Since September of last year I've had the honor of being a Visiting Scholar at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. One of the things I've been doing there is working closely with staff from across the Foundation as they make sense of the emerging landscape of digital civil society. We're working on several public projects that I'll be thrilled to share here and elsewhere when they're ready.
In the meantime, let me share a little of what we're doing and invite you to send resources, join us in thinking about these issues, and helping us plan.
1. What do funders need to think about when funding digital data projects? This is a question we'd been thinking about when I had the opportunity to join Paul Tarini of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on a webinar about digital data and philanthropy. Paul and his colleagues had reached out to experts at the Center for Democracy and Technology and assembled a list of questions funders should ask. They graciously gave me permission to share the list at Packard and post it here. Thanks! You can find the webinar video and the slides that include these questions here.
2. Remember NOLO Press guides for nonprofits? They offer easy to use templates for setting up a nonprofit corporation, including templates for the articles of incorporation, bylaws and other policies. Well, nowadays, the list of policies every civil society organization needs goes further than that - and includes many things, like data policies, terms of service, privacy policies, and IP asset transfer agreements that are hard to wrap your head around. We're working on "Good Data Governance" toolkit/templates that will draw from some of the great work that organizations have already done to draft these policies and make several models available to everyone for their consideration/use/improvement. After all, not everyone wants to spend time developing these (hah!)
3. What are all the ways civil society organizations are using digital data? These are countless. Which won't stop me from trying to count them. With my colleagues at the Packard Foundation we've been tracking ideas and examples on this wiki - please add yours. Here's a snapshot typology I developed for a presentation in Brazil - feel free to improve on this as well. We'll do our best to get some kind of typology out there - your insights are more than welcome.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Thinking today like an historian of tomorrow
I had an interesting conversation with folks at the Atlantic Philanthropies the other day. Atlantic has announced it will spend out its endowment and close up shop - something it is working on quite publicly. One of its concerns is how to make sure that the work it has funded can be used by others.
Now, I entered philanthropy through the side door of a historian-in-training. My interests in grad school (and still today) were in questions of public and private - what's what and who decides? While reading history on the Reconstruction South I became particularly intrigued by philanthropic giving of Northern whites to help educate blacks. I realized that American public schooling held a long, convoluted, not-well-told history of philanthropic involvement and activism. I went on to write my dissertation about philanthropic giving in the San Francisco public schools in the decades prior to the passage of Proposition 13.
It was not an interest in foundations that led me to this work, it was an interest in how we, as a society, decide what we will support with public dollars (and what we won't). Schooling was an obvious place to look, but you could also turn to public health, social welfare, criminal justice, higher education - almost every public system in the U.S. has a history that involves private dollars, either commercial or philanthropic or both.
So when asked how to think about Atlantic's legacy - how it should store, categorize, apply metadata and search optimization tools to its records - the only advice I could come up with was to think like an historian. How will someone even know to look for the work of this long-gone foundation 50 or 100 years from now? Will it be through a biographical interest in the founder? A historical interest in the Affordable Care Act (one of many issues Atlantic has funded)? And if the foundation is to shut down, how will information catalogued with today's tools be updated for tomorrow's search mechanisms?
There are, of course, professionals who know how to catalogue, preserve, and store information for use in the future, they're called librarians and archivists. So few foundations have made their records available (exceptions can be found at the Rockefeller Archive Center and at Indiana University, and grant making histories of larger foundations exist in the database of The Foundation Center) that our historical knowledge of philanthropy is largely limited to the small universe of organizations whose records are available. See Olivier Zunz's 2011 history, Philanthropy In America, for both a view that extends beyond the few well-archived institutions and a sense of what we're missing.
As foundations begin sharing more information publicly and digitally perhaps they will also begin to think about where their records live on. After all, their tweets are with Twitter and the Library of Congress, Facebook owns their pages (as its does everyone who uses its services), and their tax forms are public record (and, someday, may be easy to access). So what of the material contributions they're making now to the issues they fund - whether it's support for free enterprise or the Affordable Care Act? What of the research they fund, the organizations they support, the evaluations they use, or the collaborations and advocacy initiatives of which they are part?
