CharityFocus.org: Incubator of Compassionate Action

SmoothFeather Hits YouTube Homepage Again!

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-18 00:00:00

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.

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Masanobu Fukuoka Passes Away

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-17 00:00:00

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.

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The Worth of "works & conversations"

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-16 00:00:00

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.

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News as a Medium of Social Currency

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-15 00:00:00

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.

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Chalk the Walk -- In Downtown Berkeley!

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-14 22:00:00

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.

Photos really do speak a thousand words here. But thousand words are inspiring too: Omar's My Birthday Party Tomorrow :) 7-8:45PM" and Binal's Catching the Chalking Spirit are the first one to post stories.

Happy Birthday, Chris! :)

[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!]

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Social Cause Diet, Book by Gail Johnston

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-14 00:00:00

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."

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"Meditation Reminder" Gets A Face-Lift!

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-13 00:00:00

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.

Onwards we keep marching!

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Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-12 00:00:00

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:

"It's not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy."

"The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren't like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous."

"At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it... Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate"

"The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic."

"At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity..."

"Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls "entitled mediocrity." A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It's another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don't worry, we'll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you're good enough... Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it's also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-."

"But if you're afraid to fail, you're afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual... Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions."

"What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, "So are you saying that we're all just, like, really excellent sheep?""

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Planners Vs. Searchers

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-10 00:00:00

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:

The planners set out a predetermined big goal, like ending world poverty, to be solved. They also determine a big plan to reach the big goal and throw an endless supply of resources and a large administrative apparatus at that big goal. The searcher is more humble about how little she knows about other people’s problems. Searchers do not set predetermined problems and do not have big plans; they are just on the lookout for favorable opportunities to solve problems—any problem no matter how big or small, whose solution will benefit themselves or others. Searchers must learn enough about each little problem to solve it, which means they must get feedback from the people affected by the problem and what they need to fix it.

A planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. As the UN Millennium Project put it in 2005, ‘‘Throughout, we stress that the specific technologies for achieving the [Millennium Development] Goals are known. What is needed is to apply them at scale.’’ A searcher admits she does not know the answers in advance; she believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A searcher only hopes to find answers to individual problems of the world’s poor by trial-and-error experimentation.

As much as this information makes sense (to me :)), it's not really a basis of a revolutionary, social program due to one simple fact -- we don't know how to organize searchers without becoming planners.

Until, of course, the Internet's connectivity births a new paradigm of organizing. Now, unlike-ever-before, we are able to create overhead-free, decentralized groups. Overhead-free is crucial, because that is what gives us the capacity to be failure-resilient and allows for authentic trail-and-error experimentation. Wikipedia, for example, works because its resiliency for failure (ie. bad edits). The year-and-half-old crowd-sourcing movement is an example of this. Innocentive, for example, is achieving rather stunning success with its -- if you have a problem, ask everyone -- approach, in the commercial sector.

In our humble ways, we've started dabbling in this arena too and are stumbling into very interesting patterns of positive deviance -- like the Peace Feece Smile Card. And perhaps not in as humble a way, CharityFocus is also leading a coalition of a few organizations to design an idea-bank to find "social innovation through social capital". More as it develops. :)

Searchers are the new paradigm, but hopefully they'll be able to provide some more proof in the pudding.

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Future of Passwords

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-09 00:00:00

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.

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A YouTube For Documents

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-08 00:00:00

Sonesh introduced me to Scribd.com. Here's what they're upto:

Scribd began with a simple observation – there are billions of documents sitting siloed on people's hard drives. By making it easy for people to publish their documents to the internet, Scribd has unlocked this treasure trove of information.

One of early problems Scribd encountered was that there was no good format for displaying its documents, as formats like PDF, Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint were designed before the Internet existed. In response, Scribd created iPaper, the first document format built for the web. Like YouTube's player did for video formats, iPaper standardizes all document formats into one viewer that can be seamlessly integrated into webpages.

