Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Crowdsourcing some good

Rob Wright at Socialtext asked me yesterday how he could set up a non-profit organization to make donations tax deductible for the $20k he and others are raising for a friend's liver transplant.  I found my answer lacking, so:

I got some good responses worth collecting in one place.

 

         

	bhell13   @Ross - Not sure it's tax deductible but I know people who have used dropcash.com          about 3 hours ago from web               in reply to Ross
	pierre   @Ross check with local community foundation. They should know how to help, or someone who can, receive medical donations.          about 17 hours ago from txt               in reply to Ross
	driehle   @Ross: Rather than starting a non-profit, I'd seek fiscal sponsorship from an existing non-profit.          about 17 hours ago from web               in reply to Ross
	alexschmidt   @Ross try contacting chaya!: permalink          about 18 hours ago from web               in reply to Ross
	chrisdunlap   @Ross - try Penninsula Community Foundation or San Francisco Foundation... expertise as "Fiscal Sponsors" for projects & New non-profits          about 19 hours ago from web               in reply to Ross

I'll update this post later with what Rob finds out from this great advice.

UPDATE from Rob:

Background: friend is in need of new kidney and approximately 40 individuals want to help financially. 

• Setting up a non-profit org takes about 3 months and $3.000 to $10,000 to set up.  Additionally, the money raised can not go to just 1 individual.  So that option is out.
• I have found two non-profits, http://www.transplants.org/ and http://www.transplantfund.org/ that for a fee of either 4% or 5% will accept donations on behalf of someone and pay any and all related bills and those donations are tax deductible.    They actually cover a wide range of needs and claim to help in the organization of events like a golf fundraiser. 
• Our last option is to simply deposit funds into a bank account and track and disperse funds by hand.

Cyber Monday, Pay It Forward

As we sink deeper into our credit-laden consumer cesspool, with Black Friday followed by Cyber Monday, I wonder what we could do that is more thankful for the gifts we have gotten and give a compounding gift of giving. 

Something always bothers me about this time of year, it never seems to be the spirit of the holidays you find in your friends and families, but what the markets want of us.  Most everyone has these feelings, methinks.

This year they holiday spending spree is the last test of our economy, which has been driven by the up to recently largest consumer economy.  Odds are, however, that the credit crunch will ripple into waves next quarter with wide impact. 

I'll admit to making a long awaited purchase Friday despite the crowds (leveraging a Consumer Reports blog post, price comparison presented as evidence in my mobile wiki for competitor price matching by a seller with a better service reputation, not on credit, but is an aside disclosure).  But now with Christmas lists being checked twice, I wonder how my gift can be a means of social production.

Recently I rediscovered Kiva.org, the Social Microfinance Network.  They partnered with Microfinance institutions that provide micro loans on the ground to budding entrepreneurs and provide a means of personal involvement with social feedback.  My cousin works for a Microfinance Institution in Benin, and despite recently recovering from Malaria, I can say she is involved with one of the most effective methods of sustainable development known as yet.  Kiva gives me a way of being personally involved, and on Thanksgiving I made my first loan, $25 max, to a butcher in Kenya who needed a $700 capital equipment loan for a deep freezer to increase inventory and decrease transportation costs.  I look forward to hearing her stories about how this improved her life and those around her.

For the coming holiday, I'm considering giving Kiva Gift Certificates for others to make their first micro-loans.

Just for fun, lets compare to traditional gift certificates without mocking their lack of imagination.  A good number of them are bought on credit and then given as credit and consumed in relative isolation.  With Kiva, I can give a gift to give, but also be repaid.  So they could still go and consume their 0% interest spoils anyhow, perhaps at the opportune time in a crashed economy.

Okay, I'm probably lessening how powerful this is, and how you can be if you discover your own power through Kiva.  The last paragraph was a bit of a grinchy pun on the economy, but think about it.  Anyone can be a social entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs change the world.

