commonspace

Shuttleworth open licensing policy now online

A few months back, I posted a draft How We Work article on the Shuttleworth Foundation's open licensing strategy. The basic idea is that we want everything we do and fund to be under an open license. As my article says, this hasn't always worked as we haven't had a clear policy on the matter. Good news: now we do.

Andrew Rens and Karen Gabriels have polished off our Open Resources Statement of Principle. It says things like:

All Agreements entered into by the Foundation which include the creation of resources shall ensure that the resources are open resources, and shall record how the Intellectual Property in the resources is owned and licensed.

and

Resources are open resources when they are available for revision, translation, improvement and sharing under open licences, open standards and in open formats, free of technical protection measures.

This will now flow into an update of our standard grant and consulting contracts, and generally guide us as we go forward. Great work, Andrew and Karen!

With the release of this policy, we've also finalized and polished my article on the topic of open licensing. It's up on the Foundation site in both HTML and PDF.

Agile philanthropy: how our fellowships work

Last month, we sat down to have another How We Work conversation at Shuttleworth Foundation. Under the microscope this time: our Fellowships Program. We're all pretty happy with this program. So, the aim was to reflect on why it seems to be working ... and to find ways to tweak and improve it.

The fellowships idea has a simple genesis: the desire to work with people on the front edge of issues like open education, knowledge and telecom in a way that is at once agile and high impact. Projects and grants sometimes work for this. However, they just as often create a situation where the Foundation is talking to the right people (smart, connected and engaged on the issues that matter to us) in the wrong way (long project negotiations trying to fit round pegs into square holes). The fellowships emerged about 18 months ago so we have a way to make bets not just on projects but also on people. 

We currently have four fellows. Andrew Rens working on access to knowledge and intellectual property. Steve Song on open telecom. Steve Vosloo on communications and analysis (aka 'how education needs to work differently in the 21st century'). And myself with the dual hat of open philanthropy and open education. With the exception of myself, all the fellows work in our Cape Town office alongside the people who manage our grant making and in-house projects.

When Helen, Jason and the four of us fellows reflected on the program last month, some of the things we said were ...

1. The 'make bets on smart people' works for us.

The fellowships are based on the 'make bets on smart people and let them run' model. This approach has bought the Foundation two things: agility (we can move quickly on ideas and issues) and intellectual momentum (I can't think of a better term ... but basically we are moving as a group on the issues that matter to us). Also, we've created a brainstormy hothouse in the office, with ideas bouncing about constantly. This not only has the fellows fueling each other but also feeds projects like Siyavula and Kusasa and the organization as a whole.

2. We're starting to get traction on issues that matter ...

While it's still early days, we're starting to get traction on specific work led by the fellows. Steve Song has gathered people around the beautifully disruptive idea of the village telco. Andrew has helped South Africa drive the openness agenda in the OOXML / ISO discussions. Steve Vosloo is helping to shape the conversation on mother tongue instruction, which is a critical issue in the future of South African education. I helped a group of open education pioneers birth the Cape Town Declaration. These are small scale results, for sure. But are concrete and, more importantly, they represent the kind of things we want to see happening in the world. 

3. ... but follow through is sometimes tough.

On the flip side, we haven't always had perfect follow through on this early traction. If I just look at the Cape Town Declaration, we could have done more to quickly seize the momentum we built with the Declaration launch in January. This could have been fixed in part by me blogging, engaging and pushing more post launch. The fellowships are all about this kind of 'just roll up your sleeves' action. However, our not perfect Cape Town follow through is also related to the fact that we've tried to organize some of our next step activities using grants (watch soon for Open Education News) ... which is a slower way to get things rolling. We need to think about how we elegantly combine grants and fellowship energy in the future. We have an opportunity to move further faster combining these things, but we aren't there yet.

4. Getting the word out is even tougher.

We've also had a tough time sharing and communicating the ideas emerging from the fellows. All of the fellows are blogging, some in high profile places. This is good. There is a blog aggregator. Which is also helpful, although it's not clear who follows it. What's needed now is a better web site that pushes people to this material more aggressively. MOre importantly, we need a better strategy for getting people engaged: more thoughtful links between our e-mail newsletter and our most compelling posts; blogging about other people's work, especially the Foundation's partners; getting other bloggers to link to what we're writing. Small, simple stuff. We need to do it.

