Grantsfire is a story about a ragtag group of busy individuals who cared passionately about social change, who had a good idea and no time to do it, and who did it anyway. I want to share that story, and I want to offer a challenge to all grantmakers moving forward.

The Data Problem

To understand the premise behind Grantsfire, try answering the following questions:

• Which U.S.-based foundations invested in climate initiatives in 2009?
• How much was invested and in which specific areas?
• Who received these grants?

Substitute “climate initiatives” for any social change initiative, and your answers are probably the same: “I don’t know.”

Here’s the dirty little secret. Nobody really knows.

One of the huge problems in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors is the lack of good data on grants. The Foundation Center spends millions of dollars every year attempting to collect this data, but it takes at least a year to aggregate and scrub. That’s not a knock on the Foundation Center. Data collection is a hard problem, and the way that foundations do their reporting makes it even harder. Without this data, people can’t even get to the harder and more important problem: Making sense of the data.

So people try to apply bandages. Affinity groups, for example, spend a huge portion of their time surveying their members, trying to collect this data themselves. Program officers often rely on word-of-mouth from their grantees to learn about other foundations in their space.

Why does all this matter? Good, real-time data allows people to make good decisions in real-time. It helps foundations fund strategically, and it helps both foundations and nonprofits work collaboratively. Simply seeing where the money is being invested opens up opportunities for collaboration and smart followership.

Grantsfire Is Born

From left to right: Gavin Clabaugh, Eugene Eric Kim, Jason Ricci, Eugene Chan, and Patrick Collins. Missing Katrin Verclas and Michael Gilbert.

Katrin Verclas (then of N-TEN, now of MobileActive), Eugene Chan (then of Community Technology Foundation of California), and Gavin Clabaugh of Mott Foundation first conceived of Grantsfire in 2005 as part of the short-lived Innovation Funders Network. They were inspired by a proposal that Michael Gilbert made in 2004.

Michael’s proposal was simple and brilliant. Grantmakers should publish the grants they make in real-time on their web sites. If they used a standard format, anyone could aggregate and analyze that data. Michael suggested using RSS, which is a standard used across the web for syndicating information.

Katrin, Eugene, Gavin, and Michael discussed the idea, and decided that there needed to be an additional layer of structure over RSS that was grant-specific. Katrin had heard about something called microformats that she thought could be useful. She wanted to get some feedback on that idea. So she gave me a call.

Microformats are a clever way of structuring data using standard HTML, which is the language that all web sites use to present information. The advantage of using microformats is that you can use any standard web design program to generate them. There’s no need to learn a new language or use special tools.

I told Katrin that using a microformat was a smart choice. It lowered the bar for publishing structured data even further. I also told her that I thought that the overall idea was brilliant, but that I was too busy to do anything more than offer advice here and there.

A few weeks later, I found myself at the Community Technology Foundation of Californias offices in San Francisco with Katrin and Eugene, mapping out a schema for grants data, which we dubbed hGrant. A few months later, I found myself at TAG in Baltimore meeting with Eugene, Gavin, Patrick Collins, and Jason Ricci.

Patrick had just joined the Hewlett Foundation as its CIO, and he also loved the idea of Grantsfire. (He has a saying which explains how all of us suddenly found ourselves involved in this project: “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.”)

Jason “working” at one of our meetings hosted by the Community Technology Foundation of California.

Jason was a successful product designer who wanted to build an open source grants management tool. The synergy between the two ideas was obvious, and he wanted to participate. Jason is irascible and impatient. He’s also one of the nicest, most genuine people I know, and despite his pragmatism, he’s also an idealist. He, more than anyone, is the reason Grantsfire is where it is today.

Based on our discussions, I pulled together a spec and wrote a quick demo to show how easy it was to publish and parse hGrant. Eugene, Gavin, and Patrick scraped together about $15,000 from their combined budgets, and Jason and his developer (Keith Grennan) wrote the first aggregator. In the meantime, Gavin and Patrick drummed up additional resources to implement the spec at Mott and Hewlett. Total time from our last meeting to a working prototype with live data? Six weeks.

It took us about three months working in our limited spare time to take a good idea and make it real. We thought the road to transforming the sector was just around the corner. We felt justifiably high.

Then we got stuck.

The Adoption Challenge

“Never confuse a clear view with a short path.” –Paul Saffo

From day one, we felt that our biggest challenge would be adoption. Our first goal was to eliminate technical barriers as an excuse. We felt we had done that. Our next step was to overcome the cultural barriers. We were optimistic. We thought that our rapid proof of concept, our large collective network of connections, and having two major foundations on board so quickly would galvanize others to participate. We started fundraising and evangelizing.