Brewster Kahle on Universal Access to All Knowledge

An Impressionistic Transcript of Brewster Khale's talk at Wikimania...

You are really on to something. There is something big going on here and a lot of these talks are about trying to figure it out. At the beginning of the talk I'll talk about things I know about and at the end talk about things I don't know -- how is that for a VC pitch?

I'll talk about open source, open content and the rise of the technical non-profits. Universal Access to All Knowledge is a big goal, and if you accomplish it, what are you going to do? Move to Florida?

Wikipedia is the 15th most popular site on the web. This is because of the enlightenment goal. The goal isn't a technical one, but a structural one. Despite centuries old balance...1976 radical expansion of US Copyright Regulation. Property of IP is perhaps the worst idea since the Domino Theory. Information is knowledge, not property. Valenti's crowning achievement radicalized copyright regulation. Most people talk about 130 year protection, but it is the vast scope and repercussions.

First casualty was software. The response was Open Source licenses. MIT's sale to Symbolics, which forked development and RMS' experience lead to open source. This is Brewster's revisionist history, but it may be where it came from.

The second casualty was Music and Video. The response was Creative Commons licenses. Another response was organizations to facilitate community effort. We lost the help of institutions like MIT so we built new ones. The Free Software Foundation. DejaNews was a for profit, sold to Google, dissapated. IMDB, 6 guy community project was bought by Amazon. CDDB became Gracenote, Inc. WAIS Inc was sold to AOL. FTP Software sold to NetManage. Cygnus sold to Redhat. All commercial companies built upon community effort that don't last long. FSF is still around.

The response is the rise of the technical non-profit. Apache software foundation has no full-time employees, but is incorporated to last a while. OASF has gotten money not only from Mitch but from Foundations. Mozilla Foundation is a great success with Firefox and the Google toolbar (money) they spun off a for-profit company. Interesting ecology to watch and try and understand what it means. Linux. Internet Archive is based on the open access model -- can we get paid for the administration we do so everything we do can be openly accessible. Wikimedia foundation you know about. The rise of the technical non-profit is an interesting addition to the ecology, we went wrong with the over-corporatization post WWII. EFF., Public Knowledge and Open Content Alliance exist to enforce rights and serve us. We massively screwed up our law structure and the general approach of knowledge of property.

Open Hardware. Petabox, a cheap machine that is open sourced. The $100 Laptop Program has interest in the order of 5-10 million. What would happen if the next major laptop company is a non-profit? It is because they are non-profit that they are trusted and base on open work.

The structure is now in place to proceed towards Universal Access to All Knowledge. We have institutions dedicated towards these goals, but how are we doing towards it?

In Text, getting the 26-28 million books in the Library of Congress. 1 megabyte for a book, 26 terabytes, $60k cost for the entire library on a Linux machine. But I actually like books, the printed page. Created the mobile bookmobile, which has printed a million books. The cost is a penny a page, a buck a book means you can give books away. In our first debut of this was the supreme court when they were arguing to extend copyright another 20 years, but we lost that one. Erik Eldridge has one, two in India, one in Egypt, one in Uganda... this gets closer to universal access, but what we realized is we need to scan more books. One way to do this is send them somewhere else. The Million Books project sends them to India, but we had to buy 100k books to send to them, but not many others wanted to send books to them. So the Indians were scanning their own books, which may be the right thing for them to do. Put the scanners next to the books. Sending to India to scan is $10 per book, in the US it is $30. The automatic scanners are not effective, so we made our own scanner and can do it at 10 cents a page. Scanning 400 books a day. $750 million dollars to digitize the Library of Congress. About a year an a half of the LoB budget.

Books are within our grasp technologically. There are issues about if it will be done by non-profits or projects like Google Books. We have an orphaned works problem. The way you ask a question in the US is through a lawsuit, Khale and Eldgrige. But if you get to frame a problem (orphaned works) you have already won. Who would forget the orphans? Give the orphans a home!