5. Paper, podiums and parties are great ... but needs discipline.

The tongue-in-cheek mandate for the fellows program is 'papers, podiums and parties'. Papers = writing and blogging to push thought leadership. Podiums = speaking and evangelizing. Parties = running events and building networks. Tongue-in-cheek or not, this trio actually serves well as a way to check whether we're working on the right things. A quick reflection at the meeting showed that most of us are doing well in one or two areas, but not necessarily in all. Eg. Steve Vosloo's work on mother tongue has a great paper and he's spoken on podiums ... but we need to follow through with some sort of symposium on the topic (a party). We need to be a bit more disciplined about tracking what we are doing in these areas and filling in the gaps.

The bullets above are a gut reflection on the meeting MP3 and my notes, which I just went over last week. I will write a more formal How We Work article on fellowships sometime in July. If you have questions or would like me to dig deeper on any particular points, please post comments here.

Practising my open philanthropy rap

During my recent trip to Cape Town, the Foundation held a 'messaging meeting'. This is basically a communications group therapy session. Everyone has two or three minutes to deliver a pitch on their work and projects. After watching a video playback of each pitch, the group offers constructive criticism.

If you want to hear my current open philanthropy rap (or just want to see me make a fool of myself) take a look at this video from the meeting:



The 'get better at your pitch' benefits of this exercise are obvious ... and doing a session like this every few months is worthwhile for this reason alone.

However, there was a bigger and somewhat surprising benefit: team building. People learned about each other's projects in a way that they would never have time for during the normally flurry of a workday. They also had a chance to provide informal, rapid-fire input on both the positioning and substance of the work we are doing as a Foundation. And, fueled by the nervous gawkiness of any public speaking rehearsal, all of this was rolled up inside a good dose of humour and love. It was quite amazing. I hope I get to do it again.

Building a hothouse

Last week, I had a rare 45 mins with Mark Shuttleworth. He asked: what do you think the Foundation has achieved in the last year? I answered that it had 'stabilized and grown strong'. Which is true. After a few rocky years, the Foundation is now in a position to actually pursue big ideas like free textbooks and learning analytical skills p2p-style in a serious way. Yet, I knew my answer wasn't quite right. The Foundation hasn't just stabilized, its, well, this sounds silly, but ...

... it's turned into a hothouse of ideas, invention and activism. The hothouse image came up as we were brainstorming new metaphors for the theory of change. At first, I wrote this one off. But, reflecting on two weeks at the Foundation's Cape Town office, the hothouse image has stuck with me. It feels like that is exactly what we have built.

Amidst the clatter of the open plan office, sparky ideas constantly bounce off the walls. Over the course of just a few hours the other day: Andrew and Sam were debating the merits (or lack thereof) of the OLPC / Microsoft deal. Steve(2) and I were comparing South Africa's mother tongue education policies with the last 30 years of French immersion in Canada; and all of us were trying to figure out why the Lego mashup of Eddie Izzard's Death Star Canteen is so good (which is actually very important if the projects you're building hinge on contribution and creativity). The Foundation has truly become fertile ground for the exchange and evolution of ideas.

Of course, fertilizer on its own is just crap. Thankfully, the Foundation also has some promising seeds in the ground. Mark's Siyavula free textbook project has not borne fruit yet, but it's definitely taken root. He is now grappling with concrete issues like setting up an online repository, putting 1000s pages of existing content online and recruiting community leaders and volunteers to make this content better. Sam is at a similar spot with Kusasa, working through the practicalities of testing grade four peer-to-peer learning content in seven schools. And, new seeds like Steve(1)'s Village Telco are also going into the ground. Much is growing, and it is real.

