The most transparent grantmaker

Twitter made my day this morning when I received this:

Check out David's blog post for what he's up to - here's a short list of what he's aiming to post

"I commit to publishing a blog post within 15 days of the signing of a grant agreement that I have facilitated between Omidyar Network and a partner organization. The blog post will contain the following information:

• Amount of grant
• Date that grant agreement was signed
• Name and link to receiving institution and other organizations involved in the project
• Name and link to co-funders
• Summary of grant
• Contextual analysis of related issues
• Metrics to gauge the impact of the grant
• Date and manner that the relevant project will be evaluated"

He goes on to note that he'll be using the IATI schema and will get to the XML version of this information soon.

I jumped at this news and hope to speak with David next week to learn more. In the meantime, we have a responsibility to help David's efforts succeed. Let's use his effort to push further on our own transparency initiatives. It's a great opportunity for Glasspockets to chime in, for other grantmakers to think about their information sharing  and for the rest of us to use the information that does get provided.  It's great that one grantmaker has committed to put this information out there - but transparency improves practice only when the information is used. We need others to follow David.  Perhaps you'd like to surpass him, you're not going to let him get away with this "throw down challenge" as most transparent, are you?!

We need activists and grantees to respond, request, use the info; we need sites that can mash grantmaker data with public information, political giving, results data, other financial flows, etc. We do need to focus, as Phil Buchanan of CEP notes, on "the transparency that matters." As important as what we share is why we share it and what we do with it. In other words, transparency is part of a series of behavior, actor and organizational changes (it's part of institutional conversations) not just "another thing to do."

We need to see the sharing of the info as the first step in a conversation that aims toward better results.



Thanks, David, for your efforts. Everyone else, how will you use the information and join the conversation - what will you do to be more transparent?

Nonprofits as the bad guys

Today at Stanford we're holding our #ReCodeGood charrette on Citizens United: Are Nonprofits People, Too? This post from Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, couldn't have been more timely. It raises several issues about transparency, trust, disclosure, advocacy, and anonymity. The question Roll Call asks, which we'll be grappling with is:

“I think there is a lot of concern in the nonprofit community about this,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, an Indiana University professor who studies nonprofits. “The problem is: What do you do about it? It’s hard to see a solution that’s workable.”

We'll be looking for workable solutions. We're particularly honored to be joined by Rick Hasen, of UC Irvine's law school, who posted his materials on his Election Law blog, along with Dan Newman of Maplight.org, which uses data and visualizations to reveal relationships between money and politics, colleagues from the Sunlight Foundation, Independent Sector, several local foundations and invited participation from the California Attorney General's Office and the Fair Political Practices Commission. Finally, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker is joining us - her articles State for Sale and Covert Operations are critical reads on this topic.

Listeners to NPR's Morning Edition may have heard Peter Overby's first in a series on the big donors to SuperPACS in this Presidential election. Overby explains why the disclosure rules on 501 c (4)s - which are not required to disclose their donors but do report their expenditures - obscure just how much more money might actually be flowing from these and other individuals through social welfare nonprofits. NPR also has an interactive on other "SuperPAC Superdonors."

REVISED AGAIN: Technology and future of social sector

What follows is a small collection of recent interviews, public discussions on technology and good.

(my photo, The Creators Project)


1) "The Joy of e-Giving," @MattBish in The Economist on Davos panel with Chelsea Clinton, Sean Parker, Eric Schmidt, Yuri Milner, and Alec Ross. Best part is suggestion from Tim Berners-Lee for

 "...a radical approach to improving the effectiveness of philanthropy through extreme charity: it should become a routine activity, he suggested, that anyone receiving a donation should publish in cyberspace exactly what they do with it, all the way along the line until the money reaches its ultimate charitable destination."

Platforms like Peer Water Exchange and FLOW are making this happen.

2) A review of a #SXSW session on "The Benevolent Internet"

3) Here is an interview with me in Crain's Chicago Business on future of nonprofits and technology.

4) Darin McKeever from @gatesfoundation on the Internet gets Charitable  (Thanks Victoria Vrana)

5) And because The Grants Managers Network conference is happening now, let me point you back to my plea for Open Data from last year's Personal Democracy Forum - (VIDEO) -



Since that speech last June, colleagues at DataWithoutBorders have held several amazing datadives and helped #NPOs across the country put their data to work. We're starting to see how powerful this behavior can be when put into action.