One of the first questions we had to grapple with was, “Are you competing with the Foundation Center?” Our answer was no. We saw our work as naturally complementing the Foundation Center, and in private, we all thought that the natural future home for this work was the Foundation Center. Our goal was real-time data, and we were willing to sacrifice certain things to get rough numbers quickly. We saw the Foundation Center’s value in a world of openly available data as cleaning it up and making sense of it. We wanted to make it easier for the Foundation Center and anyone else to do just that.

Furthermore, we released the code under an open source license. Anyone could take our code, run it,, and modify it. We didn’t want to assume that ours had to be the only aggregator. Our goal was to catalyze change and to maximize the potential for emergence.

While we generated lots of interest, we weren’t able to raise the funds we needed to really sell the concept. We had three people on our team from foundations, and one person with significant fundraising experience, so the odds should have been in our favor. This was the first time I was personally involved making a grant pitch to foundations, and I found it grueling and frustrating. In the meantime, we all continued trying to convince foundations to adopt the spec and make their data available.

We ran into three main barriers:

• The people who were most excited by the idea tended to be the least empowered to make that decision within their organization. These included CIOs and communications people.
• Many people felt that they were already doing their part by publishing their 990s or giving their data to Foundation Center, and they didn’t see the value in making their data publicly available in real-time.
• Fear.

Many people didn’t understand the technology, and they naturally didn’t want to mess with something they didn’t understand. Many more were scared of the implications of this kind of transparency, which in fairness, are not simple or straightforward. And frankly, many people were simply afraid of looking stupid. In their eyes, it was better to do nothing than to risk failure.

We kept running into brick wall after brick wall, and we hadn’t raised the money to sustain our energy. A few of us, including me, essentially dropped off the project. Everyone else kept trucking along, including Jason. I was surprised by that, because Jason was probably more frustrated than any of us. I hadn’t realized how stubbornly persistent he was, and how much he believed in the importance of our work. We also acquired more valuable talent along the way, including John Soulsby, Kristen Barrali, and Casey West.

Breakthroughs and a Gauntlet

Starting in late 2008, we experienced three breakthroughs. First, Gavin managed to secure a grant from Mott to push Grantsfire forward. It was the first significant funding we had received, and Jason was tasked to manage the project.

Second, Jason became the CIO of Energy Foundation, where he was given the opportunity to implement his original vision of an open source grants management tool. (Watch out for it. It is spectacular. Energy Foundation is already using it, and it will release it to the world later this year.) Not having to deal with startup hours and the grind of product management enabled him to refocus his energies.

Third, Brad Smith became president of the Foundation Center. I have not had the pleasure of meeting Brad, but by all accounts, he is someone who gets it.

I don’t know the exact details of how Grantsfire became a Foundation Center project, and so that’s not my story to tell. I will say that the experience seems to have been very positive, and I am personally thrilled that this happened. Foundation Center is the right home for this work, and I hope they understand the value of why we designed it the way we did. Furthermore, our adoption strategy has always centered around eliminating excuses. We’ve now eliminated the question of whether to give it to Grantsfire or the Foundation Center (which was always a red herring anyway). Now the answer is, give it to the Foundation Center.

I feel blessed to have been included in this project and to have had the opportunity to work with such a remarkable group of people. That said, the work is not done. At the end of the day, foundations still need to commit to publishing their data openly and in real-time. It’s shameful that it hasn’t happened already, especially considering the comparable transparency of our financial markets.

And so, I’d like to offer the following challenge to all of the foundations listening: Have an open conversation about this. Your concerns are complex and real, and they need to be addressed. But don’t fall into the trap of analysis paralysis either. Grantsfire offers a simple, straightforward way to do some good and improve the sector. Take that first step, and support the work that the Foundation Center will now be doing.

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of participating in the Monitor Institute’s gathering on the next 10 years of philanthropy. Representatives from institutional and individual philanthropy along with folks like me came together to talk about how philanthropy can adapt to the rapidly changing world.

In the afternoon, we broke out into teams. Our task was to come up with an innovative way of addressing a specific challenge. At the end of the day, we would vote on the most viable ideas. The winner would walk away with applause and chocolate.

Making Followership Sexy

I ended up with a great group of folks: Lance Fors of Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund’s, Bob Hughes formerly of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Mayur Patel of Knight Foundation, Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and Kelvin Taketa of Hawaii Community Foundation.

After some discussion instigated and facilitated by Monitor consultants Gabriel Kasper and Edward Wexler-Beron, our group decided to focus on followership. Specifically, we wanted to dispel the notion that leadership is about doing something first or by yourself.

The most prominent example of this was Warren Buffett’s decision on June 25, 2006 to give away most of his fortune (about $30 billion) to the Gates Foundation, esentially doubling its already massive endowment. Why not give his fortune to his own foundation? Buffett explained:

I came to realize that there was a terrific foundation that was already scaled-up — that wouldn’t have to go through the real grind of getting to a megasize like the Buffett Foundation would — and that could productively use my money now.