So take, for example, a talk by Swami Vivekananda -- Work and Its Secret. The talk is just so awesome, that any amount of cut-and-paste into a small blog entry doesn't do it justice. So, like YouTube, I can embed it like this:

Will it work like YouTube? Probably not. It's a nice and useful service (and even Obama Campaign is officially using it), but I don't think it has the initial conditions that made video-over-ip and YouTube viral. (But I did find the entire copy of Eckhart Tolle's New Earth fully online, in downloadable PDF. :))

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Smile Cards -- at the Casinos of Las Vegas?

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-07 00:00:00

Yes, it's true. Father Charlie Urnick requests 1500 cards with this statement:

I am a Catholic priest who has recently moved to the Diocese of Las Vegas (Nevada) and am the administrator of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Laughlin, Nevada. I had distributed your Smile cards in my previous parish in NJ, and I would like to introduce the people here to the concept. What makes us unique is that 3 out of our 5 weekend services are held in the casino showroom of the Riverside Resort and Casino, so we get quite a few hundreds of tourists for the Masses each weekend.

I mean, I was pretty elated when the Smile Cards personally reached Eckhart Tolle, Dalai Lama, and even Warren Buffett. But the casinos of Vegas?!? Now, that's pretty sweet. I wonder what's next. :)

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Greater Good and Daily Good :)

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-06 00:00:00

At our last Tiger Team meeting, Christine Carter attended and shared a few words of inspiration during the DailyGood presentation. As an editor of Greater Good, she gratefully described the impact of DailyGood on their magazine.

Last week, Richard and I met with Jason Marsh (founding editor) and Tom White at the Greater Good offices at UC Berkeley, to explore further.

We talked about lots of things and at the meeting itself, I offered resources in five key directions:

Content: GG has been very impressed with our content, and we're happy to share (as we've done with many books and magazines), so long as it remains in the public domains. GG will be printing some HelpOthers stories, featuring GG stories on their home page, and we are even exploring the idea of GG giving us a regular column.
Technology: those who build technical infrastructures are quite impressed with the subtleties of our design and the way it's scaling elegantly. We offered our design as a model and we may toying with the idea of GG joining our circle of sites.
works & conversations: while GG has a comfortable budget, here we have Richard -- with CF, post-gift-economy migration -- putting out more original content, posting impressive growth rate and working without any star power. We're exploring how to share best practices here and grow into more synergies.
Community: GG knows, from various sources, that we've got tons of social capital and are quite prevalent in the bay-area community. We're exploring co-hosting some events, and all their staff is ready to volunteer at Karma Kitchen (and gift GG copies). :)
Gift-Economy: well, you can't have a meeting without me parading the joys (and benefits) of a gift-economy. GG heard it, likes it, but I don't see them heading in this direction anytime soon. :)

It was an inspired meeting, with lots of tidbits. If you're unfamiliar with the GG magazine, The Compassion Instinct article is almost like their manifesto.

Perhaps the most interesting data point in the meeting, though, was about DailyGood. Some of their articles, like Hope on the Battlefield, made it to the top of Digg; having experienced that, I was curious to learn about their experience. Jason noted that being on DailyGood is far more valuable (in terms of concrete "conversions" to subscribers for eNewsletter and magazine, and engaged/sustained participation) than being on top of Digg. Of course, we know that DailyGood is emailed out to 91 thousand people everyday but it's not just the quantity that makes a difference -- it's the quality too. We are now starting to see the rewards of 10 years of unconditional service. :)

More as it develops. The DailyGood crew -- led by Viral and Pavi -- deserve more kudos than we can give them. :)

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The Measure of a Man, a Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-04 00:00:00

Birju (who has a great silence-before-meal story with his work colleagues), pointed me to this inspired piece from Martin Luther King Jr.'s The Measure of a Man.

Some years ago, a group of chemists who had a flair for statistics decided to work out the worth of man's body in terms of market values of that day. They got together and did a lot of work, and finally they came to this conclusion: the average man has enough fat in him to make about seven bars of soap, enough iron to make a medium-sized nail, enough sugar to fill a shaker, enough lime to whitewash a chicken coop, enough phosphorous for about 2,220 match tips, and enough magnesium for a dose of magnesia. When all of this was added up in terms of the market values of that day, it came to about ninety-eight cents. Now, I guess, since the standards of living are a little higher today, you could get about a dollar ninety-eight for the average man.

