Yup, that's right. SmoothFeather's Back in Life is on the YouTube homepage again! Last time this happened, with Lusaka Sunrise, it hit 300 thousand viewers and created to lots of other ripples; let's see what happens this time. :)
Silas, the heart and soul of SmoothFeather, is very explicit and unwavering about his gift-economy approach and CF's three guiding principles. As you will notice in the credits of all his films, it will say: "A Gift-Economy Production."
Having attended the Tiger Team meetings in 2007 and 2008, lot of you know the magic of this 25 year old named Silas (not to mention his parents!). It is one thing to talk about the power of small when you have no choice to be big, but it is quite another to talk about it when you've got celebrities and Academy Award winners pulling down your sleeve. :)
Brother man Silas, it is a delight to have you as a part of CharityFocus, an honor to be supporting SmoothFeather's noble work, and an inspiration to witness your growing commitment to a pure gift-economy.
In 1969, he silently tended to a farm in the remote hills of Japan. In the first four years, he practically destroyed his farm. Soon after, though, his rich produce became the talk of the town and some locals pondered the secrets of his efficiency. The locals perhaps thought he just a couple of good seasons, so no one looked further into it. It wasn’t until about thirty years later that people outside of his community started to take a deeper look of this man’s curious farming habits. He called it “Do Nothing” farming – no plowing the land, not even to sow seeds; no use of fertilizers or compost; no weeding at all; no use of any insecticides or any chemicals.
A true revolutionary, a saintly heart, inspiration behind the modern-day permaculture movement, Masanobu Fukuoka passed away on August 16th, at the age of 95.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to such greatness is to read One Straw Revolution and be-the-change.
As the beautiful statement on the "donate" page of conversations.org starts: "What is something worth when you give it for free?"
Among the six billion answers to that question, here is one from Ladislav Hanka that we got in today:
I saw your magazine at Ed Gray's gallery in northern Michigan and found it stimulatingly thoughtful. I tend to avoid the art press as being almost universally a backwater of unreadable sophistry written by those with curious axes to grind, oxes to gore and theories to illustrate - but primarily having little to do with my own life as an artist. I try to continually bear in mind that what brought me to art was the child who had to get his hands on the tadpoles and whose amazement with the beauty of the earth found its expression through crayons and paper. I sense that your magazine is an adult's extension of that interest in a literate format and that I may well have something to gain as well to contribute in that conversation.
To give you a flavor of the magazine, here's a quote from a beautiful piece -- The Dumpster -- by Meredith Sabini:
It is common these days to lament how materialistic we have become, but I do not believe this is accurate. It seems to me that we have not yet begun to value matter. Much that is made today is not intended to last and cannot be repaired. Mana is unable to fill our possessions. Lacking substance, they cannot become proper vessels for spirit. We may ask where objects come from, but they no longer have stories to tell. They too have lost their roots.
Newspaper readership is steadily declining (while radio audience is downright plummeting), and newspapers are in much-anticipated trouble:
The market capitalization of the Journal Register Company, publisher of the New Haven Register and hundreds of smaller papers, fell below $1 million last week, down more than 99 percent since the start of 2007. In the same period, GateHouse Media, another publisher of hundreds of small papers, has dropped almost 98 percent, to a market value under $26 million. The Sun-Times Media Group is down 91 percent, to less than $34 million.
Quite naturally, the Associated Press decided to do an in-depth (and rather impressive) study about A New Model for News, and came up with some interesting findings. One, in particular, got my attention: news as a medium of creating social currency.
Years ago, we got an email from a father -- he prints out DailyGood everyday, reads it before the family dinner, and they reflect on it during the meal. Changing the nature of our conversations, and subtly our thoughts, is one of the underlying points of CF's inspiring content.
As Jack Shafer points out, until recently, it was the newspaper that shelled out this social currency:
For as long as anybody can remember, the newspaper has been the primary info-hub through which people interacted. Oh, people might have talked to the shoe-shine man or their broker about what they heard on the radio or saw on television, but nothing could beat the newspaper as a source for socially lubricating conversation. How many times have you heard a conversation start, "Didja see that article ..."?
But that's no longer the case. Online networks are quickly becoming the Federal Reserves of social currency. AP report notes that as consumers get more control of the where-when-how of their news consumption, they are looking for deeper news beyond just the facts and updates.
My sense is that this "deeper news" will be far more effective as a crowd-sourced phenomena. That is to say, just as NBC can't create a YouTube, I don't think newspapers will be able to make this transition. And I guess that's why no is buying.
In HelpOthers.org, we perhaps have our farthest example of this content creation paradigm, but we are exploring this with Conversations.org and Karma Tube and perhaps we can extend it to ProPoor as well.
It was Chris J.'s birthday on Tuesday. Being a grassroot peace activist, and an avid CF'er, Chris called up his work and requested a day off: "It's my birthday, so I want to spend the day being of service to people." Hard to say no to that. :) And so that's exactly what he did.
In the evening, though, he invited some friends to join in the fun. Move over Miles of Smiles, it's time for Chalk-The-Walk! Chris and friends would all engage in random acts of chalk art, right outside the downtown Berkeley Bart station. Passerby's would notice, comment, join in, and in one case -- even promise to do the same activity in Portland! Even a 2-year old joined in.
[P.S. The next day, on Wednesday night, we agreed to practice an act of gratitude by sending a greeting card to a 95-year-old gift-economy knitter in Virginia! Helen Rose Miller is quite story ... and will be totally blown away as she starts receiving dozens of unexpected cards!]
Gail Johnston's latest book, Social Cause Diet, features two of HelpOthers.org stories. She describes her inspiration for the book as follows:
In a country where over 400 diet books were published last year, why do problems with obesity and eating disorders continue to climb? Maybe it's because typical diet books share one major flaw: they perpetuate the dieter's focus on food and tendency to be self-absorbed. But true health and well-being is achieved when we become free from our obsessions and shift our attention to greater things.
Author Gail Johnston proposes that we all go on the Social Cause Diet: a diet that involves intentionally giving ourselves to others in service. Through varied stories of satisfying acts of service, this anthology will inspire you to enjoy the more fulfilling aspects of life. It also includes a simple personality test to help you discover your service strengths.
Those who are young and inexperienced; those who are ambitious and overworked; those who are middle-aged and questioning; those who are elderly and retired--all can partake of the rich benefits from going on the Social Cause Diet.
Many of our stories have been published before, but this time I even got quoted (from the Stanford talk): "People who serve often say, ‘Thank you for the opportunity to be of service.’ They understand that their service to you benefits themselves."
Warren Buffett often says that when his company makes an investment decision, they never think about an exit strategy. Same could be said about CharityFocus. :) Like that energizer bunny, we just keep going and going. And going.
Thought of the Week started back in 1997. Pre-blogs, it used to be like my blog entry emailed to bunch of like-hearted friends. Soon enough, CharityFocus seeds were being watered and I didn't have time to write, so I started cut-and-pasting inspiring excerpts from other authors. People appreciated it, so I kept at it. Then, one day, my Dad (also a subscriber) had this brilliant idea of reading this aloud before starting the circle of sharing on "Wednesdays". It all stuck, and so without an exit strategy (or even a growth strategy, let alone a branding strategy :)), we kept offering it.
Week in and week out, subscribers got their "Meditation Reminders". 11 years later, there are still some who believe that I do a compose-and-send each week. :) Today, however, it reaches 54 thousand people acround the globe; several folks like Pavi and Viral vet the thoughts each week; Prasad often spends hours in contemplation before contributing one of his original photos; Liz and Jarrod create a professional audio recording each week!
Along the way, all this CF stuff kept happening -- kindness stories, videos, conversations with social artists, good news. And quite naturally, last week, Thought of the Week got a major face-lift as it started including featured inspirations from various CharityFocus portals.
Jon M. writes in this morning with a poignant note:
I am most moved and intrigued by what you folks are doing. You seem to have found a wonderful format, and amazing quality, for communicating fundamental spiritual ideas that extend across all cultural borders. Making the universal universal is no small achievement in our world!!
