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February 6, 2009 10:00 AM	Party’s Over The air in Davos was so thick with gloom over the convulsing economy and Wall Street greed [$20 billion in bonuses paid out despite hefty bank bailouts and historic layoffs], that many CEOs leaving this year’s the World Economic Forum for home “bore the harrowed looks of survivors of the Donner Party,” according to Newsweek columnist Daniel Gross. No wonder, then, that as layoffs mount amid surveys showing public anger with CEOs at peak levels, a growing number of brands—from Frito-lay to Kellogg’s—are scrambling to adopt-a-nonprofit activist for their spring season ad campaigns. [Listen up, nonprofits seeking revenue] For the upcoming Oscars, for example, TrueNorth snacks will run a storytelling ad that profiles Majora Carter’s work with Sustainable South Bronx to “green the Bronx and “create green-collar jobs.” [Recall Kellogg’s recent Superbowl spot encouraging moms to “plant a seed” and nominate local playing fields for renovation.] Meanwhile, corporate volunteering panels are flooding Manhattan’s philanthropy events calendars for spring. Simon Sinek, president of Sinek Partners, a New York-based brand consultancy that specializes in “corporate refocusing” told BrandWeek magazine recently that “with President Obama, we are ushering in an era of service. Community service is now bigger than green.” Surveys of younger customers, it seems—members of Generation G (for good)—are also fueling the season’s stepped-up corporate responsibility campaigns. According to trendwatching.com, there is a rapidly growing segment of cause-wired, global consumers aged 40 or younger who now consider “generosity” an important social and business mindset. “As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy,” the report says, “has there ever been more urgency for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity?” The report also says that “sharing is the new giving” and posts the question: “In this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?” Compiled for business leaders in more than 120 countries from a global network of 8,000 trendspotters, the report lists various ways firms might use social media and other initiatives to create social responsibility programs that matter. Among them: Co-donate. Collaborate with customers about how often to donate—and to which causes. Use online and mobile technologies “to make the most of impulse-driven and networked fundraising.” (http://www.tomsshoes.com/) Be eco-generous. Don’t just offset your company’s impact on the environment; find ways to improve it. (http://www.novacem.com/) Engage in “free love”—in this case, give away some goods, like free coffees or free travel guides to consumers. Use brand butlers to help customers make the most of the company’s products. IKEA, for example, loans out branded bikes with trailers to its customers in Denmark to help them transport their purchases home. Engage in “perkonomics.” Offer perks like reserved parking to, say, owners of a specific automotive brand, or let preferred customers jump queues at busy events. Offer “tryvertising.” Let customers try products before they purchase them to make their purchasing decisions based on their product experiences rather than corporate brand messages. There’s no question: with public trust in CEOs and corporations at rock-bottom and the change mantra out of Washington [and Davos] and this week’s TED2009 still freshly potent, cause-wired social entrepreneurs have never had a better opportunity to boost traction globally for their Web-powered ideas. In that vein, expect even more aggressive efforts this spring by leaders of the social enterprise movement to track and compile the rate of return of social media in for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. Says new media expert Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization, “Design an environment where people can feel good at what they’re doing…and they’ll flock to your venture.” For more on designing initiatives for generosity that also work for the bottom line, see Shirky’s talk at the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine, below: Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy. Posted by Kelsey Walker 0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments
November 2, 2009 04:03 PM	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

February 6, 2009
10:00 AM

Party’s Over

The air in Davos was so thick with gloom over the convulsing economy and Wall Street greed [$20 billion in bonuses paid out despite hefty bank bailouts and historic layoffs], that many CEOs leaving this year’s the World Economic Forum for home “bore the harrowed looks of survivors of the Donner Party,” according to Newsweek columnist Daniel Gross.

No wonder, then, that as layoffs mount amid surveys showing public anger with CEOs at peak levels, a growing number of brands—from Frito-lay to Kellogg’s—are scrambling to adopt-a-nonprofit activist for their spring season ad campaigns. [Listen up, nonprofits seeking revenue] For the upcoming Oscars, for example, TrueNorth snacks will run a storytelling ad that profiles Majora Carter’s work with Sustainable South Bronx to “green the Bronx and “create green-collar jobs.” [Recall Kellogg’s recent Superbowl spot encouraging moms to “plant a seed” and nominate local playing fields for renovation.] Meanwhile, corporate volunteering panels are flooding Manhattan’s philanthropy events calendars for spring. Simon Sinek, president of Sinek Partners, a New York-based brand consultancy that specializes in “corporate refocusing” told BrandWeek magazine recently that “with President Obama, we are ushering in an era of service. Community service is now bigger than green.”

Surveys of younger customers, it seems—members of Generation G (for good)—are also fueling the season’s stepped-up corporate responsibility campaigns. According to trendwatching.com, there is a rapidly growing segment of cause-wired, global consumers aged 40 or younger who now consider “generosity” an important social and business mindset. “As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy,” the report says, “has there ever been more urgency for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity?” The report also says that “sharing is the new giving” and posts the question: “In this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?”

Compiled for business leaders in more than 120 countries from a global network of 8,000 trendspotters, the report lists various ways firms might use social media and other initiatives to create social responsibility programs that matter. Among them:

Co-donate. Collaborate with customers about how often to donate—and to which causes. Use online and mobile technologies “to make the most of impulse-driven and networked fundraising.” (http://www.tomsshoes.com/)
Be eco-generous. Don’t just offset your company’s impact on the environment; find ways to improve it. (http://www.novacem.com/)
Engage in “free love”—in this case, give away some goods, like free coffees or free travel guides to consumers.
Use brand butlers to help customers make the most of the company’s products. IKEA, for example, loans out branded bikes with trailers to its customers in Denmark to help them transport their purchases home.
Engage in “perkonomics.” Offer perks like reserved parking to, say, owners of a specific automotive brand, or let preferred customers jump queues at busy events.
Offer “tryvertising.” Let customers try products before they purchase them to make their purchasing decisions based on their product experiences rather than corporate brand messages.

There’s no question: with public trust in CEOs and corporations at rock-bottom and the change mantra out of Washington [and Davos] and this week’s TED2009 still freshly potent, cause-wired social entrepreneurs have never had a better opportunity to boost traction globally for their Web-powered ideas.

In that vein, expect even more aggressive efforts this spring by leaders of the social enterprise movement to track and compile the rate of return of social media in for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. Says new media expert Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization, “Design an environment where people can feel good at what they’re doing…and they’ll flock to your venture.”

For more on designing initiatives for generosity that also work for the bottom line, see Shirky’s talk at the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine, below:

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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View/Post Comments

November 2, 2009
04:03 PM

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.

Advertisement 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