Open, philanthropy and a theory of change

A number of people have been asking me lately: what happened with the open philanthropy work that you posted about last September?

In addition to lots of fruitful little experiments (more on these later), my main work on the open philanthropy front has been on the Shuttleworth Foundation theory of change. In our own words, the purpose of this exercise is to ‘explain what we do, simply’. While we may not have hit that mark yet, we have definitely forced ourselves to start digging into what we mean by open philanthropy. The current draft looks like this:

One of the first questions we stumbled across as we worked on this picture was ‘what does an open philanthropy way of working look like?’ We brainstormed a ton on this. Some of the ideas we came up with simply described our values as a team (e.g. integrity and irreverence). However, we also unearthed a few things that feel like the essence of the open philanthropy practice we’re currently inventing. While the list is still likely to evolve, these include:

1. Open source everything. Everything that the Foundation creates, funds or helps with should be open sourced. This means: under an open license; available in an open format; and accessible from a public web site, always.
2. Share. Leverage. Share again. Open source is not just about giving (share), it’s also about receiving (leverage). You don’t need to look far in the software world to see this. Something like Ubuntu rests on the shoulders (and code) of giants who have shared tremendously. However, it only succeeds by leveraging these existing assets to create even more value, and then giving it back again. It’s this leverage and share again process to moves things ahead. The Foundation can use this same share|leverage|share cycle to drive collaborative social innovation and radical improvement in areas like education.
3. Community as part of everything. Despite the rhetoric, most philanthropy and social investment happens in silos. The result is zero leverage, poor use of resources and slow progress. The Foundation needs to get down and dirty with communities working on education, innovation and access each step of the way. This means constantly looking at who’s doing similar work, inviting them to our parties, and going to theirs. It also means befriending the enemies of those working against us. The open source world has lots to teach us about this. So does Gramsci.
4. Radical transparency. A core piece of ‘open‘ — open source, open events, open societies, open systems
   – is being able to see what’s under the hood. When you can see inside
   something, you can understand it, interface with it, hack it or rip it
   off altogether. If something is closed, you can’t. Radical transparency
   means opening up not only your yearly books (we need to do this
   anyways), but also openly sharing your planning, learning and
   relationships as you go along. This doesn’t have to be hard: just take
   the password off the wiki and podcast your events. By the doing things
   like this, the Foundation is likely to have partners who come with
   better ideas (interface), offer improvements (hack) and even run with
   things on their own (rip it off). That’s what we want.
5. Listen, learn, evolve: constantly. The Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that markets are conversations. It’s strange to me that so few activists have learned that the same is true of social change. Open philanthropy must include constant engagement and conversation with partners, activists, policymakers and (god forbid) customers. Knowing what these people think in real time with 80% accuracy (using cluetrain-style market research) is way better than finding out with 99% accuracy five years too late (using the rigorous and expensive evaluation processes that foundations love). This is especially true if people think what you are doing sucks, as you’ve still got time to fix it. The Foundation needs to get involved in this kind of listening in a very systematic way, and then to use what it is hearing and learning to steer the ship.

In the Shuttleworth team, we already embrace some of these things in our daily practice, even if we do so far from perfectly. Everything we do and fund is under an open license. Initiatives like Siyavula and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration have community at their heart. And, we do listen, learn and evolve faster than any other foundation I have worked with. Open is deep in the DNA of the Shuttleworth Foundation, the team and most of our partners.

The thing is, embracing with these ideas isn’t the same as succeeding with them. We’re still a long way from having a break away hit with open sourced education. In fact, we’re just starting (after four years of trying) to become more systematic about open licensing and archiving the things produced by the Foundation and its partners. And, we’re still a ways off from a systematic approach to learning and transparency. The Foundation — and this infant idea of open philanthropy — are works in progress. We know that. It’s part of the fun.