…

If you think about it — if your goal is to return the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don’t have a commensurate funding base — what could you find that’s better than turning to a couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright, whose ideas have been proven, who already have shown an ability to scale it up and do it right?

You don’t get an opportunity like that ordinarily. I’m getting two people enormously successful at something, where I’ve had a chance to see what they’ve done, where I know they will keep doing it — where they’ve done it with their own money, so they’re not living in some fantasy world — and where in general I agree with their reasoning. If I’ve found the right vehicle for my goal, there’s no reason to wait.

Buffett’s decision went a long way into making followership sexy, but in some ways, it seems strange that this announcement made news at all. In finance, this stuff is de rigeur. As Sean explained in a great blog post, investors follow the “smart money” all the time. For a variety of reasons, this has not been true in philanthropy. We wanted to change this.

The Smart Money Award

Our idea was simple. We would create the Smart Money Award, recognizing outstanding examples in philanthropy of followership.

We felt it important to make cash part of the award, so we tapped into the vast financial resources at the table (our wallets) and managed to scrape together $50. We wanted a nice certificate, so we recruited Lynn Carruthers, our graphic facilitator, who did an outstanding job under extreme duress.

We needed an outlet for publicizing the award, and so everyone around the table committed to blogging about the winners.

We needed a process for deciding who would get the award, and we decided that initially, we would do.

Finally, we needed an inaugural recipient. This was the fun part. There were a lot of great stories of followership in the room, and we rapidly converged on a winner… the Kellogg Foundation for its pledge last year to spend $16 million on the Buffett Early Childhood Fund:

Sterling Speirn, Kellogg’s president, says he saw no reason to start from scratch when a good approach to advocacy and education was already in place.

The Kellogg Foundation accepts the inaugural Smart Money Award from our team.

Or as Anne Mosle, Kellogg’s vice president of programs, stated, “We don’t believe we have to lead everything.”

We made our pitch — one of ten teams to do so. Anne and several others from Kellogg were there, and they graciously and enthusiastically accepted the award.

After votes were counted, not only were we the winner of the competition, several people had thrown in some cash with their votes. Total amount: $50, just enough for our next award!

Working with these guys on the Smart Money Award was a ton of fun. Everyone was sharp and committed. Not only did we align quickly, but we weren’t satisfied with simply making a pitch. It was a simple idea with a potentially powerful impact, and we all believed in it.

So we did it. And we’re going to keep doing it. After all, we have another $50 to give away.

If you have stories of great followership in the philanthropic sector that you think we should know about, email them to smartmoneyawards@gmail.com. We’ll consider them for the next award

Update

April 5, 2010: Here’s Sean’s post on the Smart Money Award.

In attempting to answer this question, it’s easy to make generalizations. You can’t develop trust online. You can’t develop meaningful relationships online.

The problem is that actual experience contradicts these generalizations. Trusting, meaningful relationships are possible online. Online collaboration can be just as effective as face-to-face, and at times, moreso. Well, if this is the case, then what’s the value of face-to-face collaboration? Why do we need it, especially in a down economy when the cost of convening starts seeming like a luxury?

I’ve put together a 10-minute slidecast that explores these questions and articulates the real differences between online and face-to-face collaboration. (Hit the play button to watch.)

Elaborating on the Nuances

I had two intentions in creating this presentation. First, I wanted to counter some of the myths about online collaboration. Second, I wanted to articulate a framework for how to think about these different modes of interaction. That framework boils down to three points:

Artifacts are critical for effective collaboration. We use them all the time in face-to-face collaboration, and they usually work the same way face-to-face as they do online. For example, the best online brainstorming tools apply the same principles as the best face-to-face brainstorming processes using a whiteboard or Post-Its. Online collaboration is unique in that every interaction results in an artifact. That doesn’t make it inherently better, as the default artifact isn’t necessarily the best. But, this property leads to the second point, which is that…

Online enables scale. Because you’re working in a medium that is inherently replicable and shareable and where geographical limitations do not apply, you can potentially reach a much larger audience. The key word is potential. Actually attaining scale online is a huge challenge, and how you frame that goal is critical. Size, for example, may not be as important as diversity.

Face-to-face buys you attention. You cannot guarantee people’s presence (in the metaphysical sense) online, and that makes it hard to tackle certain types of problems. Getting that level of focused attention is possible, but the cost of doing it online is higher. This is the most important point, and understanding the nuances of it determines whether or not your collaborative strategy will be effective.