This is interesting. Think about it. Man's bodily stuff is worthy only ninety-eight cents. But can we explain the whole of man in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the artistic genius of a Michelangelo in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the poetic genius of a Shakespeare in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the spirit genius of Jesus of Nazareth in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the mystery of the human soul in terms of ninety-eight cents? Oh, no. There is something within man that cannot be explained in terms of dollars and cents. There is something within man that cannot be reduced to chemical of biological terms, for man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons. He is more than a wisp of smoke from a limitless smoldering.

When people ask how CharityFocus survives, how some of us personally survive, the answer inevitably points to this little extra something within us that can be poorly defined as social capital.

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Teaching Millionaires To Be Philanthropists

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-02 00:00:00

Imagine if someone comes up to you and say, "I'd like to effectively give away $70MM. How do you suggest I go about it?" Well, that's exactly what happened to Sudhir Venkatesh (author of Gang Leader For A Day, Sociology professor at Columiba).

Most philanthropists forget to the power of a be-the-change element, and hence their impact is mostly a figment of their imagination (backed by fancy reports from their staff). However, Sudhir steps it up in a very interesting direction. Some quotes from his chronicles:

I knew that philanthropy is most effective when the donor has a clear understanding of his/her own role and can answer the question, “What is motivating me to give?”
First, they confused charity with commerce: that is, they uncritically applied the language of outcome-oriented investment to efforts to change human behavior in social settings. Humans, alas, don’t operate neatly according to market logic, though incentives can shift behavior.
Second, donors seem reluctant to talk about their own self interest. Instead of admitting their personal desires, they speak of selfless charity. Of course, donors can do whatever they want with their money, but this attitude doesn’t help them grow.

Three donors wanted to work with him and here were his terms:

I agreed to work with them for one year, but with conditions. Most important, they had to arrive at a “loss figure” — a sum of money that they would give away (to actual causes), but which would be entirely devoted to their own learning. They had to forgo any serious outcome-based evaluations of the families/service providers who received their support. Instead, they had to privilege and pay attention to their own development.

So they came up with $500K as the "loss figure" and another $500k which would be given to the organization regardless of the outcome (to maintain focus solely on their transformation).

The topic they chose was alleviating poverty. So they actually went to meet poor families in Chicago and New York. The philanthropists expected money to work like a magic pill, but it didn't.

They believed that poverty was largely a result of resource deficiencies and organizational inefficiencies: if the poor had more money and their service providers could simply manage their giving more efficiently, change would happen. None placed much emphasis on feelings of self worth, the long-term nature of behavioral change or, most important, that staying above water is itself an accomplishment for a poor household. Everyone modeled their expectations after their family business or other corporate workplaces where they saw the “bottom line” motivate people to meet certain standards of achievement.

Over the year, more than 2 dozen families opened their doors to these 3 philanthropists. And by the end, philanthropists all realized that money isn't a sufficient condition to change people's behavior, they all felt frustrated and wondered if they should just go back to the predictable commercial sector that they're good at.

They also learned that, in some cases, process is as important as outcome. For example, service providers who keep families together — despite dramatic improvements — are playing a valuable function in communities where things always fall apart. And even if a child’s grades don’t improve, sometimes staying in school is a huge mark of success for the family.

Fascinating journey. Philanthropy boot-camp. :)

A generosity boot-camp, though, would step it up even further from understanding motives for giving to understanding basis for interconnection -- imagine if these philanthropists had to live with the "poor" and they left their wallets at home. Forces clarity in a hurry. :)

Several years ago, few of us were on philanthropy run and just stepped it up by stopping on the streets and spending the night out. All eight of us will never forget that night.

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Four Kind of Networks, and the Inner-Net

Nipun Mehta — 2008-08-01 00:00:00

When Gil sent me an article on networks, it reignited my latest thinking on networks. But first a summary:

Sarnoff's Law: the value of a network is proportional to the number of members. David Sarnoff was a radio personality in the 30s and this was relevant to the broadcast (one-to-many) model.

Metcalfe's Law: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. Robert Metcalfe presented this in the 70s, and this was largely relevant to the telecom network where the density of the network was much higher (anyone could call anyone).