As one engaged in wondering how we can bring this kind of consciousness into public education, I read your posting in two levels: What they mean for me; and how might we create or adapt these for classroom use as relates to literature, character development, and so on.
As ever thanks for sprinkling cosmic blossoms on my desktop.
Being in the Silicon Valley, lot of us are Berkeley and Stanford grads. In many circles, that's a badge of honor and a metric of authentication. If a Stanford grad goes on a pilgrimage, it's somehow more valuable because his opportunity cost is higher. When a Berkeley grad talks about the gift-economy, she isn't just a free loader who couldn't make it in the real world. Having society view academic institutions as brands is problematic in the sense that it gives graduates (like myself) a severly misplaced sense of self-worth. Generations of confusion later, we get wrapped up in that dream while forgetting to ask questions beyond which-college, what-job, which-house. We excel in exams, but miss out on education.
Malcom Gladwell, in this fantastic speech to Oxonian Society and Getting In article in the New Yorker, offers data to show that elite schools have become like elite brands and like corporations, their choices of who is accepted is very much about maximizing the return on investment. (And yes, Harvard's endowment of $38B is greater than the Gates Foundation!)
It is no wonder that, more than half a century ago, Gandhi wasn't a big fan of schools as a medium for education. We go through this whole rigamarole and justify an unsatisfying job to dissolve the $100K college debt; by the time we come clean, we already have 2 young kids and are risk-averse; and when life has passed us by, we give commencement speeches without ever having found authentic, personal answers to life's big questions. As Krishnmurti opens in Education and Significance of Life, "We are turning out, as if through a mould, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible."
Neil, having graduated from Cal and now doing his PhD at Stanford (and also volunteering on CF's Tech Team), knows first-hand the powers of a "ruling-class institution." And this morning, he pointed to an interesting op-ed on the limitations of elite education (which also relates to his recent blog post). Here are some of Neil's favorite quotes from the (long) article:
One could simplify the big, governmental, several-billion-dollar industry of foreign "aid" into two categories: Jeffrey Sachs (author of End of Poverty) and William Easterly (author of White Man's Burden). At the crux of their arguments, Sachs believe in imposing top-down big plans while Easterly looks for bottom-up solutions to specific needs.
At a lot of design meetings and discussions, I often draw the distinction between plan-and-execute models vs. search-and-amplify. CharityFocus has always been in the latter mode, and it has had very significant ramifications in the long-term outcomes of all our projects.
In a new book, Reinventing Aid, Easterly points out a great distinction between "planners" and "searchers".
The planning mind-set is in turn linked to previously discredited theories, such as that poverty is due to a ‘‘poverty trap,’’ which can be alleviated only by a large inflow of aid from rich country to poor country governments to fill a ‘‘financing gap’’ for poor countries. The aid inflow is, of course, administered by this same planning apparatus. This is bad news for the world’s poor, as historically poverty has not been ended by central planners. It is ended by ‘‘searchers,’’ both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way.
This is really fascinating, because Easterly is essentially languaging the merits of CF's third guiding principle -- focus on small things.
So what are the traits of the planners and the searchers? Easterly says:
Kaliya, an active fan of gift-economy, has spent years creating momentum around OpenID. While the average Internet user has 8.6 logins and passwords, OpenID would create a central repository for a single sign-on experience. Along with the ease, the hope was that it would be more secure and flexible. What started with a couple of champions now has lot of major companies involved in the conversation.
An article in today's NY Times, though, is essentially saying that any kind of password system is inherently weak:
I once felt ashamed about failing to follow best practices for password selection — but no more. Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them.
So what's the next generation solution?
The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties’ authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see. In short, we need a log-on system that relies on cryptography, not mnemonics. As users, we would replace passwords with so-called information cards, icons on our screen that we select with a click to log on to a Web site. The click starts a handshake between machines that relies on hard-to-crack cryptographic code.
To give you a flavor of the magazine, here's a quote from a beautiful piece -- 