This slidecast is a good example of all three things. If I had given this talk without the aid of the slides, it may have been hard to visualize certain things such as the Tic-Tac-Toe exercise. This would have held true if this talk were delivered face-to-face as well. The slides as artifacts made a critical difference in communicating the ideas.

Because it’s recorded and available online, it allowed me to make it available widely and get feedback from a variety of sources, some of them unexpected, all of them appreciated. I heard back from about ten people and got detailed feedback from three. If this were face-to-face, I would have incurred additional costs in the time and resources required to arrange meetings, deliver the presentation, and listen to the feedback. Since it’s online, the only additional cost is the cost of listening, which I will gladly pay.

Attention is the tricky factor. Because it’s available anytime, the ten people who gave me feedback were able to watch the slidecast on their own schedule. Because of the nature of their feedback, I can be fairly certain they paid attention while watching it.

According to my statistics, in the three days it’s been online, the slidecast has been viewed almost 200 times. However, how many of those people were paying close attention? Of those who were, how can I get their attention long enough to get their feedback?

If I were delivering this presentation to a room with 200 people, I could be fairly certain that I had their attention. Or, I could use various tricks to get their attention, and I would have instant feedback as to whether those tricks worked. The effort required to accomplish a similar effect online is much, much higher, and the results are less certain. If it were critical for me to get a known group of 200 people to watch, pay attention to this presentation, and give me feedback afterward, in the end, the cost of gathering those people in a room might actually be lower than delivering this presentation online. Figuring out whether or not that’s the case is the hard part.

Finally, I don’t want to understate the important, emotional benefits of face-to-face interaction, the power of being in another person’s presence, the power of touch. Ultimately, that’s what being human is all about. However, the impact of that physical presence in the context of collaborative processes is often overstated. Hopefully, my slidecast helped demonstrate this.

The perfect collaborative strategy for solving really hard, really big problems ideally leverages face-to-face and online interactions. This framework offers clues on when to leverage which mediums.

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to the new decade!

This morning, I eschewed my usual routine of checking my email as soon as I woke up. I wanted to dictate how I kicked off the New Year. I wanted to be proactive, not reactive. So, I went for a run. It felt good. Now I feel strong and in control, and my mind is clear. I’m ready to take on this new year, this new decade, this ongoing adventure.

Maybe the next few days or even the next few weeks will be like today. Maybe they’ll be even better. Or maybe, I’ll return to my old habit of rolling out of bed and checking (and often responding to) my email first thing in the morning.

Martin Heidegger contended that technology was insidious because it made us forget our essential humanness. In this day and age, that’s an easy contention to understand.

Your Inner Circle

Back in 2008, my girlfriend told me that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. I thought a lot about that claim and whether it applied to my own life, and I was troubled. When I really thought about it, I was fairly certain I was spending most of my time with people I didn’t want to be spending time with.

I decided to take a look at some hard numbers. I used a tool called mail-trends on both my personal and work email accounts to see whom I was emailing the most.

I was reasonably happy with the numbers from my personal email, but I was distraught by the results of my work email. I interacted a lot with my clients, which was a good thing. (I love my clients!) However, I was also receiving an inordinate amount of email from people whom I didn’t want to be talking to. Worse, I was sending just as much email back to these same people. To top it off, I found that I often didn’t get around to responding to people whom I did want to be talking to.

It would have been easy to blame email for these woes, so naturally, I did. After all, email is designed to focus your attention on your inbox, and by default, it doesn’t place any barriers around that inbox. You end up ceding your attention to the people who email you the most, whether you like it or not.

One year ago today, I resolved to change this.

I did okay — not as well as I would have liked, but better than usual. Awareness made a big difference. I did some obvious things, such as emailing and calling people I wanted to talk to. I also made some structural changes. For example, I started the Blue Oxen Barnstars podcast, which was a great excuse for me to talk to people I wanted to talk to.

I also made some changes to how I managed my email inbox. I recently ran mail-trends again, and saw that my email situation improved a lot this past year. But it’s still not where I want it to be. At times, I wonder whether I want to be on email at all.

Tools As Space

A few months ago, Jelly Helm wrote a provocative post, where he said he was feeling “over” social media. He asked, “How does the screen/Interpipe enhance our humanity? How does it detract from it? How can it add more joy to our lives? When does it take away joy?”

Environment matters. We know this from situational psychology, which has shown over and over again that our surroundings can dictate our behavior. If we understand and acknowledge this, then one path toward transformation is to change that space. Life coach Martha Beck has suggested that your living space is a reflection on your life and that the room that gives you the most anxiety is an indication of the part of your life that needs the most work. Her solution? Revamp that room!

