Conches

Reimagining "Value" For A Post-Crisis Economy

(Social) Value: Love
"Money can't buy me love" is both cheesy and true

The reason why money can't buy love is because, ultimately, love is the value that money represents. Money is a proxy for value and value is that which holds us together and makes us relevant, love. This feels cheesy or even embarrassing because we have broken our social contract with value. Specifically, we have inappropriately imbued money with a value of its own, disassociating money from its role as an intermediary, as a temporary representation of value in a chain of transactions. Money has become the object as opposed to the expedient. It is my thesis that value creation must be the frame within which wealth creation fits; that our humanity can no longer be subjugated to our economy due to a false primacy of our intermediary for value, cash. I believe that our economy should serve our humanity.

Please read the rest at Change.org...

Change.org Idea: Limit Media Consolidation

At the urging of Arthur Codington, via a post on Facebook, I recently commented on a Change.org idea.

Limit Media Consolidation

We need more voices in the media. Establish policies that limit the number of radio/tv stations one company can own. Create incentives that give voice to perspectives we're not currently hearing in the mainstream media.

My comment is attached here (and on change.org), please go over to the change.org idea to post yours

Steve Forbes and His Assinine Article

I was just today pointed to Steve Forbes article in his namesake magazine entitled "How Capitalism Will Save Us."  I just finished reading it and I now feel fully justified in saying, "Fuck you Steve Forbes."

If sensible rescue efforts continue--and they will--the immediate crisis will quickly pass. Shell-shocked businesses and consumers won't recover rapidly from the trauma of recent months, especially as we now cope with recession. But the downturn shouldn't be prolonged: The economy here and those overseas should start to pick up no later than next spring.

This, Steve Forbes, is great to hear, please tell me how this will come about...

Networks, Relationships and Value

I am starting with the assumption that it does not matter who you are, or, in a macro sense, you do not matter.  Value does not lie in matter at all.  Value is in relationships and every social contract that we have to represent value as a thing is just an abstraction of that fact. The space between us is real.  How we fill that space is what defines us. 

This is why I am interested in networks.

Desperate Need For Change

We are in desperate need of change.  It could be argued that we are perpetually in desperate need of change, that change for humanity is like breathing for the body.  The problem, as I see it, is that we spend our energy understanding self as if it were an orphaned node, as if my value was not derived from my relation to others, to you, as if I made me. The fundamental change that we need is to shift our understanding of self to internalize the networks that, while constantly shifting, define us. And, paradoxically, we need to believe that each of us are the source of change, that a constantly better world is sourced from self, that we are each responsible for the quality of our connections to the world.  What do I think that means in a more concrete sense.

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.

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.

Internet Music

I am a music Snob.  I listen to music constantly and almost exclusively I listen to music streaming over the web. So, I thought it might be interesting to others to see what tools and services I use.

Slacker, Rhapsody, Mp3Tunes, Last.fm, Logitech SqueezeBox, MusicBrainz, MusicIP...