2013 philanthropy buzzword predictions

I have a half-drafted post on 3D printing - which I was going to upload as the first Philanthropy Buzzword of the year. President Obama's mention of the technology in his #SOTU certainly caught my attention.

But I think privacy is actually going to be the bigger theme of 2013 - data privacy, online personal privacy, privacy policies on websites and about data usage. I think we're going to all start wondering "Why don't I own my own data? And why aren't I in charge of what happens with it?" (There are plenty of privacy issues associated with 3D printing)

So, for something new and different this year, I'm asking you to chime in on which of these two concepts you think we'll all be talking about, experimenting with, reading about, possibly funding, possibly failing to comprehend in 2013 -

• 3D printing and its accompanying "tangible data" implications OR
• Privacy, personal, online, data-related

Chime in in the comments or tweet me at @p2173. Both concepts will, no doubt, make the final 2013 philanthropy buzzword list but which should come first?

I'd also welcome your thoughts on why they matter to philanthropy and civil society. And, sure, go ahead, suggest some other buzzwords for the year while you're at it. Thanks.

Transparency. Sounds real good if you say it real fast.

I had a colleague years ago who used to respond to every new big idea in school reform with "Sounds real good if you say it real fast." The point being that the devil is in the details on doing anything new.

I have a feeling a few foundation leaders may be feeling this way about transparency right about now.

Yesterday I saw this tweet go by from Daniel Silverman at The James Irvine Foundation:

So, I clicked through and read Jim's post - which is titled Transparency 2.0. In it, he makes reference to several bloggers who've written about the Foundation's new arts strategy. This is what he says:

"Whether people agree or disagree with the choices we have made, we are now discussing it, publicly, intelligently and forthrightly. I admire those who have stepped forward to criticize aspects of our strategy, whether they believe it is wrong on its merits or they view it as yet another example of “strategic philanthropy” gone awry, where we are dictating and imposing our solutions upon the field."

He links directly in his post to the bloggers' posts:  Nina Simon, Diane Ragsdale, Clay Lord and Barry Hessenius. I then saw this tweet from an arts program officer at Irvine, Ted Russell:

Which didn't add any content to what I could see happening, but gave it some useful context and reminded me of something it's easy to forget when reading tweets and blogs - there are people having all kinds of face to face discussions that matter to the little stream we access on social media. (Full disclosure: Ted is a college friend of mine and I've known Jim and Daniel for years)

Yesterday morning, I, like many readers of the New York Times, opened the Arts Section to find this provocatively headlined little article: (photo cuts off the story, click link for full piece)

This was a kinder piece than what ran in Gawker and elsewhere - all covering the Knight Foundation's hosting of Lehrer at their Media Learning Seminar (Full disclosure: I led a breakout session at the seminar the day before the speech. I was not paid to do so.). This morning, a link in TechPresident's (highly recommended) daily newsletter, FIRST POST, took me to this post from the Knight Foundation:

The text of the post, which is unsigned, includes this paragraph:

"We try to be as transparent as possible about our work. When asked, we released the amount of the speaker’s fee. The fee was not unusual for a well-known author to address a large conference. But it was simply not something Knight Foundation, given our values, should have paid. We continue to support journalism excellence in the digital age. And we do not want our foundation partners to think that journalism controversies are too hot for them to handle. Instead, we want to send the message that when things go wrong the best action is to admit the error and get back to work."

And the comments, which numbered about two dozen when I went to read them, were appalled, angry, and self-righteously nasty about the irony of such a mistake on the part of the Foundation. At least one of the commenters railed about how could no one inside the foundation have pushed back on the decision to invite Lehrer before the event? From a few hallway conversations I had at the seminar (before the speech occurred, as soon as I saw it noted on the agenda) it seems to me that many of them did.  It may have been a wrong decision, it may have been a risky decision, but I doubt it was an unconsidered decision.

There's a saying about marriages - you can never really tell what is going on in anyone else's. We don't know what happened at Ted Russell's lunch or in the meeting rooms at the Knight Foundation in which inviting Lehrer to speak and agreeing to pay him was discussed. Twitter and blogs give us some - mediated - sense of both these events and it's easy to push for more.

I found myself considering these two events from a few steps further back. We criticize foundations for being opaque, and mostly they are.  Steps toward transparency aren't going to be easy (sounds real good if you say it real fast). Both of these examples involve foundations actually in conversation with publics they could (easily, legally, and rather comfortably) ignore. The more important question for all us may be - why is that the case?

Public discussion is a step forward for foundation transparency. Even as I write this, I'm steeling myself for backlash. Past experience tells me I'll get nasty comments and I'll end up wishing I'd kept my mouth shut on the whole thing.

The #SOTU and measuring the marigolds

Listening to President Obama's State of the Union (#SOTU in twitterese) address last night, I had several reactions. I won't share most of them with you, though as someone who has played an insignificant role - mostly as a learner - as foundations in California and local community groups in San Francisco work to build support for early childhood education, his call for national access to pre-K got a big shoutout in my home.

One response I will share was this, "Does any American President ever talk about other forms of opportunity besides economic?" As someone who proudly holds three degrees in American history, I should know the answer to this, but I don't. I do, however, know how to find out. I plan, eventually, to go read all the #SOTUs and see what I can learn. Or perhaps I can use Google Ngram and find out that way (a great opportunity to play "digital humanities scholar").  Anyway....

