Enjoy! (and let me know what I'm missing)

Civic Hall and Personal Democracy Forum (and First Post newsletter)

http://civichall.org/civicist

Data & Society Institute

http://www.datasociety.net/

Equal Future – Social Justice and Technology

https://www.equalfuture.us/

Knight Foundation Tech for Civic Engagement

http://www.knightfoundation.org/funding-initiatives/tech-engagement/

Markets For Good
http://www.marketsforgood.org

NYU Gov Lab - Friday newsletter
http://www.thegovlab.org/

Social Good

http://mashable.com/category/social-good/

Stanford Cyber Initiative Blog ( great weekly newsletter)