Conches

Possibility

Benjamin Zander and Roz gave me an A. The single condition was that I project myself in to a better future and understand my contribution to that future.  Who am I not to be worthy of that A.  Dare I aspire to be graced with the responsibility to lead, to declare an A for others.  I project myself to be more than an obstacle, not the stick nor the carrot. The greatest difficulty is that I can only be I while owning that it's not about me.  I can only be I and so much more than me is what is needed. 

Benjamin Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, believes in a world of possibility, possibility as opposed to scarcity, scarcity being the world of winners and losers, a world where judgment oppresses.  In order to understand a world of possibility, to live in the  abundance of potential, Benjamin Zander assigns his students to project themselves in to the future, a future where they have earned the praise that he gave to them the moment they met.  They do this with a letter, a letter from themselves as they stand in the future.  Roz, Benjamin's partner, help him craft this scheme.

So, Benjamin and Roz, here is the future in which I stand....

I have not sacrificed rigor.  I have not sacrificed rigor as evidenced by the reality of a better world. I have engaged deeply with love and wonder (Marian Bantjes) and I have not sacrificed rigor.  I got the answers right to questions that I didn't know we had to problems that I knew we could not solve. 

I found a way to value love.  Not with a cash equivalent but with Love.  As art is distinguishable from skill or artifice, as love is distinguishable from affinity or choice, I found a way to understand Love and its expression, as valuable.  Actually, exchangeably, cognitively valuable.

I had the courage to accept the grace of responsibility.  A responsibility to not claim my space, to not declare a truth, to not decide.  It was not me but I played a role. I can only be I and I was not the answer.  That was difficult to own. I did not know what the answer was.  I only knew that the answer was not found, which is not to say that it was not known, or was not emergent. 

Hearing signal from noise, seeing patterns in chaos, happened at the edges, where the network is new, where connections are being formed.  I only knew that there is great value in solving real problems and worked, with love and wonder, to magnify possibility.  I believed that we had not accounted for the value of  lives at the edges.  I believed that increasing the capitalization of human potential (Malcolm Gladwell) would not occur with winners picking winners.  I understood that the unknown was fertile.  I worked in the unknown. I said out loud what I did not know, what I was trying to understand, what I thought might be.

Something about the Chekovian (heart) string that finds resonance in each of us, regardless of our callouses, is what defined meaning and sourced the future.  And I did not sacrifice rigor.  I played a role.  I am content with my participation, with my contribution.

Media: An Abundance of Money, A Scarcity of Meaning

I have been following the media industry for a while now.  I claim no expertise, just an opinion. First, I think there are two critical reforms necessary for America to find its way: 1) voting reform. 2) campaign finance reform, 3) media reform.

1. Media is not just entertainment.
2. We need to fight the censorship of the center.
3. Youth Media is not paternalism.
4. Participatory and p2p media is the disruptive technology in media. 
5. We need a new infrastructure to support effective information systems.
6. Effective information systems can do more.

Are McCain and the RNC Commiting Criminal Fraud?

Let's ignore the fact that the accusations are morally and ethically out of bounds as they accuse Obama of supporting terrorism and being indifferent to infanticide.  Let's ignore the fact that they are ill advised from any perspective, and the only possible explanation is that the RNC is throwing red meat to it's base.  Let's also forget what it says about a party that can only hold itself together by engendering hatred through despicable and degenerate lies.  Let's even forget what the RNC should be doing to be a responsible political entity, to earn its role as a representative of the conservative perspective.  Instead, let's take a look and see if what the McCain-Palin campaign and the RNC is doing is criminal fraud.

In criminal law, fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them – usually, to obtain property or services unjustly. [1] Fraud can be accomplished through the aid of forged objects. In the criminal law of common law jurisdictions it may be called "theft by deception," "larceny by trick," "larceny by fraud and deception" or something similar.
     - Wikipedia

SoCap Day Two

Yesterday I spent the day thinking about investors and structure and deals.

Today, I thought about social enterprise.  I went to four sessions today and they coalesced in my head in a very odd way.

Media

Two of the sessions got me thinking about media and technology as social investment.  The first session I attended was on Information and communication Technology for the Developing World.  The conversation moved back and forth between the devices that were used (computers and mobile phones) and the content or what information was transmitted.  I also attended a pitch session where four new ventures pitched participatory media ideas.  My career started as a high school educator and when I first moved in to philanthropy I worked in youth media so I was very interested in this session. Without going too deep in to the content of this session, a central issue was how to pitch a radically new understanding of an existing market.  I immediately was reminded of some of the slogans of this field, "Content is king" and "The medium is the message" and the interplay between them.  In both developing world ICT infrastructure AND participatory media, there is a fantastic opportunity to create a totally different paradigm, one for which the medium and the content are sympatico, one that is not as centralized, one that conceptualizes the audience as a participant.  This would require a radically different understanding of networking infrastructure and a radically different understanding of media and information and truth and perspective.  Given that Nokia and Cisco and others will/do pour large amounts of money in to this space to ensure their position at the center, I do not have great hope that we will not need to make the same mistakes at least a few more times while we wait for the just the right disruptive solution.  My thinking is not crystal here but the central thought is how do we not miss game changing ideas because we are stuck on traditional models.

Intermediaries and Scale

The other two sessions were Fair Trade products and a panel that I sat on, the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs.  The central issue for me, for both of these panels was the need for a vibrant B to B or intermediary layer to catalyze scale. 