Future historians looking to understand the issues that today's foundations work on will need to be able to find traces of philanthropy in the archives and documentary history of those issues or they'll never look any further. Whether it's healthcare, immigration reform, marriage equality, or charter schooling the future history of philanthropy will be written within the issues it funds. The time to think about how that history will be found is now.
Now, I entered philanthropy through the side door of a historian-in-training. My interests in grad school (and still today) were in questions of public and private - what's what and who decides? While reading history on the Reconstruction South I became particularly intrigued by philanthropic giving of Northern whites to help educate blacks. I realized that American public schooling held a long, convoluted, not-well-told history of philanthropic involvement and activism. I went on to write my dissertation about philanthropic giving in the San Francisco public schools in the decades prior to the passage of Proposition 13.
It was not an interest in foundations that led me to this work, it was an interest in how we, as a society, decide what we will support with public dollars (and what we won't). Schooling was an obvious place to look, but you could also turn to public health, social welfare, criminal justice, higher education - almost every public system in the U.S. has a history that involves private dollars, either commercial or philanthropic or both.
So when asked how to think about Atlantic's legacy - how it should store, categorize, apply metadata and search optimization tools to its records - the only advice I could come up with was to think like an historian. How will someone even know to look for the work of this long-gone foundation 50 or 100 years from now? Will it be through a biographical interest in the founder? A historical interest in the Affordable Care Act (one of many issues Atlantic has funded)? And if the foundation is to shut down, how will information catalogued with today's tools be updated for tomorrow's search mechanisms?
There are, of course, professionals who know how to catalogue, preserve, and store information for use in the future, they're called librarians and archivists. So few foundations have made their records available (exceptions can be found at the Rockefeller Archive Center and at Indiana University, and grant making histories of larger foundations exist in the database of The Foundation Center) that our historical knowledge of philanthropy is largely limited to the small universe of organizations whose records are available. See Olivier Zunz's 2011 history, Philanthropy In America, for both a view that extends beyond the few well-archived institutions and a sense of what we're missing.
As foundations begin sharing more information publicly and digitally perhaps they will also begin to think about where their records live on. After all, their tweets are with Twitter and the Library of Congress, Facebook owns their pages (as its does everyone who uses its services), and their tax forms are public record (and, someday, may be easy to access). So what of the material contributions they're making now to the issues they fund - whether it's support for free enterprise or the Affordable Care Act? What of the research they fund, the organizations they support, the evaluations they use, or the collaborations and advocacy initiatives of which they are part?
Future historians looking to understand the issues that today's foundations work on will need to be able to find traces of philanthropy in the archives and documentary history of those issues or they'll never look any further. Whether it's healthcare, immigration reform, marriage equality, or charter schooling the future history of philanthropy will be written within the issues it funds. The time to think about how that history will be found is now.
Friday, March 28, 2014
In search of digital civil society around the world
I recently had the opportunity to discuss the role of digital data and my ideas about digital civil society in Beijing, China and São Paolo, Brazil. Some reflections:
Beijing - the day before this photo was taken I joined Maria Rendon, of USAID and Bin Pei of the Gates Foundation at an event hosted by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. We were there to talk about data and digital civil society. (It took place on the other side of the wall in the photo - other than location there is no connection to Mrs. Obama). We drew attention to the many ways digital data are becoming part of the emergent nongovernmental sector in China. We heard from the China Foundation Center about its plans to open up the data it collects (all of which is digital). The level of registration and oversight for NGOs in China creates a robust digital trail of information, allowing for much more robust data gathering on civil society than is possible in other parts of the world.
Brazil - 25 hours of flying and half a world away I found myself at the GIFE Conference in São Paolo. Brazil has a disbursed, diverse, fragmented economy of civil organizations - from global NGOs to political activist networks. Brazil is home to a vital, vibrant, messy and confusing social economy - it's a great place to think about what it would take to map such a space, and all the different implications of that economy as it goes digital. Here are the slides I used to get us started:
Registration and oversight of these organizations or networks is very different from that in China - and I repeatedly heard funders, nonprofit leaders, financiers, and scholars bemoan the lack of comparable data about the sector. There is a working group of leaders from the sector that wants to remedy this situation, possibly by developing a Brazilian "Blueprint" such as the one I write every year. This is very exciting and I hope it comes to pass.
Here's the deck of "working examples" I used to jumpstart a conversation on how we are using digital data to create new forms of civil society. Note - these are deliberately scattershot, I was trying for a wide range of data types, tools and uses. Turning these working examples into a typology or framework will require many more examples and some more time. I welcome your input:
In both Brazil and China I had the chance to tout the state of digital data on civil society in Canada. The country collects data on foundations and nonprofits electronically, makes it open and machine readable in useful time frames, allowing companies such as ajah.ca to use those data feeds to produce search tools that are really useful and collective efforts such as PoweredByData* that provide models for the rest of us.
I didn't really get to travel the globe looking for digital civil society (but I'd love to if anyone wants to foot the bill or host me). We need a global conversation about data, social change, and digital civil society - including examples, challenges, new norms, and opportunities from all over the world. The Markets For Good platform and Feedback Labs are two places these conversations can be catalyzed and captured - do you know of others? I have been in touch with folks at Betterplace Labs in Berlin - and they DID go around the globe as part of their Lab Around the World Tour. I'm looking forward to learning more about what they learned and helping share it more broadly. Stay tuned.
*I am an unpaid independent advisor to this effort.
Brazil - 25 hours of flying and half a world away I found myself at the GIFE Conference in São Paolo. Brazil has a disbursed, diverse, fragmented economy of civil organizations - from global NGOs to political activist networks. Brazil is home to a vital, vibrant, messy and confusing social economy - it's a great place to think about what it would take to map such a space, and all the different implications of that economy as it goes digital. Here are the slides I used to get us started:
Registration and oversight of these organizations or networks is very different from that in China - and I repeatedly heard funders, nonprofit leaders, financiers, and scholars bemoan the lack of comparable data about the sector. There is a working group of leaders from the sector that wants to remedy this situation, possibly by developing a Brazilian "Blueprint" such as the one I write every year. This is very exciting and I hope it comes to pass.
Here's the deck of "working examples" I used to jumpstart a conversation on how we are using digital data to create new forms of civil society. Note - these are deliberately scattershot, I was trying for a wide range of data types, tools and uses. Turning these working examples into a typology or framework will require many more examples and some more time. I welcome your input:
In both Brazil and China I had the chance to tout the state of digital data on civil society in Canada. The country collects data on foundations and nonprofits electronically, makes it open and machine readable in useful time frames, allowing companies such as ajah.ca to use those data feeds to produce search tools that are really useful and collective efforts such as PoweredByData* that provide models for the rest of us.
I didn't really get to travel the globe looking for digital civil society (but I'd love to if anyone wants to foot the bill or host me). We need a global conversation about data, social change, and digital civil society - including examples, challenges, new norms, and opportunities from all over the world. The Markets For Good platform and Feedback Labs are two places these conversations can be catalyzed and captured - do you know of others? I have been in touch with folks at Betterplace Labs in Berlin - and they DID go around the globe as part of their Lab Around the World Tour. I'm looking forward to learning more about what they learned and helping share it more broadly. Stay tuned.
*I am an unpaid independent advisor to this effort.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Future of Museums 2014 - always worth a read
The 2014 version of the Center for the Future of Museums report, TrendsWatch, is out and it's always worth a read. The big 2014 trends they see?
The Center for the Future of Museums is part of the American Alliance of Museums.
- The Sharing Economy
- Robots
- Privacy
- Data
- Social entrepreneurship
- Multisensory experiences
The Center for the Future of Museums is part of the American Alliance of Museums.
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