Conches

Web 3.0: WE can't let THEM decide it for US

Here is how Wikipedia defines it:

Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:...

This stuff makes great sense and it is a logical extension of web 2.0; actually, I would suggest that it IS web 2.0.  We will see the rise the semantic web and various sense making tools will emerge to help us filter and discover.  However, what I see in the definitions above is really, really, really interactive television where the USER has great control of the information that they can digest.  What is massively wrong about this definition is that it's nothing new.  It's a feature set. 

It is unreasonable to version the Internet in terms of features.  If features were the only variable then we are surely well past web 3.0.  So what do I think web 3.0 is...

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.

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...

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.

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.