What is open philanthropy?

Driving to Stellenbosch yesterday, Darius asked me: "In a nutshell, what do you mean when you say open philanthropy?" It was a good question. The words ‘open’ and ‘philanthropy’ have been tumbling out of my mouth side-by-side for over a year now. Yet, they’ve always expressed an intuition, and not a clearly honed concept. Nothing like an explain-this-quickly-in-the-car gauntlet to help with clarity.

My initial shot at a one liner for Darius was: "like the Cluetrain Manifesto, but for philanthropy and social change." While this wasn’t quite right, it had a kernel of right-ness. Cluetrain is about the need for corporations to be transparent, network-centric and engaged with customers in a very honest and human way. It’s also about the emergent opportunities, quick feedback loops and ability to gauge needs and demands in real time that come with this kind of social connectivity. Philanthropy and development need more of these things, to be sure.

The other link is around the nature of corporations (and philanthropic orgs) with industrial era management cultures. These organizations thrive on thick planning documents (or funding proposals) that try to predict the future, locking everyone involved in a forced march towards a rigid goal. They have impermeable boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, eschewing the kinds of fuzzy edges make it possible to hook into broader economic and social ecosystems. And, of course, they rely heavily on control-based management (supervision, deliverables, audits) rather than enablement (coaching, outcomes, learning).

In Cluetrain, industrial-brained companies are at best ineffective, and more likely doomed. The problem is, philanthropic organizations and development funders, without the watching eyes of the market, can be ineffective for a very long time without ever being doomed. And, ineffective they are. One need not be an expert in philanthropy to know that large numbers of grants contribute little or nothing to the social outcomes they are meant to catalyze. In most parts of the world, the response has been to lock down grantmaking even more, adding more planning, more supervision, more rigid evaluation. At the same time, the most creative and interesting social change organizations of our time are becoming more amorphous, more network-like and more informal (read Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest for useful insights on this). The result is that a great deal of grantmaking is not only ineffective in itself, but also that it rarely connects with the people and organizations that have the most potential to make our world a better place.

The point of open philanthropy is to reconnect social investment and social change. It’s something that many people are intuitively poking at, but that we are not yet having a conversation about. In small ways, you see it in: IDRCs attempt to replace ‘evaluation’ with ‘outcome mapping‘; Skoll and Omidyar’s efforts to create online communities around their philanthropy (or whatever they call it); and, the Metcalf Foundation’s efforts to use networks as a way to surface ideas and define collective strategy. All of this comes from an intuition, an itch. There is some sense that words like open and philanthropy might mean something together, even if we haven’t said it yet.

With the Shuttleworth Foundation generously offering me the title of Open Philanthropy Fellow, I guess one of my jobs is to take a crack at some of this saying. The best place to start for me is with a doodle. I just did this one on the plane:

Building on the notes above, the idea is pretty simple. Most philanthropy is disconnected from creative social change. We need to respond with an open philanthropy approach that backs inventive social change agents. And, extrapolating from experience and intuition, the three strategies to try out are: openness and transparency; network-centric-ness; and emergence and leverage. Let me quickly dig into these strategies.

The idea of ‘open and transparent’ is the most obvious. Make sure everything you do and fund is open licensed (the Shuttleworth Foundation does this). Use blogs for the majority of grantee and program officer reporting, cutting back on internal reports that no one outside the organization ever sees (tried this with telecentre.org, to mixed effect). Use wikis for planning and documentation (lots of people doing this). The point here is not only to put outputs of your efforts into the commons, but also to create a real time narrative that people can engage with and learn from. This is harder than it sounds.

Being network-centric is the next step. This isn’t just about funding networks, which many funders have done, often to poor effect. In fact, it’s most importantly about being ‘in the game’ as a part the natural networks that you work with, and getting out of the habit of acting like an outside voice giving directions or making judgments. Anyone in the social change game will be familiar with the vibe of funders standing at the back of the room or outside the circle of conversation. A network-centric approach starts with not doing this (very Cluetrain-ish) kind of thing. It then extends to listening to the ideas and energy flows in the networks and movements where you want to a difference. And, once you’re good at this, it should also include monitoring the quality of connectedness, and doing things (paying for plan tickets, supporting meetings, making introductions) where necessary to strengthen the mesh within the network. In the end, much of this boils down to being a good friend and peer with the change agents you are working with. This is the main idea we’ve being testing with telecentre.org. It has worked in some ways, and not in others.

The third strategy is around emergence and leverage. Part of this is about listening for good ideas and watching for strong leaders, backing them with very small amounts of support, and then seeing what happens. As they succeed in small ways, you back them more. And so on. The other part is looking across the ecosystem for gaps, and filling them (as opposed to trying to make your own big, siloed splash in a particular area). While these are in some ways separate ideas, they really do make up one strategy. They are about the way you actually make your social investments (or grants) by listening rather than planning. This is probably the toughest thing to do well, both because we’re addicted to big ideas with detailed plans, and because the grant administration systems that we have built up in foundations and governments make it almost impossible to be nimble, responsive and iterative. My guess is that it’s worth pushing these envelopes, as they are likely to yield the kinds of innovation and social change that we have so long said we are looking for.

Okay, that’s brain dump #1 on open philanthropy. It feels good to get it out. Tons of unanswered questions still hang, but that’s okay. It’s time to loop some of this back into the Shuttleworth Foundation theory of change. And, assuming I am not crazy, it’s time for you all to hack away and evolve this idea with me. I’m up for this. Are you?

Cape Town Declaration, coming soon to an inbox near you

With my plane now somewhere over Eastern Ontario, I’ve little time to write about last week’s amazing meetings in Cape Town. Let me just report this: 30 amazing brains from universities, government ministries and foundations gathered to come up with a statement to rally and accelerate the open education movement. Drawing on a tremendous amount of laughter, kindness and wisdom, we came up with the raw material for a declaration that we hope many hundreds (thousands?) of other people and organizations will sign. I will be crafting this with the help of people from the New South Wales Dept of Education, Creative Commons, Macquarie University and Utah’s Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning over the coming weeks.

The idea of a ‘declaration’ stems from the experience of the Budapest Initiative, which used a similar document to build huge momentum for the open access movement. The Budapest document was a mix of vision, values, definitions and strategies supported by the people who drafted and signed it. We’re looking at a similar mix of ideas in the Cape Town Declaration, which I have summarized in this doodle:

Beyond just getting such a diverse and amazing group on the same page, one of the big achievements was expanding the conversation to include not only open educational resources, but also teacher engagement and empowerment and the development of policies make open sourcing education easier. These three ideas will be at the core of the strategy section of the declaration. I think I can see Lake Simcoe out the window. More on this as the story evolves.

The evolution of learning

This is an article that Lisa Petrides’ and I wrote for the iCommons Annual, which was released back in June. It’s up on line as a part of the PDF for the whole book. But, I thought it would be nice to also have it up in text form, so I am posting it here:

The evolution of learning: Taking open educational resources to the next level

Lisa Petrides, President, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
Mark Surman, Open Philanthropy Fellow, Shuttleworth Foundation

Mark Horner is a newly minted Ph.D. physicist educated in Cape Town. He is also an innovator and activist who just may help to transform the way we write, evolve and produce textbooks.

A few years back, Mark and some fellow graduate students set out to tackle a major challenge for education in South Africa: the lack of textbooks. Poor and rural schools in this country typically have only a few copies of the texts needed for each of their courses. Students are unable to take books home, and they even need to scramble for a look at the texts while in the classroom. Needless to say, this is a major barrier to learning.

In an attempt to address this need, they started up the Free High School Science Textbook initiative. They use volunteer teachers and open source-style collaborative writing to produce a collection of royalty free math and science textbooks. These text books will be available online and in print, and will continue to be evolve over time. The group is also in the process of submitting these texts for approval by the Ministry of Education. Once they accomplish this, it will be possible for schools in South Africa to get key textbooks for about  dollar a piece. This is cheap enough that many more schools should be able to buy the texts they need. And, if things go well, this price point could even attract a corporate or philanthropic sponsor willing to print texts for every school in the country.

The good news is that all of South Africa’s high school students may soon have their own math and science textbooks. The even better news is that people like Mark Horner are part of a growing worldwide movement to open and improve education for all. Inspired by the success of open source software, a handful of educators, content creators, evangelists, policy-makers and funders have taken up the challenge of making the world’s knowledge freely accessible and modifiable. These people have gathered under the banner of the open educational resources (OER) movement.

State of the movement

The promise of open educational resources movement is that it will serve as an equitable alternative to the rising costs and increased commercialization of education at all levels.

A recent study commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation shows that the movement has made major strides towards this goal.  Major institutions like MIT are demonstrating that policy and packaging hurdles can be jumped to ‘open up’ large curriculum collections. Thousands of resources are now online through sites like Connexions, Curriki and OER Commons. Some of these sites are also evolving to serve as community platforms where teachers and content producers form communities to create content and collaborate with others. The size of the movement is also growing with dozens of smaller initiatives starting to pop up around the world.

There is also early evidence that teachers are actually using many of these resources. A recent survey of community college instructors conducted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) found that 92 percent searched for course-related materials online. Reasons cited in the survey included a desire to integrate materials into courses, improve teaching methods and connect with colleagues who have similar teaching interests. Similarly, MIT’s recent evaluation report of its open collections revealed that educators are accessing open educational resources to support their course planning and preparation and to enhance their personal knowledge. Ninety-six percent of these educators indicated that MIT’s collection has or will help to improve their courses. Students and self-learners indicated that they access MIT’s open content to plan future studies, complement existing courses and improve their personal knowledge.

Is it working?

All of these efforts share a common commitment to creating a cultural of innovation and providing sustainable access to educational resources for all. The question is: is the open educational resources movement actually meeting these goals?

Certainly, we are still a long way from bringing the idea of open educational resources to scale. Usability of resources and repositories present one barrier. A recent ISKME report states: “…. we are consistently told that the tools for teaching and learning need to evolve in both simplicity and depth to keep pace with and transcend what one can currently find on Amazon or Google, or what has been tried in proprietary learning management systems.” Also, the Hewlett study points out that there are significant structural hurdles to overcome before the movement can scale. These include sustainability, intellectual property and quality assessment.

In addition, there is a question about the reach of the movement. Many of the early successes in open educational resources are in the realm of university and college education, often driven and championed by centralized initiatives. However, there has been less traction in K-12 education, partly due to the decentralized nature of teaching in schools. While there are hundreds of examples of taking existing materials and digitizing them, there are far fewer examples of collaborative production and re-use of materials. Additionally, the voices of educators from developing and transitioning economies are almost completely missing from the current movement. We need to reach out and make open education relevant to the work of these economies if we truly want to be successful.

Of course, the real issue underlying all of this is that the open education movement has not yet “caught fire” beyond a core circle of activists and evangelists. A recent Creative Commons report says: “… we are still a long way from the dream of a national and international community of engaged teachers and students, at every level of education, contributing to a global commons of educational material that can be customized to local languages, needs and educational requirements, an educational commons that rivals Wikipedia in its scope and ambition.” In the end, this is the dream that most people in the open educational resources movement are pursuing. How do we make this dream into reality?

Community as rocket fuel

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recently said: “Wikipedia is 10 percent technology and 90 percent community.” The open education movement can probably learn from this equation. The past five years have seen a huge emphasis on products like portals and courseware. The next generation of open educational resource activities need to focus instead on processes, communities and culture. These are the things can provide the rocket fuel the movement needs to scale.

Part of this is about rolling up our sleeves to take on real projects that explore the process of collaborative production and the potential to leverage teacher volunteerism. Good teachers are by their very nature innovators, adapting curriculum every day as they do their jobs. Small communities like one that has produced that Free High School Science Textbook show that the combination of teacher university student energy plus tactics learned from the open source world can be tapped to create high quality open educational resources. Of course, there are huge barriers to doing this, especially in K-12. Teachers lack spare time. Curriculum comes from above. There is no support for a culture of innovation or collaboration beyond day-to-day work in the classroom even though there is a huge amount of innovation that happens daily. However, it may only take a few successful initiatives in a handful of countries to change this landscape. As Mark Horner’s story demonstrates, these examples can emerge if we just look for the right opportunities and get to work.

Of course, communities can serve not only as an engine for collaborative production but also a place where teachers can turn to their peers for support, learning and sharing. This is an obvious goal to aim for in open education: communities of teachers who are using similar open curriculum that can swap notes and tips. These communities can help teachers take control of their own teaching, helping them understand and add context to items. They may also help to drive increased re-use and remixing of materials, as teachers may be inspired by how their peers are using materials they find online.

As Howard Rheingold pointed out almost 15 years ago, communities like these are most successful if they have both face to face and offline components. We see this principle in operation with everything from open source software (sprints and summits) to Facebook (real world friends online). BioQUEST and the Center for Investigative Case-Based Learning offer an early open education example of this principle. They have integrated the use of OER Commons into their curriculum development workshops for K-12 biology teachers. The teachers use the site both to access raw material for their face-to-face curriculum development and to keep in touch online after the workshop. With the right backing from policy makers, this sort curriculum mashup effort could easily be built into existing professional development days. Informal curriculum sprints and meet ups also offer potential here.

Creating intersections

Of course, community building is only one piece of the puzzle. We also need to find structural ways to simplify the collaborative production process, making licenses and technologies interoperable (and seamless to the end user).  And, of course, we need to get education policy makers and funders actively engaged as champions for open educational resources.

Luckily, there is growing consensus – and action – around a loose “OER 2.0” agenda. Creative Commons’ new CC Learn initiative is tackling license interoperability and loaning out experienced community builders to open educational resource initiatives. The Shuttleworth Foundation is tapping into learning from Ubuntu community to scale open education in South Africa,  combining community processes with rigour, leverage and strategic partnership building. Initiatives like OER Commons, Curriki and Connexions are working hard to create scalable community platforms. Hewlett Foundation is developing a next generation open educational resource strategy based on its recent review of the movement. And, the iCommons iCurriculum initiative is emerging to more effectively connect the movement together.

Of course, the real hope in all of this lies with people like Mark Horner. These are the people who will roll up their sleeves and take on the hard work of actually building curriculum and creating communities. Mark himself is starting down this path, organizing workshops and writing sprints for people who may want to take on new textbook subjects. One of the most important things we can do is help with this kind of practical evangelism. This is where the sparks fly.

A journal, evolved

As I write this, I am looking at one of the most inspiring scenes in the world: the granite shores of Georgian Bay covered by wind-bent pine and rolling in and out of perfectly still waters. I’ve been calmly watching this scene for a week, playing with my kids, sipping wine, listening. I’ve also been sitting here reading Paul Hawken’s new book Blessed Unrest (book reflections in another post).

Blessed Unrest reminded me of the important role that journals – and other sorts of reflective writing – can play in navigating new terrain. In particular, Hawken talks about the way Thoreau used his journal to log ideas during and beyond his time on Walden Pond. These simple logs became the seeds not only of Thoreau’s books and essays, but also of movements for peace, justice and sustainability that he barely could have imagined. Thoreau’s simple documentary record of the present became inspirational fuel for the future.

I count myself lucky that I stumbled across blogging just as I started my work on telecentre.org. Writing a journal online has helped me watch the arc of my own thinking and actions over the past two and a half years. I started out as a passionate, hurried movement builder. The many faces and hearts that inspired my blog postings helped fuel this passion. They also led me to the understanding that weaving together the atoms of modern movements is a simple matter, and also a very difficult one. It is a complex blend of leadership, patience and surrender. Seeing this is a gift that has come from keeping a journal.

At the moment, I am entering a new phase of my work, which makes me think I need a new way of writing this journal. The first steps of telecentre.org were all about a journey across the telecentre movement, seeking out the best grassroots leaders, both for myself and for each other. A series of episodic snapshots recorded on this page seemed to work well as a way to document the journey. At each stop – a country, a telecentre, a community gathering — I would write a story about “the things I was learning along the way”. For myself and the few that were reading, this provided at least one lens into the people, organizations and networks that were growing into telecentre.org.

I am now starting a different journey. It still includes work on telecentre.org, although with less focus on ground level activism (others are thriving at this piece). The job now is to help telecentre.org transform from a public sector funding program into a global community that is driven and governed by grassroots telecentre networks. Working with a talented collection of new friends at the Shuttleworth Foundation, I have also turned part of my attention to the movement for open (source) educational content, in South Africa and around the world. Both efforts are experiments in what might be called open philanthropy, thinking of the networks and connectivity make up modern movements not only as something to fund, but also as a way to work. This is a blend of very activist and very conceptual work, which I love.

As I spend my days thinking through governance models, learning about open (source) education and sketching out what open philanthropy might possibly look like, I know that I will need a journal that reflects on more than just my travels. I will need to keep notes on things I read.  Map out emerging ideas. And just doodle. I will need a broad sketchpad covering what may seem like very disparate ideas.  This will be messy, to be sure. But I think that’s what good journals are about.

As of this post, the focus of this blog page is officially evolving, with doodles, notes and messiness as the theme. Enjoy.