What's most hot-house-y – and what you really only feel in the office – is the the ideas and the action really feeding each other. The fellows don't just write papers. The people running concrete projects don't just project manage. They dance together. Just think: Mark (creating free textbooks) is sitting across the room from Andrew (the intellectual property fellow) as he works on a competition bureau complaint related to educational publishing. The natural thing that happens is that they help each other. This is what is going on all the time, in subtle but quite powerful ways.

The bad news: you can't really see this from outside, which is not very hot-house-y. Fixing this is critical. We want people to take inspiration from (or take issue with) what we are doing. We also want them to contribute to (or simply rip off) what we are doing, even before our work has fully borne fruit. This won't happen until people can pick up and even join into the office vibe from outside. As a simple first step, we've agreed to compile all the existing Foundation blogs as the main feature on the front page a of our site. Much more is in the works.

Next time someone asks me what we've done in the last year, I'll have a better answer: we've built a hothouse. A very good one. True, it's only produced a few tiny victories so far (the Cape Town Declaration and South Africa's vote against OOXML at the ISO). But, after a week in Cape Town, I am quite hopeful that it's about to produce a great deal more.

PS. While I love the hothouse metaphor, I am still not completely convinced we should use it for the updated theory of change. Comments on this highly encouraged.

Philanthropy on the commons

I spent the weekend mulling over Mike Edwards' essay Philanthrocapitalism: After the gold rush. The basic argument is this: there is a movement afoot to harness the power of business for social change. This includes newly-minted foundations like Gates, corporate social responsibility programs and social entrepreneurs. These philanthrocapitalists are undermining the independence and social mission of civil society. As a result, we are missing out on real social transformation, and maybe even risking our democracy.

From where I sit, much of what Edwards says seems wrong or misdirected, mixing apples with oranges with assumptions. Which is why I was so surprised to see him briefly trumpeting one of my favourite ideas: "... new business models built around the commons, such as open source software." Edwards suggests that these new models have the potential to deliver deep changes to both our society and our economy. I agree. In fact, I would argue that they already have.

The power of peers

Just think about Wikipedia for a second. In less than 10 years, Wikipedia has completely overturned the intellectual and economic power structure of the publishing industry (or, at least, the parts dealing with reference materials). What's more, it has dramatically increased the number of languages that have their own encyclopedias (over 250), the number of topics covered (2.3 million in English alone) and the speed with which new topics get covered (there is even a little article on philanthrocapitalism). Like it or not, Wikipedia is unquestionably an incredible achievement.

Many would also argue that Wikipedia is a major public good, on the order of an education or library system. That's certainly what Jimmy Wales and others had in mind when the coined the Wikimedia Foundation's vision statement: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." The people behind Wikipedia were definitely thinking about what Edwards calls 'real social transformation' right from day one.

Of course, the most interesting thing about Wikipedia is not Wikipedia itself, but the method used to create and maintain it. Tens of thousands of volunteers around the world contribute and edit content on topics they are passionate about. When you add up all of these small bits of labour, you have what it takes to create the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia.

It's this kind peer production that Edwards is talking about when he speaks of 'the commons'. And, as Yochai Benkler eloquently argues in The Wealth of Networks, this model is not limited to Wikipedia: it is a part of a new and growing wave of non-market peer production that is creating tremendous public assets. Linux. Mozilla Firefox. The Public Library of Science. MIT's OpenCourseWare. The 60 million Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr. We create and hold these things in common. And, as we hold them, our economies, our societies and our democracies are transforming.

The yin yang dance

The funny thing is, Edwards seems to think that the commons and business are at odds. "The problem is that these approaches are absent from the philanthrocapitalist menu," he says. The facts say otherwise. Who are the top funders of of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson's Virgin Unite. Who funds the Creative Commons? Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook as well as a number of foundations created with newly minted high tech wealth. The commons is clearly on the philanthrocapitalist menu.

More importantly: collaborative, non-market peer production was born from a world that lives on the fuzzy edge between public and private benefit. In his 1999 essay, the Magic Cauldron, Eric Raymond offered a taxonomy of open source business models that still left the code in the commons: cost-sharing; giving away things that have use value but no sale value; selling technical support or services. His point was this: business and the commons are not only compatible but, in many cases, actually interdependent.

