tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3614581.post111532648975798660..comments2024-03-28T03:11:22.839-07:00Comments on PHILANTHROPY 2173: A month's worth of musings...Lucy Bernholzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09253941214286179394noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3614581.post-1115339712004028392005-05-05T17:35:00.000-07:002005-05-05T17:35:00.000-07:00I'm not sure you can make sense of what is going o...I'm not sure you can make sense of what is going on. There are big, in fact massive, changes going in technology, the economy and society that go straight to the heart of issues of social justice, equality of opportunity, political participation, and many other social issues.<BR/><BR/>Those changes (intellectual property, information originating from individuals rather than corporate media, open source, power at the edge of the network, etc.) tend to be complex and very difficult for the philanthropic/ nonprofit sector to understand, much less assimilate.<BR/><BR/>Heck, the philanthropic/ nonprofit sector is just understanding what a database is and why its important. Microedge's GIFTS, prehistoric and clunky technology, is and will remain into the foreseable future, the market leader.<BR/><BR/>The danger is that the third sector is missing an historic opportunity to leverage some amazing technologies and trends before corporate consumer capitalism co-opts them into quarterly profits. <BR/><BR/>Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), out on the bleeding edge of technology and trends has venture capital financing. In a few years, the transformative nature of that technology will have been harnessed to drive quarterly revenues through data mining and advertising revenues. But how many philanthropists have heard of del.icio.us or can even understand the transformative nature of unstructured knowledge tagged by individuals and shared openly throughout the community?<BR/><BR/>This is why the new breed of philanthropic organizations (Omidyar, Google Foundation) are structured to invest in for profit firms... the nonprofit sector is pecieved to be bereft of innovation, creativity or significant impact.<BR/><BR/>And this is because the philanthropic community doesn't spend enough time understanding the ever changing environment, identifying and understanding trends, and investing accordingly.<BR/><BR/>If the for-profit sector (even with the nice name of "social enterprise") becomes the new vehicle for doing good in the world, I fear for the values we will have lost along the way.David Geilhufehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15515132554389517815noreply@blogger.com