Inventing Digital Civil Society

Here's the video of my TEDxGrandRapids talk on Inventing Digital Civil Society. This thinking is part of the #ReCoding Good Project and will be continued at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab.



Sorry for all the pacing around. Nerves. 

Reinventing Philanthropy

Join me, Katherine Fulton, Jacob Harold, Mari Kurashi, Peter Leyden and Clara Miller in a Reinventors Network roundtable discussion on Reinventing Philanthropy.

The conversation takes place as a Google+ Hangout, starting at 11:00 am PST, Thursday, June 27.

We'll be discussing the potential of new rules, metrics, data, resources, and technologies to fundamentally shift philanthropy in the near and longer-term futures. Join us.

Social media, organ donations and increasing giving

Here are some thoughts on social media, organ donations and what The Chronicle of Philanthropy calls the "Stubborn 2%" problem.

Public Action Requires Privacy Protections

(photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leben_der_anderen.jpg)


Have you seen the movie, The Lives of Others? The 2006 Academy Award winner for best foreign film, the movie tells the story of authors and artists living under the Stasi in East Germany, when everyone spied on everyone else, all typewriters were registered with the government, and there was virtually no way to publicly protest the government. In a world with no privacy, there can be no public action. Privacy, in other words, is critical to civil society.

In February, I wrote this post about why we need rules for how, the heart of American civil society, handle our data and protect the privacy of everyone they work with. Protecting our individual privacy is critical not only as a matter of civil liberties, but to ensure our ability to act publicly. Privacy is critical to civil society.

Given the recent news about the role of the government and big companies in monitoring our online and phone interactions, realizing what we need to do to protect our civil institutions - our ability to freely associate, speak, and publish - seems ever more relevant. I'm not talking about just the work of the civil liberties activists, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation. Data privacy should be a top policy concern for all philanthropic foundations and all nonprofits. Their future existence likely depends on it. Defining them by how they use our data is more important now than ever; they may well be our last bastion of protection.