Reed's Law: The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. In 1999, Reed used this explain the Internet, in the sense that it was more than just many-to-many; we could form groups and groups could interact or cooperate and the density of the network increased even further.

So, we went from a potential value proportional to number of members in a broadcast network, to the square of the number of members in a telecom type network, to roughly 2 to the n'th power, in a group-forming network, where n is the number of members. But now, Ming proposes a new law:

Ming's Law: The value of a network is proportional to its complexity. It's not just the possible connections, but the amount of nodes you can have a relationship with. Ming argues that value of the connection of a telecom network isn't just n-squared because it depends on outside networks also. Many networks interacting with each other, in a mix of online and offline networks, is the complexity he's talking about.

If you go in the direction of Ming's Law, you start to point toward the ultimate social network -- the inner-net, a web of inter-connection that binds our collective human experience.

When technology becomes boring, its social use typically becomes interesting. Then, the constraints start shifting; the way to improve the network value is no longer predicated on how many transistors we can cram into an integrated circuit, but rather on our ability to expand human abilities like attention. Friendsters and Facebooks of the world are flavors of the day but value based networks, like gift-economy, become increasingly relevant as that technology becomes boring and human capacity turns interesting.

So, how does a gift-economy network fare against a MySpace-ish network? Well, in the gift-economy realm, the organizing principle is giving; when you give, you create stillness; when you create stillness, you can pay more attention; when you pay more attention, you can create/maintain more connections, and finally, when as the density of interconnection rises, the network value ramps up.

My hunch is that a gift-economy network, if built with the same gusto of any commercial platform, will prove to be far more effective than any other kind of online network we've seen. And it will serve humanity.

On the flip side, if we don't build out such value-based frameworks, we will relentlessly fulfill Moore's Law, create applications where invention is the mother of necessity, and replace humans with robots. :)

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Lunch With Nipun?

Nipun Mehta — 2008-07-30 00:00:00

Yes, as funny as it sounds, it's true. Bidding is on for lunch with Nipun Mehta. :)

And apparently, I ship for free!

Samir (CEO of Search Force) and I agreed to do this, because it's a fun way to support education for Bangladeshi women via Agami, because Suma (the coordinator for Agami) is just so good-hearted, and ultimately, because we're shameless. :)

While lunch with Buffett sold on eBay for $620,100, we are quite sure that we will attract at least one bid from our moms. :)

For those who actually know us, we'll see you tonight at Wednesday meditation!

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Pay What You Want, Eat What You Want :)

Nipun Mehta — 2008-07-29 00:00:00

Pay what you want is finding a niche in our current culture. As the Karma Kitchen site lists, there's many such efforts:

City Cafe Bakery (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada)
Annalakshmi (Singapore, Malaysia, India)
Lentil As Anything (many branches in Australia)
One World Eatery (Salt Lake City, Utah)
SAME ("So All May Eat" -- Denver, Colorado)
TerraBite (Seattle)
Made with Love Cafe (New Orleans)
Mother's Kitchen (Across USA)
Krishnan (Madurai, India)
Seva Cafe (Ahmedabad, India, also in LA for six months)

Of course, Karma Kitchen is not exactly "pay what you want". It's "pay forward what you want" -- a subtle but significant difference that perhaps some of the others (like Seva Cafe) also share.

But now, there's a restaurant in King City that's going a step further -- pay what you want and bring your own food! That's right -- they're just providing a space. :)

When asked why she did this, founder Caroline Kininmonth responds:

There's no toilet. You see I had a very fancy group of woman here one night and they were all dressed up fit to kill, all dressed up in heals and things - having absolute ball and one of the woman looked at me and said, look I've got to go to the toilet!

And I said I'm terribly sorry there's no toilet, the boathouse doesn't have a toilet. And I said, so outside you'll just have to go behind a bush.

The next step to get something up to the stage where we would have to serve food would be hugely expensive. It might happen one day - but it's rather magic as it is now.

As Rumi says, there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. :)

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Evolution of CharityFocus

Nipun Mehta — 2008-07-27 00:00:00

Yesterday, CFSites crossed its 2500 site mark. That's 2500 good causes who are now online, in a commercial free way and attracting millions (2.5 million to be exact) of users. It's nothing to write in the NY Times about, but at the same time, it's a great little service.