As some one obsessed with data and how it moves, Fair Trade fascinates me. A Fair Trade banana is easy.  Coffee is harder because it involves roasting and sometimes mixing.  Chocolate is a lot harder because not everything ingredient always Fair Trade.  Clothing is really hard.  The Fair Trade data problem is not just ingredient sourcing but also working conditions.  My main question for the field is, given that Fair Trade can only be considered successful with massive scale, on the order of 2 billion farmers, how do you scale the certification especially given that the problem does not get easier with scale. Essentially, the core difficulty is not Fair Trade products, but it is convincing the market that the products are Fair Trade (whatever Fair Trade means), that the certification is meaningful.  This is the work of an intermediary, a certifying body. Maybe a lot of certifying bodies???

In the ANDE panel that I sat on, I held the flag for the intermediaries.  ANDE is a collaboration of several funders who are trying to define the market and reach an economy of scale for the investing in Small and Growing Businesses.  Like Fair Trade, scale is the critical component to success because the goal is to rationalize economies in the developing world and a whole like of successful new entrepreneurs is the vehical to get there.  So, I posit, the critical piece will be a build out of a professional B to B layer that can 1) effectively and efficiently move capital by vetting entrepreneurs and sell investors and, 2) build the capacity of these new businesses in these difficult economies.

Today was a good day...

Social Capital Markets Conference Day One

Day one is over.  I spent the day tweeting what I heard as did many others.  There were some repeated themes that I heard.

Real Value
Putting revenue generation aside for the moment, Social investment is characterized by a focus on creating value.  This manifests in at least two ways.  1) Deep vetting of social entrepreneurs.  I referred to this in my last post as retro-investing: investing in smart people with good ideas, clear and coherent plans and predictable success.  2) Solving problems.  Our world is plagued by massive intractable problems. Solving any part of any of these problems is valuable.

Measurement
In a for profit entity you measure success by the size of your financial return.  That's math. social enterprise (or socially responsible business) you measure social impact.  That's not math. It is agreed that social impact is roughly what all stakeholders believe, on aggregate, to be success but measuring that is either marketing or impenetrable. Most organizations seem to be working to create proxies for impact. More on this as the conference progresses.

Social Actors, Definitions
Social Responsible Business - a business, likely for profit, that is concerned about providing value to all of it's stakeholders, not just its stockholders.  The is a lot of room between a corporation with great benefits and a corporation that will "do no evil"

Social Enterprise (with unrelated commercial engine) - An organization whose reason for being is to address a social ill and the cash they earn pays to advance their social impact.  (Working Assets)

Social Enterprise (whose business is to address a social ill) - An organization that can is designed to sustainably address a social ill by creating a revenue generating organization that directly addresses the problem.  (Building sanitation stations in urban areas in the developing world.  Selling eye glasses to the BOP.)

The role of philanthropy
How can philanthropy avoid being a market distorting subsidy (in the lingo of investors) and instead play a role in the investment paradigm?  it is my believe, and one that I heard voiced by Martin Fisher of Kick Start the other day, that philanthropy needs to take the role of absorbing risk.  However, this gets messy cause philanthropists instantly understand their role in that equation as making it possible for some other investor to get rich (reap an ROI) by leveraging their money.  which is what they wanted in the first place, but when the philanthropy is actually structured in to the deal, it goes wonky.  Philanthropists tend to like to stay at arms length, funding the initiative, not investing (with 0% to -100% return).

Enough for now...

Economics

I cannot pretend to know much about economics (or investment, the subject of my last post), but this piece of news is stunning.  The Nobel Prize was just given to a Princeton Economist for his contribution to our understanding of the global economy.  This same economist, Paul Krugman, is a vocal critic of the Bush administration and, specifically, of McCain (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/mccain-on-banking-and-health/).

It is this sort of thinking (and journalism) that we so desperately need more of.  We nearly GAVE a 700 Billion dollar bonus/free-ride to the jackasses that lied and cheated their way in to this mess so they could continue with business as usual.  I find it comical that these same bankers are now claiming that it is a bad idea to buy an equity stake in their business instead of just giving them the money.  And their reasons for why this is a bad idea:

1. It will make the market think they are in trouble.  (To which I apply the age old rhetorical device, Duh.)
2. It will "nationalize" the American bank system.  (If by nationalize they mean give to the people that are saving their pitiful arses the same deal that any VC would demand, then, yup, nationalize.)
3. They'd rather just have the money with no strings attached. (So, I haven't heard anyone actually say this.  Just reading between the lines a bit.)

Social Capital Markets Conference Season

Tomorrow the Social Capital Markets conference begins at Fort Mason in San Francisco.  This seems to be conference season or at least I have been getting around recently.  I recently attended the Online Giving Markets conference put on by SSIR and BarCampAfrica on Google's campus last weekend. 

Given all this activity, I thought I would trace how I got here.  I was a teacher.  Then I was a community technologist.  Then I was a nonprofit technologist.  Then I got obsessed with effective data management.  Then I got obsessed with measuring social impact.  Then I got really frustrated.  I joined the cult of the quest for the perfect proxy.  Then I found social investment.

Citizen Journalism And Steve Jobbs

It is simply silly to decry "citizen journalism" because one "citizen journalist" got the story wrong, intentionally or otherwise. Actually, the term "citizen journalism" is silly. It is a way for big media to differentiate themselves from the "citizens".

People say things on the street. People say things in their home, at work, on the train, and in email, Twitter and on their blogs. This is all information. The fact that it continues to be necessary to think about what you hear and run it through filters is no different for any information source.

I certainly would never take a CNN, or Fox or MSNBC news story as gospel. Would you?

clipped from bits.blogs.nytimes.com October 3, 2008, 12:46 pm Apple Denies ‘Citizen Journalist Report’ By John Markoff The report raised questions on several blogs about the role of citizen journalism, and there was speculation that the incident would lead to an investigation by securities regulators. Apple’s shares abruptly declined as much as 5.4 percent after the post on iReport, CNN’s citizen journalist Web site, stated that Mr. Jobs had had a “major heart attack.”