The theory of change discussion also forced us to look at our assumptions about how ideas move and how innovation happens. These ideas are even more in flux that the ones above, and will be subject to further discussion. In any case, some things that seem true so far include:

• Only some ideas will get traction. Our core, day to day work is investing in people and ideas that drive innovation in education, telecom and intellectual property. Our hope is that this work bubbles up some good ideas, and that the people behind these ideas will run with them. However, we know that only some of these ideas will get traction. That’s okay. These are the ones we want to back, and that the open philanthropy approach can accelerate and improve.
• Good ideas need to become real products, services and policies. Transitioning from a good idea to something people use everyday is hard work. The Foundation and the open philanthropy process need to be focused on putting this hard work into ideas that are viable. This includes making sure ideas are well packaged and productized (even policy ideas need to be ‘easy to use’), building communities and (social) markets around them and thinking deeply about their long term viability and sustainability out in the wild. It’s only with hard work in these areas — and then some degree of good fortune — that the ideas we back ideas will start to have the kind education, innovation and access to knowledge impact that we are seeking. 
• If we’re lucky, some ideas will go viral. The ideas that really scale — at least in the short term — will do so because they go viral. This is the real potential of open philanthropy. With open sourced ideas and strong communities, the conditions are right for going viral. But, scaling an idea this way also involves a tremendous amount of luck and serendipity. It also involves listening and being willing to jump when the opportunity arises. This is something we’ll need to train ourselves to do.

This is still early theorizing. However, it feels like the core principles here have some merit: filter for ideas with traction; be rigorous about packaging and promoting ideas with promise; and jump on opportunities to spread and go viral. By doing these things, we’re hoping that we can catalyze enduring changes to policy, practice and culture eventually nurture an open knowledge society (I guess we’d better define that one soon, but not in this post). It’ll be interesting to see what works, and even more interesting to evolve our thinking along the way.

Anyways, that’s a quick answer to those who asked what’s up on the open philanthropy front. Fun stuff. More soon.

PS. The PDF version of the digram above is here.

Wordless in Phnom Penh

It’s hard to find words for the week I just spent in Cambodia. Definitely a place in motion (which I love), but with a trajectory that’s far from clear. Exhilarating. Confusing. Hard to stop thinking about.

Sparked but wordless, I took a ton of pictures, which are now on Flicker. I also did a bit of visual journaling, including this:

I met with and talked to people filled with so much hope: that the work they were doing would make a difference; that they education they’re struggling to get will open doors; that the country will flower again. Yet, often from the same lips, came the sense that corruption, poverty and silly kinds of greed meant that none of this was possible.

Two practical experiences to illustrate. 1. Hope. I met the dean of Maharishi Vedic University in very rural Cambodia. Out loud, I admired the fact that he had risen from farmer’s son to dean and remained committed to spiritually grounded participatory rural development. He looked in my eyes and said: poor help poor. He said it very forcefully. It came from the core of who he was. 2. Hopelessness. I read a newspaper ad for one of the many shopping mall filled condo developments popping up in poor areas of Phnom Penh, which proclaimed: Gold Tower 42 will improve living standard of the world. Part of a hug whirlwind condoized commercial disconnectedness that is popping up around Phnom Penh. Hopelessness. Hope.

The nice thing was that the hope and hopelessness didn’t seem to cancel each other out. They felt somehow in creative tension, seeking balance. And, there was clearly high velocity flow and energy everywhere. A place in motion. I wait eagerly to listen and feel as it goes somewhere.

PS. I didn’t share the journal sketch or pictures from my visit to the Choeung Ek killing fields. Another strange tension, and one of the most emotional experiences of my life. Too much to just post online for all. I can share directly if you are interested.

Village backbone

While in Cambodia last week, I spent two wonderful days visiting telecentres and network hubs run by the iReach project. The idea behind iReach is to create 10 telecentres in two rural areas all connected to each other by wireless broadband (10mb/sec). One of the sites has a mediumband satellite Internet connection which is then shared across all the sites. However, the Internet is not the main point. Rather, the idea is to do broadband sharing within the 10 villages, which can be up to 20 kilometres apart.

The idea is a brilliant: connect people locally using the best and fastest technology, and leave the Internet as an afterthought. The people running the two iReach pilots are already thinking of interesting ways to make this useful. Podcasts of local people talking about local issues beamed via the network to loudspeakers outside of local pagodas. Video conferences to teach English. Cooperation amongst local committee members democratically managing the project. There are difficulties, but things like this are happening (or about to happen).

However, it also feels like there is still a ton of untapped potential. These networks could provide an excellent channel for NGOs (or even the government?) who say they want to reach out and work with communities like these. The people and technology are in place to offer education, health care, government services and anything else imaginable to these communities, at least in part. There is also potential for interesting new business models, like the VillageTelco idea Steve Song is playing with. The next challenge for the iReach project will be to show people who say they want to reach out to these communities how the network can help make things like these happen. My sense is they are ready for this.

