Civil society is missing the boat on the issues that matter

(Note added as I finished drafting this: it feels like groundhog day. How many times have I written a version of this?)

For years now, I've been reading articles and books on the transformative effects of digital on business and on government. In almost everyone of these, just after making the case that industry and democracy will never be the same, the author invariably has a line something to the tune of "but nonprofits will step in." Why is the assumption that nonprofits will not be changed by the same forces changing business and government?

It may be because in the minds of some really smart people, nonprofits have become semi-synonymous with government contractors. In the U.S. this perspective is understandable - public charities report almost 33% of revenue from government sources. (Urban Institute, Nonprofit Sector in Brief, 2013)

Whatever the reason, however, recognizing the impact of digital activity - including concerns about privacy, freedom of association, and civil rights - on civil society itself, and engaging civil society organizations in the debates, discussions, and policy fights about the future of our digital environment - has never been more important.

(Photo: http://www.bostonreview.net/current-issue)

This point came home to me powerfully as I read the very useful discussion on Saving Privacy in the May/June issue of the Boston Review. In it, Reed Hundt, former Chair of the FCC lays out an argument for a new digital bill of rights. This is not a new idea, nor is it Hundt's original thought (John Perry Barlow may have written it down first, back in 1996). The last year of revelations about NSA surveillance, and the general public's increasing understanding of how corporations use people's data, has brought the idea back to general attention. In his article, and the thoughtful disagreements and discussions that follow from Marvin Ammori, Adam Kern, Richard M. Stallman, Rebecca MacKinnon, Archon Fung, Frank Pasquale, Jennifer Granick, Bruce Schneier, Jeremy K. Kessler, and Evgeny Morozov) there were:

1. One call for collective, not individual action (Stallman)
2. Two calls for independent civil action (MacKinnon and Hundt, in response to MacKinnon)
3. One call for organizations committed to privacy and a broadening of their constituencies (Fung)
4. One discussion of the role of trust (Schneier)
5. One discussion of social movements (Granick)
6. One discussion of the Fourth Amendment and a nod to First Amendment protections for "freedom of expression and thought" (Ammori and Kern)
7. Two mentions of needs for "freedom of association" or for "secure digital spaces where [individuals] should be afforded the same privacy rights they would enjoy in the analog world" (Hundt)

I am grateful that these conversations (and the recent President's Commission on privacy) are beginning to connect the dots between digital communications, surveillance, privacy, and association.

What I hope civil society can do is see the connection between this tense terrain and its own existence. If you look at the policy or research agendas of associations that represent civil society you would think that the issues that matter are the charitable tax deduction, government funding, and the right to contribute anonymously to political activities.

Civil society fundamentally depends not on tax deductions and not on government funding. It depends on individuals' rights to a private space to form the thoughts we express publicly and the freedom to associate. In other words, civil society's existence depends on the very debates raging now about the future of digital connections, communications, governance, ownership, privacy and surveillance. But you'd never know it by looking at the nonprofit sector's stated policy interests.

Talent for good

Last year the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and White House Office of Social Innovation, with help from LinkedIn, GuideStar, the Foundation Center and Palantir, hosted a GoodJobs CodeJam, where we supported student teams in using open data to create technological tools that would help students build careers in the social sector. In my role as co-leader of the Digital Civil Society Lab (which was launched at that event), I was focused on the digital tools that career starters use and rely on to for their professional planning.

The CodeJam was a success - cool tools got prototypes, several of which are still being developed and built upon. Data got used and reflections provided to app builders and data providers. Good connections were created between industry, nonprofits and students. The Open Data Dance had its world premier.

In retrospect, this event was a bit like asking me, when I was a college senior, to prototype using a telephone as a meaningful exercise in preparing for my career. Cutting edge technology at that time would have been faxes and answering machines (no, I'm not exaggerating. ATMs were new my senior year). For today's students, the assumptions about digital are ingrained. In their reflections following the CodeJam we heard repeatedly that the tools should be assumed and the challenges of shaping careers with meaning is about finding mentors, mapping coursework and internships, making connections, and finding enterprises that value them.

I've written a lot about the social economy - the complete space in which we use private resources for public benefit. This includes (as enterprises) nonprofits, social businesses, hybrids, informal networks, temporary associations of individuals, and the socially-focused strategies of corporations.