In the almost 10 years since the Magic Cauldron, we've seen real world success by open source projects mixing public and private benefit. Committed to bringing books to the blind, entrepreneur Jim Fruchterman generates revenue from online services while staying staunchly not-for-profit. Once a single foundation, Mozilla is now a foundation and two companies as a way to consciously play across the private / public benefit divide. And, intent on transforming the economics of software with an always free, easy to use version of Linux, Mark Shuttleworth set up not a charity but a business. In stark contrast to Edwards, these folks do not see public and private benefit in a zero sum pitched battle: they see a yin yang dance. There may be times of conflict, but it is a conflict of interdependence and, ultimately, mutual benefit.

Open sourcing philanthropy

At the end of his essay, Edwards asks what he calls the $55 trillion question: how will we use the vast amount of new philanthropic resources that will be created in the next 50 years? My instincts tell me that Wikipedia, open source and peer production may hold part of the answer. The world of the commons has used openness, participation and community to create real and (hopefully) lasting public goods. Why not apply these same principles to improving education, creating low cost housing or evolving our democracy?

Of course, using open source principles to address a wide variety of social needs would require a new kind of foundation. In fact, it would require a whole wave of foundations built from the ground up around the values of openness, transparency and participation, and sitting happily on the fuzzy edges between public and private benefit. It would require us to open source philanthropy. Possible? I think so. And, who knows, maybe some of the so-called philanthrocapitalists might even be willing to help.

--

An edited version of this post is part of a debate about philanthrocapitalism taking place on OpenDemocracy.net. It's also highlighted on Slashdot.

Open, philanthropy and a theory of change

A number of people have been asking me lately: what happened with the open philanthropy work that you posted about last September?

In addition to lots of fruitful little experiments (more on these later), my main work on the open philanthropy front has been on the Shuttleworth Foundation theory of change. In our own words, the purpose of this exercise is to 'explain what we do, simply'. While we may not have hit that mark yet, we have definitely forced ourselves to start digging into what we mean by open philanthropy. The current draft looks like this:

One of the first questions we stumbled across as we worked on this picture was 'what does an open philanthropy way of working look like?' We brainstormed a ton on this. Some of the ideas we came up with simply described our values as a team (e.g. integrity and irreverence). However, we also unearthed a few things that feel like the essence of the open philanthropy practice we're currently inventing. While the list is still likely to evolve, these include:

1. Open source everything. Everything that the Foundation creates, funds or helps with should be open sourced. This means: under an open license; available in an open format; and accessible from a public web site, always.
2. Share. Leverage. Share again. Open source is not just about giving (share), it's also about receiving (leverage). You don't need to look far in the software world to see this. Something like Ubuntu rests on the shoulders (and code) of giants who have shared tremendously. However, it only succeeds by leveraging these existing assets to create even more value, and then giving it back again. It's this leverage and share again process to moves things ahead. The Foundation can use this same share|leverage|share cycle to drive collaborative social innovation and radical improvement in areas like education.
3. Community as part of everything. Despite the rhetoric, most philanthropy and social investment happens in silos. The result is zero leverage, poor use of resources and slow progress. The Foundation needs to get down and dirty with communities working on education, innovation and access each step of the way. This means constantly looking at who's doing similar work, inviting them to our parties, and going to theirs. It also means befriending the enemies of those working against us. The open source world has lots to teach us about this. So does Gramsci.
4. Radical transparency. A core piece of 'open' -- open source, open events, open societies, open systems -- is being able to see what's under the hood. When you can see inside something, you can understand it, interface with it, hack it or rip it off altogether. If something is closed, you can't. Radical transparency means opening up not only your yearly books (we need to do this anyways), but also openly sharing your planning, learning and relationships as you go along. This doesn't have to be hard: just take the password off the wiki and podcast your events. By the doing things like this, the Foundation is likely to have partners who come with better ideas (interface), offer improvements (hack) and even run with things on their own (rip it off). That's what we want.
5. Listen, learn, evolve: constantly. The Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that markets are conversations. It's strange to me that so few activists have learned that the same is true of social change. Open philanthropy must include constant engagement and conversation with partners, activists, policymakers and (god forbid) customers. Knowing what these people think in real time with 80% accuracy (using cluetrain-style market research) is way better than finding out with 99% accuracy five years too late (using the rigorous and expensive evaluation processes that foundations love). This is especially true if people think what you are doing sucks, as you've still got time to fix it. The Foundation needs to get involved in this kind of listening in a very systematic way, and then to use what it is hearing and learning to steer the ship.

