PHILANTHROPY 2173

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Talk to your neighbors

Meadan is an Arabic word that means a gathering place or town square. Meadan.org is an online, global meeting place for "western-Islamic dialogue."

The old town square has been recreated for two communities that desperately need to better understand each other - English and Arabic speakers. The technology isn't ready yet, but go ahead, get ready to talk to your neighbor.

Random digital news related to philanthropy

Here are a couple of random posts regarding Internet access and use in San Francisco and beyond.

1. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed and is pursuing city-wide wifi. The San Francisco Foundation and Community Technology Foundation of California are hosting a funders briefing to meet with representatives of the city, Google, and Earthlink. Information on open community meetings is here.

2. A new report finds that seniors, women, and people of color in San Francisco have less access to the Internet than their counterparts in other cities. An excerpt from the report,

"While the total population of San Francisco ranks in the middle ofcomparison city rankings, all of the at-risk socio-economic groups in San Francisco are below average, lagging at or near the bottom of the comparison city rankings in terms of absolute percentage with access to technology at home."


Thanks to Katrin Veclas of NTEN for bringing it to my attention. The report is online here.

3. Nonprofits in SecondLife now have a blog - find it here. This is not strictly San Francisco news, though TechSoup - which coordinates the nonprofit commons in 2L - is HQ'd in SF (and I proudly serve on its board of directors).

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

The view from a donor

Tom of GiveMeaning has a helpful post on his blog (the $5 philanthropist) about where he, as a donor, looks for information on the web. He also talks about why he was motivated to found GiveMeaning. His post has a useful chronology (his) of the development of web resources for individual philanthropists.

Participle: A new approach

Hilary Cottam is an intriguing example of a public problem solver. She has worked on redesigning schools for learning, improving prisons in Great Britain, and re-engaging citizens in their communities.

Future Currents is an example of work she did on the average London household's contribution to climate change. The problem: 40% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions come from residential units. The solution: "...make our energy use visible and motivate behaviour change." Several ideas were developed including household monitoring, reward incentives, and products "too cool" not to have. The big idea: the One Million Roofs campaign to make London the first distributed power station through micro generation.

She's starting something new: Participle, which she calls a center for "transformative design." In her words:

"We will engage in three closely linked types of work: transformational projects: ‘proof of concept’ solutions that work at scale; you will be able to see and measure the difference we have made at the neighbourhood level, in cities and rural communities nationally; transformational ideas: world leading, rigorous new analysis and proposals to influence the development of policy; transformation design: training in the tools and methodology of our inter-disciplinary team’s approach to any issue.

We will work in partnership with the private, public and third sector organisations."

This is right in line with 1) the multi-sector approach I've been writing about and 2) discussions I've had with designers and design firms here in the states. Glad to see this is happening. I'll be watching the work at Participle.