One way of thinking about the social economy is to imagine all the ways we as individuals organize ourselves to accomplish something that benefits others. In other words, at its root, it's about people.

(Photo by Lucy Bernholz: left to right, Fagan Harris, Cheryl Dorsey, Anne-Marie Burgoyne, Lisa Foster Thompson, Paul Schmitz, Jonny Dorsey)

Yesterday, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and the Aspen Institute Impact Careers Initiative hosted a "Talent For Good Summit." The question on the table was how today's career starters can plan for and make happen professional careers that focus on social good - and how the multiple types of organizations where that work happens can find, recruit and develop these people. At Stanford, this is a big question. The university is well equipped, creative, and resourceful when it comes to helping students find jobs or start enterprises in technology, finance, consulting, banking, and other commercial industries. (Just last week I experienced a true Stanford teaching reality - six weeks into a ten week term a student withdrew from class because his tech company had raised a seed round of financing). It has services and resources for students interested in careers in public service or the social sector, but these are less visible. Recruiters from the public and social sectors are much less accessible to students and much less visible than their commercial counterparts. The Talent For Good Summit was one step (of several) that students and the career resources on campus are taking to encourage and support students to dedicate their most significant private resource (their own time, interests and careers) to social and public interest careers.

The students invited, prepared, and hosted a great panel (Cheryl Dorsey, Echoing Green; Anne Marie Burgoyne, Emerson Collective, Lori Foster Thompson, North Carolina State University, and Paul Schmitz, Public Allies). Participants included social entrepreneurs, local nonprofit leaders, students, social business recruiters, and university leaders focused on career development. Small groups worked on ideas to create a shared agenda for recruiting, developing and connecting young professionals - from both campuses and communities. Related initiatives, such as the TalentPhilanthropy Project and the #OverheadMyth were looked to as potential allies.

There was meaningful disagreement about the need to channel some of the students' "I've gotta be a founder" energy into existing enterprises and the need to help organizations really use young professionals, instead of making them wait 20 years to have any input. The demographic and economic realities - from student loan debt to baby boomer professionals who won't (or can't) retire - were noted. Real improvements in recruiting tools (such as those used by TFA and the CFPB) were highlighted (yes, digital tools do make a difference!) And we discussed, dropped, revisited, and reminded ourselves repeatedly that community based social change requires leaders (and leadership recruitment, development, celebration) from communities, not just elite campuses. Can students from elite campuses help build pathways to leadership for their age-peers in communities, not just focus on building pathways for their own careers? We raised it and brainstormed about it - but no, we didn't solve it.

You can read the Impact Careers Initiative report - and see their ranking of colleges and universities that support impact careers here.

Hats off to the student leaders who are moving this work forward - Jonny Dorsey, Fagan Harris and Elizabeth Woodson.

A practical and existential challenge to nonprofits

Thanks to those who chimed in on my post about Digital Data and Blurring Boundaries. To summarize - I note that digital data don't naturally respect boundaries between public, private and independent sectors, and that nonprofits/philanthropy and other civil society organization need to think hard about how they treat digital data as a resource/asset. I raise a possibility that I've been thinking about for a long time - that civil society organizations will need to encode into their structures (i.e. new corporate requirements) how they will use digital data as a private resource for public benefit in an analogous manner to the existing non-distribution and non-ownership regulations that define nonprofits and nongovermental organizations.

In particular, I want to pick up on a theme that Pete Manzo articulated most clearly of those who commented - in his own words:

"On the encoding question, I wonder if the coding of the rules should be done with regard to the type of information and its purposes, rather than by the type of entity that holds it (so, not encoded in the tax rules governing nonprofit status). You've probably seen Alastair Croll's suggestion that we should "link what the data is with how it can be used. I might, for example, say that my musical tastes should be used for song recommendation, but not for banking decisions." http://solveforinteresting.com/big-data-is-our-generations-civil-rights-issue-and-we-dont-know-it/ Not sure how to do that, but it sounds like a good place to start."