In the Shuttleworth team, we already embrace some of these things in our daily practice, even if we do so far from perfectly. Everything we do and fund is under an open license. Initiatives like Siyavula and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration have community at their heart. And, we do listen, learn and evolve faster than any other foundation I have worked with. Open is deep in the DNA of the Shuttleworth Foundation, the team and most of our partners.

The thing is, embracing with these ideas isn't the same as succeeding with them. We're still a long way from having a break away hit with open sourced education. In fact, we're just starting (after four years of trying) to become more systematic about open licensing and archiving the things produced by the Foundation and its partners. And, we're still a ways off from a systematic approach to learning and transparency. The Foundation -- and this infant idea of open philanthropy -- are works in progress. We know that. It's part of the fun.

The theory of change discussion also forced us to look at our assumptions about how ideas move and how innovation happens. These ideas are even more in flux that the ones above, and will be subject to further discussion. In any case, some things that seem true so far include:

• Only some ideas will get traction. Our core, day to day work is investing in people and ideas that drive innovation in education, telecom and intellectual property. Our hope is that this work bubbles up some good ideas, and that the people behind these ideas will run with them. However, we know that only some of these ideas will get traction. That's okay. These are the ones we want to back, and that the open philanthropy approach can accelerate and improve.
• Good ideas need to become real products, services and policies. Transitioning from a good idea to something people use everyday is hard work. The Foundation and the open philanthropy process need to be focused on putting this hard work into ideas that are viable. This includes making sure ideas are well packaged and productized (even policy ideas need to be 'easy to use'), building communities and (social) markets around them and thinking deeply about their long term viability and sustainability out in the wild. It's only with hard work in these areas -- and then some degree of good fortune -- that the ideas we back ideas will start to have the kind education, innovation and access to knowledge impact that we are seeking. 
• If we're lucky, some ideas will go viral. The ideas that really scale -- at least in the short term -- will do so because they go viral. This is the real potential of open philanthropy. With open sourced ideas and strong communities, the conditions are right for going viral. But, scaling an idea this way also involves a tremendous amount of luck and serendipity. It also involves listening and being willing to jump when the opportunity arises. This is something we'll need to train ourselves to do.

This is still early theorizing. However, it feels like the core principles here have some merit: filter for ideas with traction; be rigorous about packaging and promoting ideas with promise; and jump on opportunities to spread and go viral. By doing these things, we're hoping that we can catalyze enduring changes to policy, practice and culture eventually nurture an open knowledge society (I guess we'd better define that one soon, but not in this post). It'll be interesting to see what works, and even more interesting to evolve our thinking along the way.

Anyways, that's a quick answer to those who asked what's up on the open philanthropy front. Fun stuff. More soon.

PS. The PDF version of the digram above is here.

Shuttleworth Foundation 'how we work' club

On this trip, I've started doing my open philanthropy work at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The biggest piece of this is developing the Foundation's theory of change and an accompanying open philanthropy manifesto (will post on this soon). The other bit is developing a series of 'how we work' papers.

The idea with the 'how we work' series is to show what open philanthropy means in practice and to encourage other people to rip off / emulate our ideas. Hopefully, the writing process will also help with internal reflection and learning. Maybe we're on to something with all this 'open' stuff, or maybe it's boohucky. The only way to find out is to look closely at how we are actually working.

In the spirit of transparency and openness (open philanthropy rule #6), I am posting my notes on the 'how we work' series below. Please comment, criticize and suggest additional topics.

