Conches

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.

Teach A Man To Fish

I read an interesting blog post on the now tired Teach A Man To Fish paradigm recently and found myself spending enough time on the comment on that blog to merit a blog post on my own site.  So...

The Teach-A-Man-To-Fish paradigm is a mess. First, it concentrates on the Man when many studies show that women are better entrepreneurs. Second, people know how to fish. The assumption that you are “helping” by telling some one everything you know is more ego stroking than anything. There are lot’s of people who fish much better than I do. Said another way, knowledge or Intellectual Property, is a fish. In an information economy teaching people to fish equates to a vibrant education system. It also requires that this vibrant education system focuses on critical thinking and the skills necessary to create intellectual property as opposed to a list of history's tired informational detritus. (That is stuff for another post.) 

In an information economy, IP is a commodity. Knowing how to fish is the ability to innovate, to apply insight to opportunity and then operationalize.

Open Everything ?

I just spent three days with 30ish very smart, very dedicated people exploring the concept of openness.  The meeting was held at Hollyhock on Cortez Island in British Columbia.  Hollyhock is very, very beautiful. This meeting/retreat was part of the OpenEverything series.  I was eager to attend in a effort to

1. understand how to build an open development community on top of a proprietary platform (salesforce.com)
2. abstract and apply the methodology of open source development to solving the world's most intractable problems.

Net Neutrality PI - Intro and Free Speech

Intro - Net Neutrality and Water Rights

I believe that Net Neutrality is very poorly understood. There is a clear reason for this. The industry that is most responsible for informing us about net neutrality is also the industry that would be most deeply effected by its implementation, big media.

Net Neutrality is usually represented with a freeway metaphor that espouses the logic of a toll road vs. a public roadway where you pay for speed and a better experience in general. The primary problem with this analogy is that it places all the emphasis on the transport mechanism as opposed to what is being transported. I was listening to an NPR interview with Maude Barlow recently. They were discussing water rights and it dawned on me that this was a much more interesting analogy. Water is becoming a commodity because corporations (Bechtel, Nestle, GE, …) see an opportunity to create profit by controlling distribution of a valuable resource.  This is directly analogous to information and how the telcos are working to control the distribution of information. In both instances, we see predatory corporate practices working explicitly against individuals and our ability to access resources that rightfully belong to the commons.  Additionally, in both examples, there are legitimate and lucrative business opportunities for private corporations to exploit that will actually contribute positively to the well-being of the communities to which they belong.

Perfect Information

After a conversation with David Geilhufe (www.digitaldivide.net/blog/geilhufe) about perfect information, specifically in its relevance to philanthropy, I got to thinking.  I googled.  I wikipedia'd.  and...

I found a fascinating post that provides a critique of the "perfect information" or economic equilibrium theory that states that the better (or more predictable) our information is, the more efficient (equitable?) our markets will be.  The author, astutely I believe, critiques this lens as irrelevant in a world where change, both subtle and grand, is the norm. 

A new lens for philanthropy

In a recent meeting with a bunch o' foundation folks, we were talking all around the issues relating to impact.  The conversation moved in a lot of different directions talking about things like philanthropy markets, and identifying a "unit of good", and how it is impossible to identify a unit of good, and accountability and transparency and who is accountable to whom and who needs to be transparent...  As the conversation rambled, I began to crystallize how I think about this.

The End Game
A just and equitable world without suffering.  To understand if we are moving in the right direction we need a lot of data and we need to all (philantropists, nonprofits, clients, and observers) be the solution we want to see.

A Reference Grid
I believe that we need to fight against the reflex to apply a financial metaphor to understand comparative good.  The financial metaphor is attractive because it gives us the ability to compare the goodness of one organization with the goodness of another.  However, this comparison is only relevant from the perspective of a donor.  And, it is only relevant to a donor that is concerned with the specific effect of his unique contribution.  It is this paradigm that drives the marketplace metaphor where product is packaged to be digested by the consumer.  Unfortunately, in this paradigm, the consumer is the donor; therefore, the product is marketed to him.  The goal is to create an environment where everyone is focused squarely on solving social problems without the noise that is created when two masters (donors and progress towards solution) compete for attention.

So, what I have tried to create in the graph is a way to examine efficacy along a three dimensional grid.  Efficiency speaks to transactional cost.  Impact speaks to social outcomes.  And, transparency speaks to an individual's or organization's ability to play well with others.  The more transparent you are, the better able you are to collaborate on solutions, to iterate through possibilities and improvements and to aggregate data so that regional and global progress can be made visible. 

The nexus of the grid represents zero where there is no Efficiency, Impact or Transparency.  The negative side is also important to examine.  For example, the negative end of the transparency spectrum moves from opaque to obfuscation.

We can plot an individual or an organization on this grid or it can be used as a way to understand more generalized progress towards solutions.  It is critical that we move beyond the granular approach of following a dollar from privilege to impact where accountability structures focus on the transactional layer, completely missing the donors and only tangentially focusing on solutions to problems.  Instead, we need and hold everyone as accountable to creating solutions.  We can only be successful if we are all impactful, efficient and transparent.

Social Impact Data Collection

Some Principles    

• The Observer Effect    
• Technology is not IT (in the Jack Kerouac sense of the word)    
• Data Collection close to the ground    
• Open Data    
• Decentralized    
• Full Spectrum

A nasty moment in time or Evidence that we don't live in a democracy

There are some very scary trends that are surfacing:

Corporate Media Consolidation

 

Coupled with

 

Telecommunications providers moving to become UNREGULATED Information Service Providers. So far cable, DSL and Broadband over powerline are classified this way.  Here is a quotation from a Stanford Law article   that discusses exactly what an Information Service is:

3. Information service: “[T]he offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications.” 47 U.S.C. §§ 153(20). Unlike cable service, a bi-directional interaction characterizes information service, where users not only receive, but also send and create information. Providers of information services are users of telecommunications and are not subject to regulations as telecommunications carriers. Information services remain largely unregulated.

ALSO

 

Convergence - here is a quotation from an article on Network Neutrilty by the Center for Digital Democracy 

...fundamental changes that the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in their quest to monetize the Internet.  If we permit the Internet to become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal consumption rather than civic-related communications, we will face the political consequences for decades to come.  Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" of America will have serious consequences for both our culture and global society.

Why are the Bells and cable now aggressively advancing such plans?  It's because our media system is undergoing a major transformation with the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of communications technologies.  What the phone and cable companies see as their potential lucrative "triple play" by providing us with video, voice and data communications, will soon be flowing into our TV's, PC's and mobile devices (such as cell phones or iPods).  All of these many billions of bits will be delivered over the telephone and cable lines, whose owners have successfully lobbied the Feds so they can impose a near monopoly over the delivery of residential broadband service.

Coupled With...