Next is in-print works. Amazon is working the other way, from print to out of print. We have found with the Open Content Alliance something that works. Even Microsoft is giving us money.

In Audio, if you take all the published works, there are 2-3 million musical works. A fairly litigated area. Some precedent that ripping them and putting them online might not be okay. A lot of musicians just looking to be put on the internet. The Grateful Dead allowed people to trade music. The key was, as long as no one was making any money. This allowed people to feel good about it. Legitimate bootlegging copies by other bands. So we went to this community and said: "would you like unlimited storage and bandwidth for free." They said, "we don't believe you." And they didn't like lossy compression. We said try us. Got lots of Okays. 2k bands, 30k recordings, everything the Grateful Dead played. Many versions of each concert, as there are debates over microphone types. If you give something for free, not only is it not taxed, but you get a tax rebate. Getting Slashdotted is a nightmare, your ISP bills could make you sell your guitar or house. Europe has a different copy-write scheme for performances (50 years), so we are working with the Dutch government to make old stuff free.

In Moving Images, 100-200,000 films. Not much, makes putting them online conceivable. We want to do this with DVD quality, but we are finding lots of archival films that never had distribution. Have 30k films on the Archive, dwarfed by YouTube, which is cool. Discovering genres like Lego Movies. Lots of these things end up in closets. Putting them online is $15 per video hour. We will host it, if it generally belongs in a library and it is okay to share it.

Television, we have a big Tivo, captured a Petabyte so far of 20 channels over a couple of years. We made one week available, the week of 911, we put online a month after. We are now understanding in the US that the news comes with a point of view. Chomsky used to say you should read 7 newspapers a day, recently this might make sense. Getting multiple points of view.

Television is technologically possible, there are some rights issues, but we could do it all -- all text, music, movies and TV is within our grasp. We got a change in the DMCA, yea! But we need a lot of help.

Web. We are best known from our web collection, about a Petabyte in size. In the history of libraries, they tend to get burned, usually by governments, and then they are sorry for 100 years, but it is too late. The lesson from the Library of Alexandria is don't just have one copy. Give copies away. Our first shot at this was with the Library of Alexandria version 2. If we had six or seven of these around the world I could sleep at night. We are trying to do this through large scale swap agreements.

Here is Wikipedia in the Archive. But most people are using it to look at their own stuff, their old websites. One of the reasons this is working is because we are non-profits.

Books, Music, Video, Software and Web -- it is all possible. Some open questions if it is public or private, for-profit or non-profit. Is Google the only shot we are going to have at scanning Harvard's library? Looks like it.

I'm going to use this opportunity to advertise some projects we need help on.

Non-profit Open Networks like SeattleWireless.net or MIT roofnet. Telecom company interests are not aligned with an open internet.

Distributed ownership network -- SFlan mesh network.

Open and transparent Web Search System -- Nutch. Let's build some alternatives and be more creative. Recall which does time-based search on the whole Archive, a project done by one woman that indexed more pages than Google, then she went to work for Google and hopefully she will come back.

Privacy and Anonymity. It is now known that the US Government is monitoring us. Tor.

Defensive Patent License. What if you did a GPL for Patents? The DPL is a license that reflects a public commitment to defense, so our patents are forever defensive. Any organization may freely use these licensed patents while so publicly committed to defense.

An Open Textbook system, started by Wikipedia. The number one request we get for books is textbooks.

Add Attribution to Wikipedia. Gutenberg guys didn't were nervous about the copyright thing. We should know where the facts from Wikipedia came from. Go read about Transclusion with Ted Nelson, backpointers. Richard Feignman, a physicist in 1982, was talking about how many layers it would take from Propedia to Micropedia to books as sources.

Open Library: annotate the book collection. Why is this book interesting to someone in the modern world. What can we do to re-inject old books into today?

We can pull off Universal Access to All Knowledge. This is where Wiki is going towards, one of the great things that humanity will be remembered for, up there with a Man on the Moon in the mythology of humanity.

Long Tail of Apathy

Let's admit that we are pathetically apathetic when it comes to politics.  Most of us don't vote, very few of us are civic participants, even some of us don't pay taxes.  Let's embrace the fact that we don't have time for politics, even when its electing representatives.  And by embracing our less than ideal civic state, we may change it.

But time with the right tools is on our side.  I just skimmed (because I've been participating in the blog conversations) a fresh copy of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.  By now you may know this new economic for how the network changes business models for discovery and fulfillment.  Chris has also written about social production, distributed across The Long Tail.

Building upon the Power Law of Participation, I'd like to suggest a model for civic engagement that embraces apathy.

The horizontal axis is time committed, the vertical axis ranges from apathy to civic engagement.  Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics surveyed 9 categories of civic participation: voting, campaign work, campaign contributions, contacting an official, protests, informal community work, membership on a local board, affiliation with a political organization, and contribution to a political cause. This lead Thomas Ehrlich to opine: But unless voting is accompanied by the other political activities, it reduces citizenship to a superficial and relatively passive activity.

Not that Ehrlich is wrong, but my point is this -- few of us have time or interest in politics, but there is a way for us all to have civic engagement within our means.  That way is though social software. As seen in the Power Law of Participation, effective communities can engage participants at their own level while functioning as an organization. 

This of course, is a theory based upon what we see in open source and Wikipedia as an organization, or the Wealth of Networks.  I was tempted to add in Asylum or Resignation as a high engagement activity, as it is the closest to the right to fork you find in these emergent models where checks and balances are more liquid.

If I have one request from readers, it is to suggest what order the categories should be, or to suggest new ones, as my views of time as money may be biased.  I added Taxes, Civil Service and Elected Office, another approach would be to leverage Robert Putnam's 12 categories.  For your remix (and while you are at it, help me draw a proper power law):

? Elected office -- representing the time and interest of a constituency.
? Civil service -- while a form of giving at the office, it's not an excuse, but a calling
? Campaign work -- this actually has multiple levels of engagement, but while paid staffers
? Membership on a local board -- the greatest opportunity for civic engagement most citizens don't realize
? Voting -- not enough, in my humble opinion, but our basic obligation for civic participation
? Contacting an official -- either directly or through petition
? Informal community work -- high social capital activities most significantly augmented by social software
? Protests -- political activism
? Affiliation with a political organization -- mass-membership organizations
? Contribution to a political cause -- issue or group specific spending as speech
? Campaign contributions -- directed towards vote, low engagement rank because of the campaign donation made accessible through the tax form
? Taxes -- you pay them, right?
? Death -- inevitable, yes, but also a proxy for doing nothing.  Didn't put it in the image.

When I napkined this model for Kevin Fong of the Mayfield Fund (no relation except trademark dispute ;-) over lunch at Brainstorm, he suggested that without apathy you have revolution.  I suggested that the 95% turnout for the first Ukrainian election, which was rather revolutionary, might support his theory.  I would like to think that political participation overlaid upon Maslow's hierarchy of needs may be a well-curve with one end sparking rebellion, and the other being, well, an ideal.

Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone surveyed the decline of social capital in twelve categories  One counter argument he acknowledges is the rise of mass-membership organizations like the Sierra Club or AARP. It should be noted that Affiliation with a Political Organization does not necessarily mean fostering social capital, as members can be only connected through proxy.  However, you could view a successful political organization as mass, with it's own Long Tail of Apathy.

Time columnist Joe Klein, author of Politics Lost, suggested at Brainstorm that his vote for the next President would be decided by how much she asked of the citizenry.  That's right -- don't ask for my vote, tell me how I should contribute.  The WW II generation shared a common sacrifice and understanding for what it meant to be American -- which made them good citizens and leaders.  Doing what you can for your country used to be a shared value.

