Deep Currents

The Long Now Foundation played host last night to Iqbal Qadir, creator of GrameenPhone. His thesis: “To raise productivity (and wealth), raise connectivity. It’s that simple.” Simplistic? Perhaps. But some of the most powerful truths are the simplest. Kevin Kelly wrote a fine summary, posted here in full:

When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all American universities were found in Washington, DC. That’s how it was in Bangladesh, where everything of importance was centralized in the capital city, Dacca. He later realized that Bangladesh was not unique; in most developing countries, the infrastructure is concentrated in one or two cities, leaving the rural areas almost blank. As he acquired degrees and experience in finance, he realized that this centralization is not only a mark of poorer countries, it is probably a cause of their poverty.

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For some time now the price of basic foodstuffs has been climbing to unheard-of levels, causing suffering for many of the world’s poor. Here are some key facts on the subject from several good Economist articles and a few other sources.

1. The immediate causes

The issue is a radical rise in the price of staple foods, as can be seen in the chart below. Wheat and rice, for example, increase 77% and rice 16% during 2007, some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. In 2008 rice has shot up 141%.

The surge in food prices has ended 30 years in which food was cheap, farming was subsidized in rich countries and international food markets were wildly distorted. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.

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Are you sitting down? Okay, now read this post from Small Precautions, which starts with the following quote:

Six months ago, the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a landmark paper on “The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” The effort was the result of a deep collaboration between high-level former US intelligence officials, climate scientists, and economists, and the reading is extremely sobering. These are sober serious people, and what they conclude is that, “Unchecked climate change equals the world depicted by Mad Max, only hotter, with no beaches, and perhaps with even more chaos. While such a characterization may seem extreme, a careful and thorough examination of all the many potential consequences associated with global climate change is profoundly disquieting. The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life. The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War.”

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics.

General News

Is everything going 2.0? (SocialButterfly, 5/7/08)

http://fly4change.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/is-everything-going-20-health-science-museum-enterprise-philanthropy-birding-etc/

Zeitgeist alert: This collection of links highlights a rash of recent blog posts and news articles that describe new applications of Web 2.0 technology to a diverse group of sectors: museums, health, science, birding, reputation, enterprise software, food, and yes—philanthropy. Of particular interest is the piece on museums, who are using Web 2.0 tools to become more engaging, more community-based, and more central to society. The broader the technology is adopted, the more examples there will be for how to use it, which will continue providing creative stimulus for those in the social sector.

 

Putting the ‘Social’ Back in Network

Six Steps to Social Media Success (Getting to the Point, 5/2/08)

http://www.nonprofitmarketingblog.com/comments/six_steps_to_social_media_success/

This post lays out the basic reasons why people use social media: to be seen and heard, and to connect with each other. It includes six steps to using social media effectively:  (1) stop—be reflective, (2) look and listen—find where your constituency is already congregating, (3) see and hear—use your expertise to contribute to existing conversations, (4) choose—pick the social medium that fits best, (5) be easy to find, and (6) ask—give your supporters opportunities to tell their story and play a meaningful role.

Listening with Social Media: Social Media Archaeologists (Beth’s Blog, 5/10/08)

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/05/listening-with.html  

The need to listen and the opportunity to learn are two of the ways that using social media for marketing is fundamentally different from traditional marketing strategy. Beth briefly describes why listening and learning are important, then provides a set of practical tips on how to listen well and how to use the experience to answer important questions.

Tool-Specific Developments

Google’s “Friend Connect” (TechCrunch, 5/12/08)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/12/google-confirms-friend-connect/

Google launched a groundbreaking new social networking platform last week called Friend Connect (http://www.google.com/friendconnect/). Friend Connect counters the phenomenon of YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site): instead of creating a new site for the sole purpose of social networking, where users can interact only with other users of the site, it is a service that any website developer can use to offer social networking to its users. The explicit target is the many small websites that don’t even have a user login today. One of Google’s examples is a simple one-page site about guacamole where previously users could only read the recipes but now can sign in to join the site, make comments, see who else is a member, and invite their friends. The most revolutionary aspect of the system is that it bridges many of the leading social network sites: MySpace, hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and Google Talk, with additional sites promised to join soon. (While Facebook was slated to join, it recently backed out.) If the technology performs as promised, it amounts to yet another expansion in the number of social groups that will form today that could never have formed before, further enabling personal connectivity and (in some cases) collective action. Ad-hoc activism just got easier.