Digital tools are simply another form of space, but it’s a space that has magical properties. The notion of distance still exists, but its properties are completely different. When Chris Dent and I started Blue Oxen Associates, we spent a grand total of one week in the same room together over the course of two years. This past year, I spent more time with Philippe Beaudette than with anyone else, and he lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I like to work late into the night, and through the power of Identi.ca, I get to watch some of my friends half-way around the world wake up and start their day. I wish I could be in the same room as them, but these small, seemingly trivial connections make them feel less far.

Digital tools have magical properties, but unless those properties are properly harnessed, they are largely potential. Magic does not, by default, make our lives better.

As designers, we need to think about what makes digital tools meaningful spaces. Tools have affordances that encourage us to behave in certain ways.

Facebook is one of my favorite tools in the world. Many of the people I want to be engaging with — regardless of context — are on it. More importantly, most of these people are actually engaging on it. They are not simply passive participants. The typical long-tail curve of participation does not seem to apply on Facebook. At last month’s PARC panel on technology-mediated social participation, Facebook’s in-house sociologist, Cameron Marlow, said that the average Facebook user posts 25 comments a month. That is a stunning participation rate for an online community.

Good tools encourage certain types of behavior, but they don’t mandate it. They might make it very hard to choose, but in the end, we still have a choice.

How we choose to leverage tools so that they help make our lives more meaningful is up to us. Sometimes, it means walking away. I have friends who have chosen not to be on Facebook, and they seem quite happy with that choice. Jelly’s solution was to prune his list of Facebook friends. (I wonder if it helped?)

We still have a lot to learn about the digital medium and how it affects our ability to be human. I am not a determinist, but I am an optimist. I don’t believe that tools are inherently good or bad, but I believe that they can be marvelous, sometimes in transformational ways. I am excited by this possibility. But to harness that potential, we need to work at it, and we need to maintain a constant level of self-awareness. I truly believe that self-awareness is the secret to good living, and that this truth spans across time, space, and tools.

I’ve known of Beth and her work for years through the tight-knit nonprofit technology community, where she is a superstar. I’ve followed her on her blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook. I’ve referred her to others, including donors.

I’ve heard people say over and over through the years that you can’t build trust over the Internet, that you need to meet people face-to-face in order to truly trust them. Well, I trusted Beth before I ever met her. I even trusted her enough to refer her to others. The question is why?

Why is trust so important? How do you build it? And what role does technology play in building trust?

Driving in the Developing World

Driving in Kano, Nigeria.

Some of my biggest epiphanies about trust have come in my work in developing countries, where cultural differences have helped highlight how much good collaboration depends on trust. One of the best examples of this is how we drive.

Driving in Nigeria is like a traffic jam without the standstill. People weave in-and-out of traffic at full speed. Some of the roads have painted lines and dividers, but as far as I can tell, they are purely decorative.

In the U.S., we are taught to drive defensively. In Nigeria, they learn to drive skillfully. You can’t afford to wait for an opening or hope that someone will wait for you to complete a lane change or a turn, because they won’t.

Last November, my Nigerian colleague, Yahaya Hashim, came to Los Angeles for the ILA conference. As an L.A. native, I took it upon myself to show him the local surroundings in my car. As I drove, I was surprised to see Yahaya flinching on several occasions. While driving in L.A. may intimidate those from other cities, it should have been a piece of cake for a Nigerian. After seeing him flinch while taking an ordinary right turn, I finally asked him what was wrong.

Dr. Yahaya Hashim of dRPC.

As it turned out, I was turning right at the same time as a car in the opposing direction was turning left. I turned into the right-most lane, and the other car simultaneously turned into the lane to my left. Neither of us thought much of it. I trusted that the other car would not try to go into my lane. Yahaya, coming from a different world and world-view, did not share that trust.

In the U.S., we trust that people will obey driving rules. We trust that the water served to us in restaurants is potable. We trust that the change that we receive from stores is not counterfeit. We trust that our buildings and bridges are sturdy and safe. Imagine what it would be like if we didn’t trust in all these things.

Trust is empowering. It is the underpinning of successful groups, both large and small. Trust frees us to do things that would otherwise not be possible. It’s hard to appreciate the importance of trust… until it goes away.

Building Trust

How do we gain trust in the first place? To some extent, I think that most people Assume Good Faith until proven otherwise. (In fact, cooperation theory suggests that this is the best strategy for working with others. Not coincidentally, it is a core principle for the Wiki community. More on this later.)

Good faith is bolstered by other things. I had never met Beth before last Thursday, but I trusted her because my friends and colleagues trust her (trust by proxy). I trusted her because she is transparent with her work, and I’ve had a chance to evaluate it first-hand (trust by transparency). I trusted her even more after breaking bread with her, listening to her smart questions, and discovering how delightful she was (trust by relationship-building).