A side note, which really should be its own story: I was super impressed by the role that the Maharishi Vedic University. This institution is acting as the lead for the iReach project in Kamshai Mear. They oversee the project, have helped build to local management committee and have sourced many of the staff. What’s impressive is how their combination of community development plus Bhuddist spirituality have given the project such a firm footing. All of the people we met and content we saw was very much *of* the communities being served. Example: an video promoting schoold enrollment with actors from the local management committee and villages. It’s hard to describe, but it felt alot like Sarvodaya meets Challenge for Change. Quite impressive, and likely to be a good mix with the local hitech / broadband model.

Open vs. open vs. etc

As I posted way back when, I have been reflecting a great deal on the question: why are so many people attracted to the word ‘open’?

If you scan the net or just listen to the conversations around you, the word ‘open’ is popping up as a modifier for almost every imaginable area of endeavor. Standards. Content. Design. Innovation. Education. Politics. Media. Government. Philanthropy. Religion. Fitness. Systems (social, technical and phsyical). Orgware. Meetings. And, of course, software.

Even I have to admit, much of this is just trendy bollocks. Open source software and the general groovy openness of the Internet have made people glom on to open everything (or open anything?). As a result, a good number of ‘open x’ ideas are simply Internet-ized angles on old, broken, closed processes (e.g. see wikipedia definition of ‘open source politics‘).

Still, my intuition tells me there is something bigger afoot than just trendy babble. I believe this ’something’ is related in part to the profound crisis of political / social / spiritual imagination that we currently face, especially in the west. Our old imaginative models of left vs. right don’t work anymore. They don’t describe reality, and they aren’t helping us make a better world.

In ‘open’ people somehow see hope. They see an narrative container for democracy, inclusion, invention, progress and diversity. At least, that’s what it feels like on the surface … and that’s what has spurred me to dig into the question ‘what do people really mean by open?’

Before the holidays, I did a little 30 minute thought experiment: I created a chart comparing four very different yet well developed domains of ‘open’.

The domains included open source software, open space meetings, open societies (Karl Popper’s idea) and open systems (in complexity theory and nature). You can see the chart on googledocs.

The idea was very simple: compare the base ideas behind each of these areas of ‘open’ to see if there is anything substantively in common. Or, as a question, is there an ‘essence of open’ across these ideas?

While I need to dig deeper (what do you expect for 30 minutes of futzing with a chart?), at least two essential elements pop to the surface from this comparison: motion and transparency.

Motion is the most striking commonality of the ‘four opens’ in the chart. Energy moves between open systems and the world around them, transforming both the system and its surroundings. Popper’s open society is driven by social mobility, with people moving between classes and identities. The magic of open space meetings flows from people moving between spaces (vote with your feet) and iteratively shuffling ideas that matter (the agenda wall). And, of course, open source is very much about the motion of evolving code and the flow of ideas inside / outside / between related software communities. With motion comes malleability, adaptability and resilience. 

Transparency also runs across these ‘four opens’, with each example including moving parts that are easy to see and act upon. People can see from the inside out, from the outside in and sideways in all directions. This multi-directional visibility is probably quite critical to what attracts people to the open concept. It implies a certain democracy without scarcity: all can see, understand and react to the system without taking away the ability of others to do the same. The power that flows from knowledge is not scarce. This may sound a bit flaky right now, but my gut says ‘non-zero-sum democracy’ is one of the main opportunities in open.

Of course, the places where there are not overlaps are just as interesting. The most notable is that ‘collaboration’ — central to things like open space and open source — doesn’t really show up in the other two domains. It may be that collaboration is a good application of ‘open’ (ie. we need to work in an open manner to collaborate well) but is not really a part of the essence that draws us to ‘open’. Similarly, the idea of accessibility — the free beer side of open source freedom — really only appears in the software domain.

Anyways, these are not profound breakthroughs. ‘Adaptable’ and ‘transparent’ are well known principles of things like open source. However, I do find the simple patterns (and non-patterns) across the different open domains somehow illuminating. I definitely want to dig deeper into ‘the meaning of open’ and see what more there is to learn.

Next step #1: read more on open innovation and complexity theory so I am grounded in other people’s thinking. Next step #2: double click on this ‘meaning of open’ comparison. Katherine Reilly, Michael Lewkowitz and Allison Powell have all expressed interest in doing this with me (yay! … and others welcome). Next step #3: pull this thinking into the open philanthropy manifesto I am writing this quarter and see if there is traction.