26 Learning Games to Change the World (Mission to Learn, 4/29/08)

http://blog.missiontolearn.com/2008/04/learning-games-for-change/

Internet games not only take advantage of networked technology but also frequently spread through social networks, and recent years have seen a rise in games that not only while away the time but also educate, inspire, and encourage donations for social causes. This list of 26 games includes some very innovative examples of cause-oriented games available today, such as the incredibly addictive “Free Rice” vocabulary game where every correct word results in the sponsor donating 20 grains of rice to the UN, which to date has resulted in a donation of over 29 billion grains.

• The 5^th Annual Games for Change Festival, which will be held on June 2^nd-4^th: http://www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2008/index.php
  
  

Donation Dashboard: collaborative filter-enhanced charity (BoingBoing, 4/21/08)

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/21/donation-dashboard-c.html

This new project (at http://dd.berkeley.edu/) uses the same logic behind Amazon’s book recommendations and the collaborative news-filtering site Digg.com to create recommendations for allocating donations. It starts as a simple tool for deciding where to donate: users search for nonprofits of interest, rate their relative interest in donating, and the site divides up the user’s donation dollars in proportion to the user’s interest. Then, as the database builds, the site can use the other users’ choices to make increasingly intelligent recommendations: “Other users who donated a large amount to the World Wildlife Fund were also interested in…” This distributed structure will hopefully give donors a useful point of information as they decide which charity is the most deserving.

Is Causes on Facebook a failure? (Givvy Blog, 4/16/08)

http://blog.givvy.com/2008/04/16/is-causes-on-facebook-a-failure/

The Causes application on Facebook has provoked a good deal of debate among philanthropy bloggers, some of whom trumpet its many members while others wonder if those numbers are meaningful. This blog post adds some numbers to the mix. Causes has roughly eight million users, placing it 69^th among all Facebook applications. But if you consider donations a more important metric than membership, the total donated to the top 5 causes comes to just $135,000, which is an average of about 1.5 cents per member. Since there’s a “long tail” of less-popular causes, Givvy estimates that the total donated by the Causes membership is around $1.5 million. The debate continues: what difference does Causes really make?

The credit crunch has left the banking industry reeling, and the Economist takes a shot at capturing how it’s most likely to evolve in this week’s special. It starts by noting the reasons for Wall Street to have hope: emerging markets continue delivering strong revenues, longer lifespans mean increasing investment in pensions, the many new sovereign wealth funds need help finding good returns, and the growing global economy will bring up the industry with it. Besides, financiers are adept at making money in any situation, and don’t forget that banks may be getting back their central role as credit evaluators now that the system of “originate-and-distribute” (a.k.a. “make bad loans and sell them to unwitting investors”) has been discredited. Then the author describes what is likely to change:

• Funding may need to come more from retail customers’ deposits than from other banks since the wholesale market is currently very expensive
• With costlier borrowing for banks, the price of debt for customers will go up: profit margins will be thinner, the least-profitable areas of trading could be cut down (such as proprietary trading at investment banks), and retail banks will place an emphasis on efficiency
• The level of capital on hand considered prudent will be higher, regardless of whether it is required by regulation, which means more selective lending in order to protect profits
• Private equity firms will start buying up banks since prices are low and many could be improved with operational tweaks
• Being large and diversified (e.g. Citigroup) will continue to be a good strategy: they are more resilient, less exposed to anyone country or type of risk, and contain retail deposits that won’t vanish in bad times

Here’s a video segment from the New Yorker conference that’s well worth watching. Let’s say you’ve lost a hand. Or a leg. Or you’re paralyzed. In five or ten years,go talk to Yoky Matsuoka at U. of Washington and she’ll fix you up with a robotic limb that responds to your thoughts. Alik Widge, I am so glad you’re working on this. Her video clips of the technology her team has created in the lab are quite amazing. In one, a monkey with a chip implanted in its brain uses a robotic arm to take food from a researcher’s hand. In another, you see a person move their finger in all directions while a robotic finger mimics its movement almost perfectly. Finally she shows you the whole hand her team has crafted, anatomically correct and with a flexible palm unlike any other created to date, with the same bone structure and range of motion as our own. This field of “neurobotics” is really taking off.

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy.

Web 2.0 tools are now being used to organize ad-hoc activism, without the need for creating new organizations or involving existing nonprofits. The rise in this ad-hoc activism is happening at the same time as many traditional membership-based nonprofits are having trouble maintaining their membership rolls and even the total number of nonprofits had registered a rare year on year decline (as recorded by the National Center of Charitable Statistics). What follows is a set of information we’ve gathered that informs how membership organizations philanthropies could respond to these changes.

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