During my Packard Foundation talk, I stressed the importance of relationship-building for building trust and catalyzing collaboration in networks. Beth tweeted:

a lot of trust in networks is built over food and drink

Valdis Krebs responded:

even more is built over task/work/project

It’s important not to lose sight of this. First, trust is contextual. You might trust that a person is a good friend, but that doesn’t mean that person is a good roommate, a good partner, or a good colleague.

Second, trust is built through experience. The more you work with people, the more you see people fulfill their commitments, the more you trust them.

When I design workshops, I jokingly promise, “No trust falls!” I actually like trust falls. I love creating experiences where people learn to recognize the importance of trust. The problem is, I could fall backwards into someone’s arms a thousand times, and that won’t make me trust that person any more if he or she has repeatedly flaked out on me. Breaking bread with someone might convince me that he or she is a good person, but it tells me nothing about whether that person is an effective, competent worker.

Three Lessons

I think there are three lessons here.

First, Assume Good Faith. Society works because we trust people we don’t know. If you are constantly second-guessing people you have to work with, you will not have an effective working relationship.

Second, Relationship-Building Matters. You are more likely to trust people you know. Building relationships is an important and underappreciated strategy for catalyzing collaboration in networks.

Third, Work Matters More. Good faith and strong relationships are rendered meaningless if you don’t do your work.

Note that none of things require face-to-face interaction. In fact, you could make a strong argument that in some situations, online interaction is a better way to build trust. If I walk into a storefront, and the storeowner is smiling and looks friendly, I might be inclined to trust him or her. But looking friendly is a poor reason for trusting someone. I would have a much better reason to trust a merchant on eBay with a perfect rating and thousands of comments raving about how good he or she is.

Noam Cohen speaks at Wikimania 2009. Photograph by Beatrice Murch.

Noam Cohen, who wrote the article, is someone who deeply understands the Wikimedia movement. (He has more edits on Wikipedia than I do.) In past articles about Wikipedia, he’s ably and concisely captured the different nuances, which is not easy.

I’m not sure he had the opportunity to do that this time. It’s a short article, and the point he’s making is somewhat subtle. Or maybe I’d just like to think that, since I’m featured in the piece. Regardless, I’d like to at least expand on my part of the story. At best, I’ll be able to clarify some points (or at least give my opinion about them). At worst, I’ll tell some entertaining stories about how I ended up in the article.

Last week was Wikimania, which is the annual gathering of Wikimedians from all over the world. This year’s conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As anyone who has ever traveled for work knows, unless you are planning to take some time off, you don’t generally have time for sight-seeing. I knew that this trip was going to be particularly tight, as it was going to be our first opportunity to discuss the Wikimedia strategic planning process in person with the wider community.

Given these constraints, I decided to focus on two non-work items: Eating Argentinian beef, and seeing the Madres de Plaza de Mayo march. One of my best friends, Sarah, has studied and worked with the Madres for practically her entire adult life, and I wanted to pay my respects to their moving cause while I was there.

So last Thursday morning, when Noam first approached me about the strategic planning process and asked me if I would set aside some time to talk to him, I responded, “Do you want to go see the Madres this afternoon?”

He gamely agreed. That afternoon, he, I, and Philippe Beaudette, the strategic planning process’s brilliant facilitator, set out to the Plaza de Mayo. Along the way, we had a long, engaging conversation about our backgrounds, about the strategic planning process, and about Wikimedia in general.

Noam turned out to be a well-meaning provocateur. He asked hard-hitting questions, some of which seemed to be out of left field, but he was also fair. I really enjoyed chatting with him (which made me nervous; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing when talking to a journalist), and we ended up talking long after our walk.

The Mothers of the Disappeared march at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Photograph by Eugene Eric Kim.

Noam opens his article with an off-the-cuff remark I made while watching the Madres. I was a bit put off by the tourist spectacle at the Plaza de Mayo, even more so because I was actively participating in it. I also learned something about the Madres I didn’t know before. In the mid-1980s, they had split into two factions. A small faction had decided to work actively with the government (and accept a monetary settlement) to bring attention to its cause. The remaining Madres had decided never to accept any help from the government until it fully admitted its wrongdoing.

It was clear to all bystanders that these two factions were not friendly with each other. When we learned the reason for this, we all nodded our heads in understanding. “Money changes everything,” I said to Noam.

And therein lies the point of Noam’s article. “Professionalization” means that, among other things, money is involved. And money is often a signal that things are about to change.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In this case, it’s a necessary thing. The Wikimedia projects have long surpassed what is possible without significant resources. Technical infrastructure is the most obvious need, and many would argue that there are many others. The question is what, and how much? The project is lucky to have a large, grassroots community of individual donors and a growing base of foundation donors. Does the supply meet the demand? Or, could supply even be surpassing demand?