6) Jake Porway of Data Without Borders is in San Francisco tonight for a talk at CodeForAmerica  Big Data for Public Good. These are the front end events that we'll look back on and say "that was the moment" when community organizations really started using data as the new platform for change. I can't make it to tonight's  CfA event, unfortunately; but you should get there if you can. Yesterday, my family and I had a great chance to hike and talk data, video tagging, the future of news collection, R & D on community data, etc. etc. with Jake.

(Photo by @pbftwit)

Then we went to The Creators Project - an amazing art + tech installation at Fort Mason. This stuff will blow your mind - especially examples of extracting "closed captioning" from video broadcasts to make the video searchable. Which is technologically cool. And there's beautiful art as well:

(my photo, creators project)

That yellow thing is a data-driven, android phone-enabled pinball on a folded metal surface, structured as a multiplayer game. But, I'm sure you knew that.

Institutions as conversations

Why does corporate philanthropy usually get slotted into the marketing budget/ vision of the company? In this age of conversation and co-production, community engagement/community affairs/community philanthropy seems to me to be a ripe R & D activity. Get out into communities or issues, see what they need, see if you can be useful. It's like social media - a conversation, not a broadcast.

A word from me, my sponsor: Thanks for reading this blog. Thanks for buying the Blueprint - consider it a "Thank you" for a $10 purchase in support of the blog. (It's pledge time in NPR land, why not here?) You can also get the "blog in a box," "a ready to go retreat" and everything you need to talk about the future of the social economy in this toolkit (from me and the Council of Michigan Foundations).

(Regularly scheduled programming)
I listened, attentively, to the story "autopsy" on This American Life. I think they set a new (high) standard for handling the mistakes we all make and are increasingly making in public. After watching, listening and talking about the Invisible Children video and how it compared to the Komen events of a few weeks ago, I realized two things:

1. The two-way, conversational, visible and video-able nature of our media lives - in which everything is both instant and archived - is part of how our future institutions will need to look. These are attributes of 21st organizations, not just social media efforts. 
2. We engage in words, video, and photos - which broadens the conversations far beyond those who are comfortable writing. Commenting and conversing in video and photos - this is where digital media are taking us. Pinterest is one recent example of this - the boards are  conversations in photo form. I post a photo, you respond with a photo, others chime in with photos of interest to them. This development further expands the conversation - not everyone is going to write down their thoughts, but we're all carrying video cameras in our pockets and will get more and more comfortable with recording and sharing our responses, ideas, conversations. 

I had a great time in Dallas with the local chapter of Social Venture Partners and the Dallas Foundation. Conversations in the hallways made me realize how much I've been thinking about - and learning from others - about this question of 21st century institutions. I'm reminded of a story that Neil Degrasse Tyson tells in one of his lectures. It starts with a picture taken of the Cydonia region of Mars (below).

 (Photo from Wikipedia)

When this photo was first shown to us earthlings, according to Degrasse Tyson, many people took it as proof of life on the red planet. Really, those are just rocks. The photos that scientists used to locate  water on Mars show a barren landscape (no "faces"). His point is this - if you go looking for life on a distant planet and think that it's going to look like you, you're not going to find it.

My point - if we go looking for the institutions of the 21st century, and think they're going to look like those from the past, we're not going to find them. So I've started thinking instead about the attributes that viable organizations will have, given our expectations and technologies. A starting list includes:

1. Permeable and transparent or very clear on why they're not.
2. Generative - they have to do more than make one thing happen, they have to be able to set the conditions for the next thing to happen.
3. Longer-term time horizon than one-off networks, but shorter-term than in the past (e.g. perpetuity).
4. Public governance will change to expect and include outsiders (stakeholders?) in viable ways. Corporate public governance may go beyond shareholder proxies and public nonprofit governance will go beyond self-appointing boards of directors.

Finally, I've been thinking about how we all need to "Act like an Artist." Artists have been getting the work done - their art - in commercial, nonprofit, individual and networked ways since the dawn of time. We need to learn from them because their social economy is now all of ours.