That milestone -- do they have mile-pebbles? :) -- got me thinking about the changing nature of the CharityFocus offerings.

Back in 1999, the web was new and we started building websites for nonprofits. Believe it or not, we even had a sheet of paper that listed all the benefit of WHY nonprofits should use this thing called Internet! At our peak, we perhaps did 100 concurrent projects.

A few years later, in a rapidly changing technology landscape, websites became more complex. Nonprofits started asking for "web solutions" with online donations, backend databases and interactive websites. We tried that but realized our volunteer infrastructure wasn't effective in this dynamic of too many moving parts. So Matt (Henning), pretty much single-handedly, created this sly little tool on the side called CFsites. At the time, it was actually competing with our Service eXchange, :) and then became the first step -- content gathering -- part of the process.

Along the way, mostly through serendipity, we took on portals like PledgePage and ProPoor and realized that we had the infrastructure to maintain these web verticals. That proved to be defining cornerstone of the next phase of CharityFocus, as we soon built several other major portals in the coming years that ranged from kindness stories to videos for social change to daily good news. :)

Back in the days, Jonathan Freeman (who is currently serving in Iraq) had called us "incubator of compassionate action." We were doing these online projects, but really, we were just trying to serve unconditionally -- and while we didn't how it fit into the "websites for nonprofit" mission of CharityFocus, it felt perfectly normal for us to gather 40-50 friends to eat lunches with the homeless and meditating on Wednesdays or starting Karma Kitchen in Berkeley. We were constantly changing, and so as we were serving, it didn't really matter what we did. I think Jonathan was right, but with such a sweeping generalized anthem, it was increasingly impossible to capture CharityFocus into a soundbyte. But that was okay, because it's not like we had funders to impress. :)

For the first part of 2008, people started noticing CharityFocus. Major organizations, educational institutions, philanthropists. We weren't doing much Charity, and neither were we all that Focused, :) but we did tap into some archetype that had concretely touched millions of people without practically any overhead. Everyone wanted to know the secret juice. Our answer was simple -- be-the-change. Most people heard that, but forgot to read the footnote: "for 9 years". :)

So what's coming up? Of course, it's hard to predict. But what seems to be happening is web communities. (It's not the same as social networks, but more on that later.) Around the themes of our vertical portals, people want to connect and deepen/broaden their connection. Smile Groups has been our extremely successful pilot, but every site is calling for its own personalize-able gateway. While we were brainstorming a "Service Space" several years ago, it no longer warrants envisioning because we've already arrived -- with more than 200 thousand members! So, rather choicelessly, :) we are building Service Space, with a warehouse-storefront model that will allow for cross fertilization of our members in the "warehouse" (back-end) while still preserving the uniqueness of each "storefront" (front-end).

Another trend that is emerging is a connection to place and the intersection of online and offline communities. For a while, we struggled with this idea of local chapters when our formal work was online, all the while knowing that we had something special in the Bay Area. As things mature, though, the local-ness is becoming very clear and we are seeing informal gift-economy posses popping up everywhere from Antarctica (yes, it's true!) to the slums of Ahmedabad.

It's fun to watch all this unfold. I wish that I could point credit to one person or one event or even a frame-able collective intelligence, but the fact of the matter is that it's a complex series of intertwined conditions. Just like a piece of art, CharityFocus can't be replicated. Ultimately the success and failures of these projects will come and go as it needs to, while we are busy being-the-change and serving unconditionally.

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Raincoats in Bombay!

Nipun Mehta — 2008-07-25 00:00:00

While Sheetal just inaugurated the Urban Ashram in Pune (with a bang!), Madhu and Meghna took the MAM group out on the Bombay streets, to hand out raincoats on a rainy day and experiment with their own version of Miles of Smiles.

All of them are very much part of CF's gift-economy posse in Western India and as you might remember, their latest exploit has been about spreading the 101 hours, 101 filmmakers, 101 NGOs to 4 cities across India now!

We look forward to ongoing good news from the crew. :)

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