But as the political season approaches, let's consider what has changed (as little in the political landscape has).  The cost for personal publishing has fallen to zero.  Its common for citizens to express a facet of their identity online.  The cost for group forming has fallen to zero.  Networked appeal has proven itself as a fundraising mechanism.  A broad conversational network and common sense repository supports collective sense making.  Today social software has gained use broad enough to support civic engagement.

During the last Presidential campaign we held hope that politics was changing.  First we thought we could get someone elected from the grassroots, but restoring topsoil takes greater effort.  Then we even hoped that political institutions could change how they engaged the public, but the elected culture isolated itself without precedent.  Quite frankly, this barely happened.  But this time around, groups are forming to take action.

One fascinating statistic thrown around at Brainstorm 2006 was that 10% of college students volunteered to join Americorps.  Unfortunately I can't find a source, although Americorps has 75,000 members, with a significant track record:

• 92 percent of AmeriCorps sponsoring organizations say members helped them increase the number of persons the groups served to a large or moderate extent.
• 72 percent of AmeriCorps members continue to volunteer in their communities after their term of service ends.
• 87 percent of former AmeriCorps members accepted public service employment (including governmental and nonprofit work) with three years after completing their AmeriCorps service.

It is encouraging to think that NetGens have a latent demand for civic engagement,  The children of the baby boom may not buy off on political messages, but they want to play a role, to give forth.  Let's admit there is hope together, each in our own way.

Learning Through Trial and Error

The $100 Laptop has been unveiled in Tunisa, going into production next quarter.  I blogged about the need and means to connect these nodes earlier this week.  But there is a revolutionary aspect of the project that is barely recognized.  David Kirkpatrick:

Negroponte's team is seeking not only a technological breakthrough but also a teaching breakthrough. They believe that illiterate kids can, with a little instruction, learn to use computers on their own and then use the laptops to teach themselves to read. After that comes math, history―you name it. Alan Kay, a Xerox Parc veteran, is working with MIT mathematician and educational theorist Seymour Papert to build software that "watches" each student and makes suggestions. Papert's "constructionist learning" approach encourages children to reach conclusions through trial and error.

This breaks known conventions for education and technology, which could have a far greater impact than the commoditization at play.

Mesh the World

This week I participated in an off the record dinner with some of the smartest people I've met.  20 people and a single conversation without a whisper of Web 2.0 or GYM.  In the midst of our optimism that something was actually new, Gary Hamel called us on it, and pointed out the simple facts of abject poverty and unconnectedness for most of the world.  Besides the cell phone, hand-crank radio and $100 laptop there is little hope.  The former ambassador of Rwanda told us his story and imparted how poverty mattered more than security.  His plea was not to connect Africa to the Internet, but to help with local connectivity.

The greatest minds in tech do deeply care and try to work on solutions.  The first instinct is to connect everything to the Net, believing the rest will take care of itself.  But the cost of far-flung and rural connectivity, especially to impoverished regions, is simply too high.

There may be a different approach to this problem.  Instead of focusing on connecting the distant, help them connect with themselves.  In the absence of connections, nodes are state attractors.  That is, if you help a village connect with itself, the village will attract connectivity with others and eventually the Net itself.  In effect, when you create value in a local node, an arbitrage condition can drive enterprising individuals to make connection happen.

The cost for local connectivity is plummeting.  Wifi is in hypergrowth, leading to commodity production of radios, low power chips and innovation in software.  The $100 laptop comes with Wifi.  With advancements in Mesh Networking, you could gain an approach for networks that expand locally. Wikipedia may be available in their local language on a CD.  But also bundle in an open source wiki to let them build their own web.  As local nodes grow in strength, people will proxy for groups until they can be connected.

UPDATE: Windmill powered Wifi.  $20 per unit, designed for geological monitoring, but it makes you wonder.