Blue Oxen Associates principal, Eugene Eric Kim, at Wikimania 2009. Photograph by Beatrice Murch.

This is a critical question for the strategic planning process, but while we explore it, we’re also living it. The reality is that the Wikimedia Foundation and its network of chapters already exist, that these organizations all have a budget, and that our work is currently part of that budget.

That brings me to my rather cryptic quote at the end of Noam’s article: “It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end.”

I don’t want to assume that where Wikimedia currently is at is where it necessarily wants to be. We’re in the midst of a great experiment. We will deliver what is expected of us, but we are going to make mistakes along the way. The question in my mind is not so much how well we do this time around, but how well the community learns from this process and what it does with that learning afterward.

Bureaucracies form to help movements scale, but the nature of bureaucracy is to seek self-sustenance, which sometimes comes at the expense of the original mission. As one of the “professionals” involved in this whole endeavour, I don’t want to be a part of that. The key to avoiding this trap is to stay self-aware, to constantly ask ourselves the kinds of questions that Noam asks in his article.

I’m leading a year-long strategic planning process for the Foundation. We’re trying to figure out where Wikimedia should be in five years. That question is hard enough, but there was an even harder question that we needed to answer first: Who’s “we”?

The obvious answer would be the Foundation itself, which consists of about 30 employees and which is paying for this work. Organizational strategic planning is a fairly well understood challenge, and for such a small organization, it’s a process that would take a few months at most.

But this does not seem to be the right answer. The Foundation is the steward of a huge international movement that represent millions of people. It was was founded in 2003, two years after the Wikipedia project started. At that point, the English Wikipedia already had over 100,000 articles, and the German Wikipedia had over 10,000. Wikipedia was already an international phenomenon, with thousands of contributors all over the world.

Today, there are ten Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. These are driven by tens of thousands of volunteer contributors and are governed independent of the Foundation. Wikipedia itself consists of versions in almost 300 different languages. Over 10 million people visit Wikimedia projects every day.

Additionally, there are the Wikimedia Chapters, an international network of organizations that support the Wikimedia movement at a local level. There are currently 24 chapters all over the world.

Finally, there are those who don’t already use or contribute to any of the Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia vision is a world in which every human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. As much of a phenomenon as Wikimedia has become in its almost nine years of existence, it still has a long way to go before it covers the sum of all knowledge and before every human in the world has access to it.

The right answer to the question, “Who’s ‘we’?”, is, “All of the above.” Believe it or not, having such a broad set of stakeholders does not in and of itself make the Wikimedia strategic planning process unique. Far from it.

What’s unique is that we have the opportunity to do this as an open community process, where anyone and everyone contributes to the planning process. We can do this for two reasons:

1. Because our core community is schooled in the art of mass collaboration in a way that no other group of this size is.
2. Because the stakeholders in this process are committed to doing it this way.

This latter reason cannot be overlooked. Collaboration does not happen without intention, and it’s not sustainable unless there is commitment.

Furthermore, there is an inherent tension between movements and the organizations that emerge to steward them. Strategic planning is typically a top-down process. We’re trying to facilitate it as a bottoms-up process. Committing to mass collaboration generally means giving up control. Top-down organizations don’t like giving up control.

I’ll describe our process in more detail in future posts. For now, feel free to follow along by visiting the strategic planning Wiki.

I recently created a three-minute slidecast our definition and model of collaboration:

As is evident here, we’re starting to experiment with slidecasting and other mediums for communicating our ideas. I welcome your feedback about the model itself and about the slidecast.

I continued the tradition through and after college, and I received a healthy number of cards as well. Many of those consisted of a typed, xeroxed, and signed letter. I wasn’t offended by that, but I wasn’t particularly impressed either. I understood the practicality, but it wasn’t for me. It’s not that I wrote a particularly deep message to each of my friends. It was more that the act of handwriting a message had deep meaning for me.

After I started Blue Oxen Associates in 2002, the tradition stopped. I just found myself so overwhelmed with starting up a business, I couldn’t summon up the energy to handwrite all those cards. Each subsequent year, it became more and more of a sore point for me. I was making so many meaningful connections with new people through my work, my list kept growing and became more overwhelming, and I was never able to restart my tradition.

Letters

Last year, after once again not sending out any cards, I decided enough was enough. I was going to send a typed, xeroxed, and signed letter. Better to at least let my friends know that I was thinking about them and let them know what I was up to rather than not touch base at all. By now, people were sending e-cards, emails, and so forth, so I felt that a xeroxed letter really wouldn’t be so bad.

A chance conversation with my girlfriend, Lisa, (who was not yet aware of my new resolve) made me change my mind yet again. She had just received a letter from Bill, her next door neighbor from when she had lived in Cleveland. Back then, she was new to Cleveland, didn’t know anybody, and was the youngest person on her block. Bill and his wife, Ellie, welcomed her and brought her fruits and vegetables from their garden.