Whether or not Presidents talk about it, other people define opportunity in a variety of ways. In response to a tweet, Victoria Vrana pointed me to this "Opportunity Index," put out by Opportunity Nation and Measure of America, a project of the Social Sciences Research Council. It looks at economic opportunity, but also opportunities for education, health, voting access, and community cohesion. These data are collected at the community level, and there are great possibilities for using this information locally.

Speaking of measuring, the President's announcement that his administration would release a college scorecard, rating higher education institutions on value, received a much more skeptical reception.  "Really? How? With what data?" And "Who will do analysis?" And, "What does US News and World Report have to say about that? And, "Watch out, my beloved alma maters."

Here's what I could find on the new College Scorecard. It has a nice interface, clearly targeting potential students and their families. It's actually called the "College Affordability and Transparency Center College Scorecard" - and it analyzes "value" along criteria such as cost, graduation rate, loan default rate, and median borrowing. It will eventually have information on jobs held by graduates, but for both Yale University and the University of Phoenix, (the two I checked*) it didn't have this information yet. If you search for it, you can find the link that will let you download the data sets in either excel or CSV format (link is at bottom of page on each university result). All the data come from the US Department of Education (US ED). When you click on the More Information link on each page a pop-up appears with the data sources and calculations for each of the criteria listed.

What you don't get is a single place to compare Yale to UPhoenix side-by-side. When you download the excel file you do get all the info on 3990 universities, listed alphabetically within States. If you are so inclined you can do your own side-by-side analysis (of the selected data points). You can also take these data and plug them in somewhere else (like Many Eyes, and play with visualizations). When you click on the link provided for more information on "median borrowing" on the Yale page, it takes you to Yale's Office of Financial Aid, which features a "net price calculator" on its home page. When you click on the equivalent link on the U of Phoenix page it takes you to the US Department of Education's page on "repaying your loan."

I realize most users may not run the same search I did, but the site needs to be more helpful to users in comparing the information that is provided school by school.** It should allow users to compare schools side by side, or by specific criteria across several schools. That said, in the end I was impressed that US ED had put this site together and was sharing the information in this way. It's a good example of putting public data (all the data comes from US ED) to work for the people (that is, for us).

Both the College Scorecard and the Opportunity Index show the power of accessible data. I hope these tools are useful for their intended purposes. I also appreciate how they represent our changing relationships to large data sets, how we can ask new questions, how quickly we can plug datasets from one site into another, and how we can begin to look at our individual organizations in much greater context, using shared data sets.

I learned a lot about these possibilities from the participants in my breakout session on "data as a public good" at the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar. Being able to see your own organization and your own work in broader context is not the future, it's the present. I believe, as I've said many times and written in the Blueprint series, this ability will change how we define problems and opportunities. It will shift what we ask and when we ask it, what answers we seek and the measures with which we seek to answer them. It can help us shift who is part of asking these questions and implementing the solutions (but we need to be deliberate about this). It's a big part of what I've called "data-first philanthropy" (video link). It's why I'm thrilled to be on the advisory board of DataKind, which I think can help us get past "data first philanthropy" to something closer to "open source philanthropy," and, even more important, to collective problem solving.

In the end, I realized that the #SOTU gave a shout-out to early childhood education, but the College Scorecard is a demonstration of the potential of open data.


*The former is my undergraduate alma mater. The latter is the first for-profit college that came to my mind.

**Last week I emailed a friend of mine, also an alum, to enlist her support in writing a letter to Mother Yale about the news that the University (and Penn) had filed suit against alums who had defaulted on their Perkins loans. So don't take this as an unmitigated "Boola Boola" post.

The people affected by the problem have to help define the solution

I posted earlier this week about the Hewlett Foundation's report and Seven Principles of Evaluation. (Check out comments to that post for another foundation report on evaluation, that one from the Gates Foundation)

Since then, I've had several conversations and given a few speeches to groups as diverse as GirlGeeks (here's a video of the speech) and community foundations, a local giving circle and within a single foundation board room. I'm also preparing for an upcoming Stanford #recodinggood charrette on Democracy and Philanthropy.

So participation is on my mind.

The headline of this post is a shorter version of something I say all the time. One thing we know about addressing community problems and making long term change is that those who will have to live with the solution have to be a part of putting it into place. Not just a part of defining the problem, but designing and implementing the solutions. Otherwise it is, at best, a band-aid.

Outside funders think they're being "inclusive" when they involve community members in meetings and brainstorms. Flip this on its head - communities can and should be inclusive about having funders and outside experts participate in their local efforts. Inclusivity cuts both ways and solutions need both insiders and outsiders.

The Declaration Initiative has a wonderfully clear statement about this on its website. More important, the approach is built into TDI's work. Here's how TDI talks about its evaluation principles:

"We have confirmed that if a project will affect a whole neighborhood or community, the participation of community members is key to developing strategies to address problems. Community residents must address questions about evaluating impact along with staff from nonprofits and government agencies, as well as donors.

A critical part of the process of ending poverty in the US must involve greatly expanding our notion of who must be engaged; what should be observed and measured; and how long the period of evaluation of long-term social change should last."

 And, as long as we're talking about inclusivity - here's a speech I gave on Data First Philanthropy in which (I hope) I make the case that such a shift is about much more than data, it's about inclusivity of ideas and people. Such shifts can start with data - imagine if program evaluators shared their data on Figshare so others could access it, think about it, and inform the analysis?