Open philanthropy 'under the hood' article series

Series of papers that explain how we work and why. The series both gives us a chance to reflect on our practices (lunch time chats) and share open philanthropy practices we're proud of with others (the papers).

Who?

While this is an opt-in activity, everyone in the Foundation is invited to get involved. Some people will write these short articles. Others will simply participate in bookclubesque chats where we reflect on the topic to be covered in an upcoming article.

What?

Series of 10 – 12 papers on how we do things. Each paper is written by a staff member or a fellow based on a team wide lunch time discussion on the topic at hand.

The papers should be lightweight, practical and easy to read. The target length is 2 - 3 pages. At this stage, we're assuming each article will cover five questions:

• what we do (describe the practice)
• why do it (connects to open philanthropy idea)
• what's working
• what's hard / broken / ineffective
• steal this idea (step by step / tips / example materials)

Possible topics for the series include:

• Grant contracts, CC licensing and keeping stuff 'free' ''(Mark w/Karen)''
• How our fellowship program works, and why ''(Jason and Karien)''
• Theory of Change, what is and how we built it ''(Mark S)''
• Book club: being serious can be fun ''(Andrew)''
• Cape Town Declaration as network building ''(Mark S)''
• Freedom Toaster as spin off example, warts and all ''(??)''
• Wikifying your foundation ''(??)''
• Blogging your foundation inside out ''(Mark)''
• Using and promoting open document ''(??)''

Mark Surman will start with the 'CC licensing topic' in February. More topics will probably make themselves evident as we go along.

Why?

One of the open philanthropy principles in our Theory of Change is: listen, learn and evolve, constantly. That's why we are doing this. Specific goals include:

• reflect on how we work (lunch chats)
• use reflection to become more nimble, open and effective (better practices)
• document how we work so others will emulate (papers + podiums)
• spark a conversation on 'open' with other foundations (parties)
• get feedback and ideas from other foundations to help us improve (better practices)

There is also a piece in here about 'share, leverage and share again' which is another of the principles in our theory of change.

When?

The papers would be released monthly, probably with some sort of fanfare. We could also do a brief seminar on each paper. This could in turn be podcast.

PS. Full disclosure: anything thing that prompted the 'put this stuff up totally openly on my blog' approach is that I can't access either of the Foundation wikis right now. However, 'as public as possible' is probably the right attitude here, so I think I'll keep posting stuff like this here.

Creative (and open?) philanthropy

Over the holidays, Tonya, the boys and I felt a huge debt of gratitude to Helen Carmichael and John Dash who let us use their house while they rode the rails in Wales. This gratitude was in part for the warm and beautiful nest from which we could explore Hackney (loved it soooo much) and enjoy a London Christmas (truly as romantic as it sounds). But we also felt grateful for the ideas and inspiration that inspiration that Helen and John shared through their wonderful collection of books.

Especially notable was Creative Philanthropy (PDF summary) by Helmut Anheier and Diana Leat, which Helen had very kindly left on the bedside table (on purpose, I'm guessing). Released in 2006, this book hit directly on many of the things I've been scratching at as I talk about open philanthropy:

• Most foundations (and even government grant making programs) are stuck in limiting, old fashioned ideas about charity and engineering solutions to social problems.
• Foundations should be focused more on big picture social change, using their independence to take risks, try new things and shift thinking.
• Big picture social change requires a focus on innovation, a commitment the spreading good ideas widely and a comfort with complexity.

At some level, much of this is obvious. Yet, there are very few foundations that focus on the kinds of innovation needed for big picture social change ... and waaaaaaaay fewer who have transformed their day to day business practices to focus on openness and creativity (or whatever other words you want to use). It's this focus on this transformation of practice that makes Creative Philanthropy so valuable, and that is at the core of the work I'm doing at the Shuttleworth Foundation.

It's is always a great gift to find kindred spirits. I feel like I've stumbled across a number with Helen, John and the authors of this book. I will definitely look them up when I am through London next. Hopefully, there is a vibrant conversation about creative philanthropy going on that I have yet to discover. My intuition says there is.

Reconsidering 'open'

I've been thinking alot about the broader meaning of 'open'. I've spent years working on and advocating for open source. I love running meetings using open space. I now work on open education. One of my job titles says I am all about open philanthropy. I organized an event about open cities. What's up with this? What is the connection? Is 'open' something bigger, something that has broad importance for our world?

As many of you know, my intuition says: yes, all the 'open' we've been playing with points quietly, albeit circuitously, to the future we want.

For the first time, I tried to tease out this intuition as a keynote to 250 amazing young people at the annual Millennium Scholars Think Again! conference. The general argument was something like: the principles of 'open' that we're familiar with from Wikipedia, Linux and even Facebook can -- and will -- help us reconfigure the worlds of work, education, government, philanthropy and social change for the better. For the purpose of illustration, I zoomed in on the impact of Internet-enabled mass collaborative and participatory media are having on how we work, think and consume. I stole alot from Benkler (with credit).

The presentation: I started with a 'who reads books vs. who uses Facebook' quiz for the audience; did a quick tour of the collapsing industrial information economy; introduced the Scholars to some important thought leaders of 'open' (Linus, Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Stallman); made the jump to open education as an example of a mainstream non-software domain built on the principles as the Internet and open source software; and ended with a link to Paul Hawken and the idea of a massively connected social movement that is acting as humanity's immune system. Phew. Slides are here on SlideShare.

The learning: a few of the Scholars thought that I was just talking about technology as our salvation. Of course, this is not the point. We can learn from the last 20 or 30 years of open technology, but this is really about seeing how the principles of 'open' work in a massive, connected, real world environment. The real opportunity is in taking these principles and applying them to all sorts of other parts of life. And, of course, the generation I was talking to is best suited to do this. Fluid, silo-less, chaotic, horizontal, p2p ways of doing things are second nature to them. If all goes well, we just need to encourage them take the way they already play and bring it into places of work, study and governance. 

Anyways, it was helpful to learn that I was coming across as too techie, and to remember that my natural inclination is to lean this way. Jane Rabinowicz from Santropol Roulant (also attending this event) was an amazing sounding board on this issue, suggesting that future talks should put equal weight on how people are using 'open' in things like meeting faciliation, organizational design and movement building. Of course, these are areas that I also play with, much more so than I play with software. So, it's easy for me to talk about these things, and to give examples the work I've been doing in the past few years (see: open education track at the iSummit). I just need to stop taking these examples for granted, and loop them into my spiel.

Riffing off this insight (thanks, Jane!), I am going to do a bit of a formal comparison of the values and rules that connect all of the kinds of 'open' that I play with. Who knows where this goes, but I suspect there are some patterns in it all. I will post here an let you know.

What is open philanthropy?

Driving to Stellenbosch yesterday, Darius asked me: "In a nutshell, what do you mean when you say open philanthropy?" It was a good question. The words 'open' and 'philanthropy' have been tumbling out of my mouth side-by-side for over a year now. Yet, they've always expressed an intuition, and not a clearly honed concept. Nothing like an explain-this-quickly-in-the-car gauntlet to help with clarity.

My initial shot at a one liner for Darius was: "like the Cluetrain Manifesto, but for philanthropy and social change." While this wasn't quite right, it had a kernel of right-ness. Cluetrain is about the need for corporations to be transparent, network-centric and engaged with customers in a very honest and human way. It's also about the emergent opportunities, quick feedback loops and ability to gauge needs and demands in real time that come with this kind of social connectivity. Philanthropy and development need more of these things, to be sure.

The other link is around the nature of corporations (and philanthropic orgs) with industrial era management cultures. These organizations thrive on thick planning documents (or funding proposals) that try to predict the future, locking everyone involved in a forced march towards a rigid goal. They have impermeable boundaries between 'us' and 'them', eschewing the kinds of fuzzy edges make it possible to hook into broader economic and social ecosystems. And, of course, they rely heavily on control-based management (supervision, deliverables, audits) rather than enablement (coaching, outcomes, learning).