With regard to digital data, this is an interesting proposition. It's much harder than it sounds, because data collected for one purpose but stored on the internet in an accessible fashion immediately subjects it to the very forces that make "big data" big - it can be copied, repurposed, and connected to other data sources in ways that stray far from any original purpose.

But Pete's comment reminded me of another issue that I've been thinking about for a long time that has not so much to do with digital data as with the nature of hybrid enterprise forms and the new social economy.

Simply put that question is this - in an age when commercial social enterprises, nonprofits, hybrid organizations, informal networks and other structures all claim to be using private resources for public benefit, why are the regulatory incentives for doing so still linked to the organizational structure and not to specific activities?

This is a huge challenge for all of us - we're used to these equations:

Private resources for public benefit (PR4PB) = Nonprofit

Tax exemptions + tax deductible revenue provide incentives for PR4PB

But today the first equation actually reads:

Private resources for public benefit = nonprofit, social enterprise, impact investing,         hybrid enterprises, some informal networks....

 So why are tax incentives not = to all PR4PB?

But if its the activities that turn the private resources into public benefit, and those activities are the purview of many types of organizational structures, than why are the incentives aligned only with one type of enterprise? It's not hard to imagine a world in which regulatory or tax incentives are not "attached" to the organization type but to the "activities" - much as Peter suggested might be done in encoding certain values into the uses of digital data, not into the enterprise form. This, my friends, is an interesting - and very real - slippery slope.

This is the existential, and increasingly practical, challenge facing nonprofits in the social economy - what is their unique value that makes them privy to the tax incentives they enjoy?

It's an existential question because it goes to the heart of why we need civil society, why we provide regulatory incentives for these actors in our democracies (OK, philosophical at least, if not existential). It's a practical challenge because of the very real need these alternatives present for nonprofits to be able to show their unique value.

Digital data further blurs boundaries between sectors

The White House released its report, Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values, yesterday.

The only place the word "nonprofit" appears in the report is in the appendix explaining where public comments to the process came from. The report focuses on the collection, use, sharing, storing, mining, retention, and destruction of personally identifiable data by corporations. Many analysts have already commented that the report was timed and designed to draw attention away from the government's own practices regarding data collection, use, sharing, storing, mining, retention, and destruction of personally identifiable information. The report rightly points out the potential of digital data for efficiency and convenience and the perils it poses in terms of due process, discrimination and privacy.

Regardless, no attention is paid to the role of digital data in civil society, philanthropy, and the social sector. (This despite the fact that several of the public meetings held to inform the report were coordinated with university and nonprofit partners.)

Nonprofits and foundations do all the same things with digital data that businesses do - they collect, store, use, share, mine, retain, and destroy it. They may not do it on the scale of business or government, although certainly nonprofit research universities, hospitals, and science centers are pretty big. Often nonprofits will do everything they do with digital data on commercial services - internet service providers, telecommunications companies, and broadband providers. In this blended reality, where you willingly give your cell phone number and email address to the politically active social welfare organization you support because you think that that information will be kept private, you'd be wrong. If the organization stores the information on commercial cloud servers, moves their information over telecommunications firms wires or broadband connections, or made it easy for you to sign up with an online form, your information - and its connection to that organization - is already being stored somewhere else. It is subject to the same rules of disclosure or chance of being hacked as data on you collected by a commercial app or website.

Do we care? Should we expect nonprofits to treat our data differently? Do we want the text message alert system we agree to from our kids' after school program or the prenatal clinic or the cause-related group to be protected somehow? Do donors opting for anonymity in their charitable giving expect that their online interactions with the groups they support will somehow stay unreleased, protected, anonymous?

Does civil society have a set of values and/or norms that should be brought to bear in how organizations working within it treat digital data? If so, what are they? Given how digital data flattens terrain between organizations - it may be collected via a nonprofit website that is hosted on a commercial service - how will nonprofits express those values, how will they treat those data, and how will they affirm the expected norms with the constituents and donors they serve?

Nonprofits are distinguished in the corporate code by the rules that govern how they manage financial assets. Excess revenue above costs must be returned to the mission (it cannot be distributed as profit) and the enterprise has no owners. What are the analogous structures for governing digital data? Once we figure out how we expect nonprofits to value and protect our digital data, perhaps we'll look at how those practices need to be encoded into the organizational structure.