You Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me...
From a blogger who writes on philanthropic issues, whose name and URL will remain justly veiled: Lucy Bernholz, alleged leading intellectual in philanthropy:
Sort your giving interests and tag the material you rely on for information. Post to your website and create an online, invitation-only learning circle with other donors. Share materials. Share leads on projects. Set filters on existing sites so that only up-to-date information on hunger, performing arts, or Asian political parties comes through to your grants management platform. Share a virtual workspace with your fellow donors and the key organizations you're working with. Streamline volunteer recruitment. Let neighbors geo-tag the projects and issues they care about and re-organize neighborhood watches. Throw "block party" fundraisers and "book clubs" that stretch across the globe. Develop village level small business info brokerages regarding the price of produce several villages away - and organize "camel pools" to transport the goods to where the price is best.
This is a combination of the “store your recipes on your computer!” mindset with the web evangelism of the first dot-com bubble (I understand another is now in progress.) You don't store recipes on your computer because you don't want to slop the stock you're reducing to demi-glace into the keyboard, and large scale computer projects require big hardware, complex software, and trained people. Thinking that you can create a serious social infrastructure using blogging tools (I'm sorry, but Scoop and Drupal are big, fugly content-management/social-networking systems and you're looking at big consulting bills if you're naïve enough to think otherwise) is like putting your local Yellow Pages through a shredder so the listings will be easier to sort. But wait-it gets worse:
Both nonprofits and foundations need to rethink how they share information. I've made a start with the blogroll on the right-hand column of this blog. If you use del.icio.us you can read what I'm reading (subscribe to my list) and share what you're reading with me (add me to your network), or send me something to think about (link to me). Go ahead - try it! Imagine the collective philanthropy reading list we can build. (Then we'll figure out what to do with it). I'll take the lead in doing this about philanthropy - but YOU can take the lead in doing it about afterschool enrichment programs, vaccination research, water filtration, advocacy grantmaking, biodiversity, serious games, disaster relief or space travel (in other words, whatever you care about).
I think these everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sorts of lists are meant to convey optimism and naïveté, therefore sincerity. It's as calculated as any marketing move, and especially annoying in the context of (purportedly) serious attempts to (allegedly) deal with serious problems. Yet worse still is the rhetoric of universal empowerment in this time of increasing oppression and diminished agency for individuals. But it isn't really about the people philanthropists say they're trying to help-it's about techno-fetishism as a means of generating revenue for philanthropic consulting/infrastructural services:
Five years ago philanthropy got caught looping in a conversation that went something like this, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could....?" "Yes, but it would be too expensive to build the tools."
Now, the tools exist, and many of us are using them all the time - Flickr, blogs, collaborative writing software, video conferencing, tagging, networks. Its time to really experiment with these tools in the day-to-day work of philanthropy and see what we can improve.
Without an existing network of trusted peers whose skills and commitment have withstood the test of time, this will be an exercise in futility that will end in the retention of a consultancy to manage these now out of hand IT resources. The only people who'd want to associate with someone like this are the well-intentioned naïve or those running a similar scam. The former had better get their training earlier (to steal William Burroughs' phrase) and drop such montebanks if they want to establish their credibility with the type of robust networks described in the post by Mr. Scruggs linked above.
Since I'm descending into the personal and now that a few days have passed, here's a story: back before the '04 election, I was a member of the insane and inane Progressive Bloggers Alliance. (And if it still exists, I might still be a member.) Among the pwogs, Dem faithful, self-promoters, etc., were several consultants of this ilk-although not in the same field, i.e., philanthropy. On the day Kerry caved, one of them actually questioned the election results, and another responded with an idea that concerned folks could use the Dean fundraising model to finance an investigation. (Interesting how funding is always the first thing on these people's minds.) These two consultants then had a nice talk on the telephone and came up with this which was emailed to the members of the Prog Bloggers Alliance:
The Greater Democracy Foundation
presents
Investigative Blogging
The nexus of traditional investigative reporting and new media
Possible Keynote Speakers
Jon Stewart
Maureen Dowd
George Lakoff
Investigative reporting is expensive and traditional news organizations continue to cut funding for investigative reporting. Blogs continue to grow in popularity, yet the citizen journalists in the blogosphere lack much of the sophistication of traditional investigative reporters.
This conference will bring together leading bloggers and leading investigative reporters to learn from one another and to share their insights with all interested bloggers and investigative reporters.
Possible topics include
How to get access to crucial information
How to frame the message in a way that will be widely understood
How to start and promote a blog
Exactly what a comedian, a cognitive scientist (albeit one known for his bloviations on political speech), and the NY Times affirmative action OpEd hire for people affected with terminal preciousness might have to tell a bunch of bloggers about investigative reporting beats me. Let's not forget that these people would probably cost a very pretty penny indeed-so much for the previous mentioned concern for costs!
It gets worse. A blog or wiki was set up at socialtext.com, and one of the first entries was a PowerPoint ready graphic of the information flow of news stories to bloggers. Rather than just setting up a seminar on how to teach some basic skills of investigative journalism, the first priority was to create a big application architecture that would
- take feeds from various online news sources;
- sort them by semantic content;
- toss some out to a blog;
- email others to individual bloggers for further investigation.
I was utterly appalled. This had turned into a bid for big big bucks that by virtue of its organization and computer architecture would keep people stuck in the subordinate roll of a media consumer/content-provider-for-free and would therefore change very little if anything. Meanwhile, the much more modest, less costly, easy to implement, and (this is probably the scary part) actually empowering project of teaching people some investigative skills vanished. After enduring meta-managerial speak in emails and on the blog/wiki/Dog knows what, I bailed.
I wish I could give some warning signs for such people and such scams, but I can't-at least right now. I can say that now I know 'em when I see 'em.
In a previous incarnation of this post, I wrote:
Oh yeah-the consultant quoted above is one Lucy Bernholz, who did the Happy Tutor a big favor and dropped him from her blog roll. She has a consultancy and a book and is obviously after a good chunk of career. There's nothing wrong with wanting career, especially in a land where it's about the only way to get health care, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to do good. There's even nothing wrong with wanting to combine them. But when the solutions proposed are exclusively ways of creating more costly overhead for individuals and organizations who need more resources-these people can go fuck themselves. They're leeches on the body of those who want to change things for the better.
Since then, I've read the introduction to that much bruited book, and I'm frankly horrified. In a nutshell, she wants to marketize philanthropic resources. Now philanthropy is not so much high-end charity (which is what I thought it was) as it is tax-sheltered investment vehicles (for more info, start with this page on so-called Donor Advised Funds at the Tides Foundation, and keep clicking) but some monies do make it to people. And now, after years of market failure upon market failure, Bernholz proposes subjecting this tiny, fragile resource to market pressures. I figure the outcome will be like Enron: insiders (donors, top level management) cashes out, while the organizations and causes that were supposed to benefit are wiped out.
I'm not in the philanthropy racket, but some of my friends are, and to them I say, “Don't make me say, ‘I told you so.’”