In Cluetrain, industrial-brained companies are at best ineffective, and more likely doomed. The problem is, philanthropic organizations and development funders, without the watching eyes of the market, can be ineffective for a very long time without ever being doomed. And, ineffective they are. One need not be an expert in philanthropy to know that large numbers of grants contribute little or nothing to the social outcomes they are meant to catalyze. In most parts of the world, the response has been to lock down grantmaking even more, adding more planning, more supervision, more rigid evaluation. At the same time, the most creative and interesting social change organizations of our time are becoming more amorphous, more network-like and more informal (read Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest for useful insights on this). The result is that a great deal of grantmaking is not only ineffective in itself, but also that it rarely connects with the people and organizations that have the most potential to make our world a better place.

The point of open philanthropy is to reconnect social investment and social change. It's something that many people are intuitively poking at, but that we are not yet having a conversation about. In small ways, you see it in: IDRCs attempt to replace 'evaluation' with 'outcome mapping'; Skoll and Omidyar's efforts to create online communities around their philanthropy (or whatever they call it); and, the Metcalf Foundation's efforts to use networks as a way to surface ideas and define collective strategy. All of this comes from an intuition, an itch. There is some sense that words like open and philanthropy might mean something together, even if we haven't said it yet.

With the Shuttleworth Foundation generously offering me the title of Open Philanthropy Fellow, I guess one of my jobs is to take a crack at some of this saying. The best place to start for me is with a doodle. I just did this one on the plane:

Building on the notes above, the idea is pretty simple. Most philanthropy is disconnected from creative social change. We need to respond with an open philanthropy approach that backs inventive social change agents. And, extrapolating from experience and intuition, the three strategies to try out are: openness and transparency; network-centric-ness; and emergence and leverage. Let me quickly dig into these strategies.

The idea of 'open and transparent' is the most obvious. Make sure everything you do and fund is open licensed (the Shuttleworth Foundation does this). Use blogs for the majority of grantee and program officer reporting, cutting back on internal reports that no one outside the organization ever sees (tried this with telecentre.org, to mixed effect). Use wikis for planning and documentation (lots of people doing this). The point here is not only to put outputs of your efforts into the commons, but also to create a real time narrative that people can engage with and learn from. This is harder than it sounds.

Being network-centric is the next step. This isn't just about funding networks, which many funders have done, often to poor effect. In fact, it's most importantly about being 'in the game' as a part the natural networks that you work with, and getting out of the habit of acting like an outside voice giving directions or making judgments. Anyone in the social change game will be familiar with the vibe of funders standing at the back of the room or outside the circle of conversation. A network-centric approach starts with not doing this (very Cluetrain-ish) kind of thing. It then extends to listening to the ideas and energy flows in the networks and movements where you want to a difference. And, once you're good at this, it should also include monitoring the quality of connectedness, and doing things (paying for plan tickets, supporting meetings, making introductions) where necessary to strengthen the mesh within the network. In the end, much of this boils down to being a good friend and peer with the change agents you are working with. This is the main idea we've being testing with telecentre.org. It has worked in some ways, and not in others.

The third strategy is around emergence and leverage. Part of this is about listening for good ideas and watching for strong leaders, backing them with very small amounts of support, and then seeing what happens. As they succeed in small ways, you back them more. And so on. The other part is looking across the ecosystem for gaps, and filling them (as opposed to trying to make your own big, siloed splash in a particular area). While these are in some ways separate ideas, they really do make up one strategy. They are about the way you actually make your social investments (or grants) by listening rather than planning. This is probably the toughest thing to do well, both because we're addicted to big ideas with detailed plans, and because the grant administration systems that we have built up in foundations and governments make it almost impossible to be nimble, responsive and iterative. My guess is that it's worth pushing these envelopes, as they are likely to yield the kinds of innovation and social change that we have so long said we are looking for.

Okay, that's brain dump #1 on open philanthropy. It feels good to get it out. Tons of unanswered questions still hang, but that's okay. It's time to loop some of this back into the Shuttleworth Foundation theory of change. And, assuming I am not crazy, it's time for you all to hack away and evolve this idea with me. I'm up for this. Are you?