They were the epitome of good neighbors, and they developed a close friendship over time. They often checked in on her, looking after her house when she was away on business and offering companionship when she was home.

One day, Lisa had just returned from a business trip, when Bill knocked on her door. Ellie had suddenly fallen ill, and he wasn’t sure what to do. Lisa suggested he take her to the doctor. The next day, they learned that Ellie had cancer all over her body. They were devastated. When Ellie returned, Lisa played her violin at Ellie’s bedside so that she would have music to comfort her. One week later, Ellie passed away.

Lisa later moved to California to pursue a long-time dream. She and Bill corresponded via cards and letters. He would write about the neighborhood, describe her old house and its new residents. He would talk about old haunts and new developments. He discussed his art and his photography, which he had decided to pursue more seriously. And he continued to check in on Lisa, providing much needed encouragement for her pursuit of her dream, acting as any good neighbor would, even though he was now 2,000 miles away.

I listened to this story, I heard about his most recent letter, I thought about some of my own correspondences, and I was overwhelmed with emotion. I decided that I couldn’t go through with my plan to send out xeroxed letters. It’s not that my original thinking was wrong, it was that the handwritten cards had deeper meaning for me, and that I didn’t want to lose that.

Mediating Meaningful Relationships

I’ve thought long and hard over the years about how different communication mediums can mediate more meaningful relationships. There are a million stories like these, and it’s easy and dangerous to see new forms of communications as less meaningful. It’s easy to look at tools such as texting and Twitter, and to worry about the loss of meaningful interactions and relationships. And to some extent, it’s true. If you lower the barrier to interacting, you enable things like spam.

But there’s a flip side to that. Meaningful relationships are not all about long walks and deep philosophical conversations. They are also about the silly and the mundane. They are about learning that the people in your life are addicted to chocolate and are devout fans of the Washington Capitals. They’re about learning that the people in your life were elite swimmers in their youth and that they raise chickens in their backyard.

Modern technology seems to be particularly good at mediating the mundane, which is not the same as the meaningless. We are overwhelmed by spam, we hear about “sexting”, and we shake our head in sadness. Those of us who do not use these mediums regularly (and even those of us who do) wonder whether today’s youth will ever know what a deep, meaningful relationship truly is.

There is some validity to this question, but the truth is that it’s naive. Studies and real-life experience show that people are constantly developing trustful, meaningful relationships in online-only mediums. Young people know this, but even older folks are catching on. Tara Hunt points out in her book, The Whuffie Factor, that the 50-plus generation is a rapidly growing demographic on the Internet.

The mistake that we often make is that we confuse the medium for the relationship. One of my least favorite terms in this business is “online community.” Community is community, regardless of the medium of interaction. Different mediums offer new opportunities to connect, they do not replace existing opportunities. When you think about building community or facilitating collaboration, the medium is important, but it is not the only thing.

Coevolving More Meaningful Tools

All that known and said, I still chose to continue to handwrite my cards, even if it meant shortening my list or even skipping entirely. I can send a canned letter or email to my friends anytime, but it’s harder to find opportunities to do something more meaningful.

Which raises the question: What are the opportunities to develop digital tools that elicit deeper conversations and connections?

The one that intrigues me the most is the following: Slow down. If we can elicit the mundane by restricting posts to 140 characters, then perhaps we can elicit deeper reflection by restricting the frequency with which we’re allowed to say things. I started noodling with this idea five years ago, and I think the potential for these ideas is strong.

When pondering this question, I think often of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who wrote essay after essay decrying modern technology, arguing that it led to an inevitable loss of humanity. However, in the midst of his overwhelming pessimism, he also quoted the poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

The downsides of technology are real, but I think the upsides are vastly unexplored and even underappreciated. Perhaps the biggest upside is that technology — both good and bad — reminds us of our essential humanity. If we’re losing it, we feel that loss, and we are reminded of what we’re missing. Remembering our humanity is the first step toward reasserting it. And reasserting our humanity is the first step toward harnessing tools for what they should really be used for, which is to augment our humanity.

Acknowledgements

I wrote this post in response to a wonderful email from Suzie Kidder, with whom I had worked years ago at the 2003 Planetwork Conference. She, in turn, was responding to my May email newsletter, where I wrote:

One of my great joys from last month’s newsletter was hearing back from so many of you, re-establishing ties after many months, even years in some cases. Technology today offers so many interesting ways to stay connected, it’s easy to forget that the old ways — a simple email or better yet, a phone call — are sometimes the best.

Suzie, thanks for reconnecting, for your appreciation, and for making me think.