Stanford Social Innovation Review

Open Source Altruism

In today’s inter-connected world some of the most innovative models for social innovation will become those that can modularize, “crowdsource,” and aggregate small tasks.  Philanthropy was once one-to-many in direction and amplitude, but today facilitated means of communication and synthesis Online are enabling many-to-many philanthropic models to become widespread and increasingly powerful.

Crowdsourcing is by no means a new concept, though its form has changed. Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began in 1999 with a screensaver download, SETI@home, a program that utilized idle CPU power to scan through radio telescope data in search of life beyond Earth.  By 2005 over 5 million unique users had downloaded SETI@home, and were contributing to the search.  In 2001 NASA created the experimental Clickworkers project to locate and categorize craters on the surface of Mars.  NASA was able to partition the mapping into bite-sized tasks, make high-resolution photographs of the Martian surface available online, and syndicate this task to 85,000 crowdsourced volunteers online.  Though each person performed only a few minutes of pro-bono work, in aggregate NASA was able to map and categorize craters on Mars, and achieve this with minimal error due to overlapped tasking and aggregation. Crowdsourcing critics exist, but as for NASA, perhaps Rawlsian “overlapping –crowd– consensus” through iterative tasking can minimize its downside risk.

Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School Professor and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, writes on the “Networked Public Sphere,” and how secure relationships can elicit human behavior that deviates from homo economicus, and the assumed selfish actor.  Many examples, such as Wikipedia.org and Kiva.org point to the cooperative behavior of individual actors willingly collaborating in the pursuit of a larger goal, a digital application of what Benkler argues to be pervasive human behavior.  In the case of Wikipedia.org users donate their hard-earned time to edit the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia, and on Kiva.org users pool money with others they don’t know to provide risky, zero-interest international loans to remote entrepreneurs. 

Thus, within a context of norms and trust, humans online will behave in coordinated ways, addressing collective problems through knowledge-constrained, coordinated individual actions.  Empirically, users do this for both social and remunerative compensation, but prolific communities such as YouTube are grounded in community rather than compensation.  Contrarily, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has created a labor market for remunerated micro tasking, a platform in which “Turkers” perform Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for pennies at a time.  Such platforms can both enable large-scale, syndicated problem solving not attainable through algorithms, and concurrently circumvent labor laws by offering compensation below statutory hourly wages.  New models are exciting in their application, and destabilizing in their misuse.

With rapid mobile penetration, and the capacity to cohere decentralized knowledge around coordinated tasks, the potential for networked philanthropy is growing.  Today over 85 percent of Americans carry a mobile phone, and an increasing percentage of them are Internet-capable.  To this end, a San Francisco-based start-up called The Extraordinaries has pioneered the iPhone application space by allowing users to donate their idle moments working toward the attainment of broad-based social missions.

Along with The Extrordinaries, organizations such as BRUTE Labs, are attempting to build platforms of “Open Source Altruism.”  Open source altruism is rooted in the prioritization of quick-win, modular ideas, packaged as “kits” in adoptable formats, and provided free of charge. The recent launch of Mchopa.com, a website featuring the Masai art of Gregory Mchopa, uses a fungible back-end infrastructure that will soon support a small business in Guatemala aiming to bridge the digital divide by selling computers to the poor.  BRUTE’s success is rooted in its volunteerism, its cross-functional competency in engineering and management, and in its emphasis on design.  The recipient of numerous design awards, BRUTE extends its reach by appealing to an appreciation of aesthetics, or “the substance of style;” Design empowers and facilitates communication.

Soon, one-to-many philanthropy will be supplemented by overlapping consensus, crowd-sourced, many-to-many social ventures that leverage the networked public sphere.  To the extent that design can help communicate ideas, new models can be fungible, open-source, and free, and that new platforms can convert networked individuals into micro-activists, social entrepreneurs can supplement hope with human cooperation.

Scott E. Hartley (Stanford, ’05) is a former Google.org Business Development Consultant and dual-degree MIA/MBA graduate student at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and Columbia Business School.  He writes on Internet & Democracy for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Posted by Jenna Nicholas

5 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Corporate Giving Needs Better Metrics

Corporate philanthropy plays a key role in society and business but needs to be a better job showing it is worth the cost and in sync with the corporate bottom line.

That is the conclusion of a new report from the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.

The report, Measuring the Value of Corporate Philanthropy, looks at practices and measurement trends in corporate giving, at demands for evidence about its impact, and at new ways of gauging its social and business benefit.

“To realize meaningful benefits, corporate philanthropy must be managed no less professionally, proactively and strategically than any other core business activity,” the report says.

“Systematic measurement of the value of giving,” it says, can make “a more persuasive case for why companies should engage in philanthropic initiatives.”

And it says corporate CEO’s, the investor community and giving professionals “need to understand more comprehensively the many mechanisms by which philanthropic investments can be measured and managed to achieve long-term business value and solve critical societal problems.”

In talking with the investor community, for example, CEOs have a chance to distinguish themselves “through disclosures about their philanthropic strategies” and by leading the charge for stronger standards, the report says.

And in making the case to CEOs for corporate giving, it says, corporate giving officers need to show not only its social impact but also its business impact.

“Philanthropy can provide novel pathways towards meeting strategic business needs, such as improving employee engagement, customer loyalty, reputational risk, and opportunities for innovation,” it says.

And in demanding that grant recipients show whether they are achieving intended results with corporate support, metrics that measure only output “offer little indication whether social improvement actually is occurring – or, for that matter, whether unintentional harm is being caused,” the report says.

“Developing a theory of change and explaining how the program will achieve its intended impact,” it says, “are critical preparatory elements of measurement.

To celebrate International Corporate Philanthropy Day on Feb. 22, President Barack Obama sent a letter to business leaders saying current challenges “demand solutions that come not only from government, but also from entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world.”

Through their “skills, ingenuity, financial support and dedication,” the letter says, “corporate philanthropists and their employees have answered the call to serve, giving back in meaningful ways that help those in need and improve our communities.”

Corporate giving plays an essential role in helping to address both the symptoms and causes of social and global problems.

At a time of unprecedented financial stress, corporations must develop better metrics to track the impact of corporate giving and to show its value to their businesses and to the communities they serve.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper that is a program of the Institute for Nonprofits at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

1 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments