“Social Networks and Social Change”: giving and getting wiki-working wisdom at Stanford
Written by Noah Flower on Monday, February 1st, 2010
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Over the weekend I helped teach a continuing-studies course at Stanford with Diana Scearce and Heather Mcleod-Grant. It was a real joy — the experience of sharing what we’ve learned with a diverse audience of highly-engaged listeners made it entirely worthwhile to get up early on a sunny Saturday. We were glad to be able to share our current thinking with people from across the spectrum in the social sector and it helped us a great deal to see that they appreciated the content that we’ve created with primarily foundation and nonprofit management in mind. To all who came: thank you, I hope you found it valuable, and please come by this blog and our Twitter-stream to continue the conversation into the future. We would love to hear your stories of how you’ve tried to apply these ideas in your own efforts. This is a very fast-moving area of practice and only through your eyes and ears that we can keep a handle on what works and what doesn’t. › Continue reading
Top Moments in Social Entrepreneurship – With a Network Lens
Written by Heather McLeod Grant on Monday, February 1st, 2010
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We found this article by Nathaniel Whittemore on Change.org, as reposted on SSIR’s blog, very interesting. It captures highlights of the past decade with respect to the rise of Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation – two topics we at the Monitor Institute care very much about. Of particular note are several of these key tipping points which relate to networks, new technologies, or movement building within the SE field. In particular, we note:
- The advent of the Stanford Social Innovation Review as a journal, and now website and online community providing connective tissue for knowledge sharing across the field (Katherine Fulton and I both serve on their advisory board).
- The launch of the Social Innovation Fund, which creates a new networked model for government, working as a partner with nonprofits, foundations and borrowing best practices from the private sector.
- Social Capital Markets conference, where we’ve spoken and shared our research on the rise of impact investing
- The iPhone, which is facilitating mobile connectivity, and furthering both network mindset and action among social activists. It signifies many of the new technologies driving the creation of networks that we’ve written about here.
- The importance of the Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropy in creating new models of giving for the field, influenced by their experience at eBay and a more network-centric approach to grant-making
For the complete list and commentary, here’s the original post.
350.org: giving new meaning to “new organizing”
Written by Noah Flower on Friday, January 29th, 2010
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A lightbulb went on in my head while I was listening to the PdF webinar last week that laid bare the machinery that made it possible for 350.org to achieve the most widespread day of political action in history back on October 24th. We’re still in the midst of examining the various threats that traditional “membership organizations” are facing and the story of 350’s success is one of the best illustrations I’ve seen yet of the new model. In the words of 350 organizer Phil Aroneanu, “It’s about concerned citizens who are looking for a meaningful way to engage. It doesn’t make sense to ask them to click once and that’s it. That’s not a believable theory of change. Building those [local] leaders is the secret to the way that we organize.” › Continue reading
Working Wikily presentation at The Hub
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
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I had a great time last night at The Hub in Berkeley presenting on Working Wikily and discussing the ins and outs of social media with an intimate group of social entrepreneurs. It was the perfect venue, both because The Hub’s members are exactly the people who are out there experimenting with the new networked toolkit and because The Hub is a place for those people to expand their networks and discover new opportunities for connection. Below are the slides that I brought with me. To all of you who came, thank you for participating. I hope you found it valuable and I would love to hear any reflections on how the content could be improved for similar audiences in the future.
Noah’s Roundup
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
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Welcome back! We’ve been kicking off the year to a busy start here at the Institute, so this is the first chance I’ve had to look back over all the interesting material that popped up in the last month and a half. Here’s another roundup of the links that jump out to me as being the most noteworthy.
- It’s a new year with new predictions. Two lists worth reading are CauseGlobal’s general predictions of trends in the social sector and Change.org’s predictions for online action beyond donations. For a more thoughtful and long-term set of ideas about how technology is shaping the sector, Lucy Bernholz’ new paper “Disrupting Philanthropy” is a must-read.
- Transparency is a hot topic. The once-promising Chase Community Giving program resulted in fiery critique because of the opaque manner in which the administrators removed several vote-getters from the final round. What does that mean for foundations? Mario Morino argues that foundations should be getting ahead of the curve with a “transparency offensive,” because going transparent is simply inevitable. But as Chase has (hopefully) learned, › Continue reading
Sometimes simplicity can be cutting edge
Written by Heather McLeod Grant on Friday, December 11th, 2009
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“What are you working on?”
It’s a simple question – one that only takes a few minutes to answer. But it’s a question that has dramatically simplified how we think about knowledge management within the Monitor Institute. Like many organizations, we have Yammer, an online “case team database,” several blogs, and other technical tools set up for sharing ideas and best practices within our organization. We have codified documents out the wazoo, and monthly team meetings to touch base on the most urgent priorities.
But most of these tools and documents don’t get used as much as they should – and consequently, we are often struggling to “know what we know” and to stay connected as we do our work, head down in client projects, pulling off into our own little silos. I suspect we’re not alone – most organizations of more than a few people struggle with how to do “knowledge management,” and few truly do it well. How do we keep connecting the dots? › Continue reading
Noah’s Roundup
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
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There’s been a lot of rich new material this last month and it’s about time that we took a moment aside again to summarize it in one place.
- Two resources for getting up to date on the current trends. First, ThinkSocial ran a competition for the best public-spirited uses of social media and released their first report, Social Media Blueprints 1.0, which offers a useful overview of the 10 trends that they’re seeing emerge. Second, Lucy Bernholz has a handy set of links to several year-end lists of social-sector trends.
- The crowd continues to be given increasing amounts of power. Governmental experimentation with crowdsourcing is beginning in earnest, as illustrated by these six examples and the launch of ExpertLabs to crowdsource policy advice. And JPMorgan Chase set a new milestone in trusting an online crowd with decisionmaking power with its Community Giving initiative that put $5 million of grants into the hands of Facebook users with only minimal supervision. What we’re seeing, says Lucy, is a shift towards organizing around expertise, wherever it exists in the organizational landscape. › Continue reading
Clean water through crowdsourcing
Written by WiserEarth on Monday, November 30th, 2009
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This post was originally published by Angus Parker on the WiserEarth Blog.
In 2007, the Blue Planet Run Foundation set itself the audacious goal of providing 200 million people safe drinking water within 20 years. The challenge is how to deliver on this goal with such a small organization.
The typical rural village in the Global South has a population of 1,000 people. That means in order to reach 200 million people you would need to do 10,000 projects a year. Jin Zidell, founder and chairman of the Blue Planet Run Foundation, doesn’t want to fundraise and staff a huge organization to do this, instead they are going to rely on networks. As he explains: “If we can save 20% because we don’t have a large staff, that’s 20% more money going to the work on the ground.” The key to their plan is the Peer Water Exchange (PWX) › Continue reading
Net-centric organizing: learning from Bill Traynor and Lawrence Community Works
Written by Diana Scearce on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
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Bill Traynor’s work comes up often as I talk to activists and funders about organizing, leadership, and assessing network impact. I’ve learned a ton from his work with Lawrence Community Works, and this post is an effort to pull together a few of the highlights. Mostly I’m drawing on a presentation he did for the Grassroots Grantmakers in late September, and his Nonprofit Quarterly article Vertigo and the Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership in a Connected World.
A little bit of background on Bill and Lawrence Community Works: › Continue reading
What if you could network every idealist in the world?
Written by Noah Flower on Monday, November 23rd, 2009
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There’s a new global network in town. It’s called Imagine, Connect, Act (ICA), its parent is Idealist.org, and based on the call to action it’s shaping up to be a very interesting and ambitious experiment in network weaving. Over 4700 people have already signed up from 140 countries. To see why, I recommend reading the whole three-page vision, which is quite moving, or if you’re not feeling inspire-able then here’s the short version: › Continue reading
#PFwhiteboard: crowdsourcing strategy at the Peery Foundation
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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Back in July I noticed something rather surprising pop up in my Twitter feed. The Peery Foundation was holding a strategy session to define the focus of its giving, and it was going to share the entire exchange in real time on Twitter. Intrigued, I started reading the posts under their hashtag (#PFwhiteboard), and what I saw made me sit back in my chair. A constant stream of remarks, responses, ideas, and counter-proposals were flowing out of the Peery Foundation’s Twitter account, and every now and then another twitterer would weigh in with an answer or alternative view. (Modern Giving was among the blogs that took note, and Tactical Philanthropy called it “a rather stunning form of transparency.”) › Continue reading
MomsRising: what we can learn from new online models
Written by Heather McLeod Grant on Friday, November 13th, 2009
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As part of our ongoing research project into the future of membership-based advocacy organizations, we’ve been talking to folks from “new” as well as “older” groups focused on issue-organizing. We’re hoping to find out how the nature of civic engagement and mobilization is changing – along with the business models needed to support this kind of work. Our hypothesis is that new technologies such as Web 2.0 are accelerating change in the sector, and that the nature of how we support causes will shift – from writing checks to being more actively engaged, or ultimately doing both. (For more thoughts on this topic, see Cynthia Gibson’s earlier post.)
All of which brings me to MomsRising.org – perhaps one of the most compelling “new” models for issue-organizing. › Continue reading
Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 5 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
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Not too long ago I had the privilege to sit down with Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, where he pioneered the use of prizes to solicit solutions to technical challenges in the commercial world from experts anywhere in the world. Alph now shares his thoughts on innovation and business strategy at InnoBlogger.
Q: Tell me about the role of money in asking for help from the crowd. How much does it make sense to offer, when should it be offered, and how do you know whether to offer it at all?
When we were putting Innocentive together, the question came up of whether it should be based on intellectual stimulation or funding. I was adamantly opposed to doing it without funding. On the commercial side, I think it’s shameful that the benefactor would benefit and not share. But when it comes to the philanthropic side, sharing your intellect is a donation in-kind. That could be a perfectly acceptable way for social institutions to further leverage their capital. › Continue reading
Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 4 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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Not too long ago I had the privilege to sit down with Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, where he pioneered the use of prizes to solicit solutions to technical challenges in the commercial world from experts anywhere in the world. Alph now shares his thoughts on innovation and business strategy at InnoBlogger.
Q: I’m curious to know if you’ve had any experience with prediction markets. Do you think they have applications for social-sector organizations?
I look at prediction markets as a kind of cognition example of collective intelligence; how does one aggregate the analytical pieces of knowledge that need to contribute to a conclusion of some kind? Do we just vote on it? Do we take a poll? Do we average across everybody’s responses or find the midpoint? I happen to be more intrigued than opposed — I think [this approach] aggregates knowledge in a very clever way, more accurate than just taking the average. › Continue reading
Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 3 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Monday, November 9th, 2009
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Not too long ago I had the privilege to sit down with Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, where he pioneered the use of prizes to solicit solutions to technical challenges in the commercial world from experts anywhere in the world. Alph now shares his thoughts on innovation and business strategy at InnoBlogger.
Q: Some social-sector problems are settled but require expertise, which are typically addressed by service delivery, while others require experimentation because we have yet to discover a solution. When would you go open versus closed on each type?
Let me use the AIDS issue as a way of stating where I think you may want to go open and where you may want to stay closed. Say there’s a newly created foundation that’s focused on AIDS in Kenya. Posting a challenge that says, “Well, what about AIDS should we address?” isn’t terribly useful. You’d tend to get a lot of chaff coming in. First I’d let the internal program director stumble around to figure out what the organization’s mission is and where they’re going to cut in. › Continue reading
Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 2 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Friday, November 6th, 2009
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Not too long ago I had the privilege to sit down with Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, where he pioneered the use of prizes to solicit solutions to technical challenges in the commercial world from experts anywhere in the world. Alph now shares his thoughts on innovation and business strategy at InnoBlogger.
Q: Is there a middle ground where you can cast out to a group that’s very much beyond your organization without the fanfare of a fully public Innocentive challenge?
Recognizing that there might be a need for this, Innocentive does have a product that they call “at work” that lets you specify a private network which could include employees, contractors, vendors, or any other group with which you have existing relationships. Companies are interested in this for a number of and one of them is definitely the desire to manage confidentiality. We’ve seen that it works. In my pre-Innocentive days at Eli Lilly, when we cast out for 1000 different perspectives across the company, we raised the diversity of perspectives we were tapping and found a lot of hidden pockets of expertise that we hadn’t necessarily recruited for. › Continue reading
Joe Solomon on the collaborative frontlines of climate change
Written by WiserEarth on Thursday, November 5th, 2009
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This piece was originally published on WiserEarth by Kerry Vineberg.
The climate change movement has been gaining momentum in recent months. We’ve felt it building at organizations like 350.org in preparation for the major UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen this December. We had a call with social media coordinator Joe Solomon of 350.org to get a sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of it all, and his thoughts on how to effectively network for a cause. › Continue reading
Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 1 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
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Not too long ago I had the privilege to sit down with Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, where he pioneered the use of prizes to solicit solutions to technical challenges in the commercial world from experts anywhere in the world. Alph now shares his thoughts on innovation and business strategy at InnoBlogger.
Q: You’ve probably seen more configurations than most of today’s crowdsourcing tools. What are the most interesting ways you’ve seen people are taking advantage of them?
I see some people recognizing that crowdsourcing technologies can be used in an iterative fashion, where people cycle between casting out broader questions, using ideas from the larger community, then going back within the smaller community until you encounter a more specific question for which you need the large, diversified group. › Continue reading
Networks for social impact: making the case
Written by Diana Scearce on Friday, October 30th, 2009
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Over the past 6 months, I’ve had the pleasure of facilitating a community of practice for funders supporting networks. The question that keeps coming up is: how to make the case that working through and investing in networks will produce the intended social impact? At the same time, the belief in network impact is becoming more widespread–-the potential for organizing without organizations, the power of developing a strategic understanding of webs of relationships, and the promise of openly sharing both data and new knowledge. There is more and more experimentation with network models for social impact. There are a handful of funders investing in these experiments. Yet there is only limited evidence to make the case that networks work. › Continue reading
Slides and podcast from our SSIR presentation
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
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We had the honor of being invited to speak at the 4th Annual Nonprofit Management Institute, held on October 6th and 7th by the Stanford Social Innovation Review on the university campus. Heather Grant spoke to the plenary session on the 7th and I joined her in fielding questions afterwards. I was happy to find that the questions reflected many of the issues that I see being discussed by the bloggers and twitterers that I follow here, ranging from tactical matters such as how to manage time when using social media to more strategic questions about the kind of organizational structure needed to run a network. Some people had stories about social media and networks of their own to share with the group, reflecting the amount of active experimentation going on as we speak. Heather’s presentation was about the work we’ve been doing here at the Monitor Institute’s networks practice, giving an introduction to the changes sweeping through the social sector today as a result of networked technologies and some of the emergent models that we’ve been studying of networked organizational structure. Her slides are below. The speech was published by the SSIR’s Social Innovation Conversations and now available as a free podcast.
