GivingMarket/OpenQuestions

Could this new sort of GivingMarket ultimately invite and support individual giving and action wholly dedicated to so many small changes that directly support all aspects of individual, community and business Life on Earth? Could it heal the social and environmental devastation of the last 70 years? Could it be as simple as putting up a dozen webpages and a handful of scripts and marrying it to existing online communities? Might we give it a try, just in case?

• What does GivingMarket user experience look like? - Currently being answered in GivingMarket/HomePage and the pages linked there.

• Who owns the transaction and in what currency? (points vs. dollars)
• Where are member accounts held? - if they are held at all!
• What is needed to support matching of financial gifts?
• What is needed to support endowment giving in perpetuity?

• So many ways blooming now for giving to organizations... is this sort of GivingMarket even needed? so much to do and so many folks dissatisfied with their experience of organization for-profit and not-... what else could invite the most powerful actions of people who really care? - There is just so much to do, growing dissatisfaction if not also distrust of charitable organizations, growing importance of young and retired populations that will need or prefer to take direct action, outside of organization... these and other factors combine to make it essential that the path to individual learning, connection, and action -- not just financial contribution -- be as accessible as possible.

RELATED: From PhilCubeta's [Gift Hub]... Interesting to see how the conversation about new models of giving is being conducted in so many venues. I hear talk about uplift, social ventures, networks, and even about activism, political engagement, and organizing. Even serious talk about what it means for a society to be democratic, stronger for all the differences of opinion and party. You get the impression that something will emerge as new a e-bay and as old as mutual trust and respect. Movement? Hub? Business? Network? Political force? A Gift Circle? What? Those who are read this stuff, what do you intuit about the next steps? It sure isn't elite philanthropy, old school. And it isn't left versus right, either. It isn't just bottom up (witness Omidyar on line chatting on his site), nor top down. It is peer to peer where wealth is less important than the ability to communicate, learn, and cooperate. Very promising.

• What if Social Venture Investment turns out to be more effective than Giving? - Does a projected return make a difference? Is a loan wiser than a gift? Perhaps what we need is not a "giving" market at all, as all projects that ask for money might also be required to generate some cash somewhere down the line. So it looks more like a social venture thing. Still person-to-person, but the funds "loaned" are expected to come back to the giver's account? This question need not be answered in advance, as generating a return is but one benefit of any potential project. If the market demands financial returns, then projects will have to find a way to make a self-sustainability case and offer that as part of their plan and story and track record. The GivingMarket can easily accommodate projects with or without a promise of financially measurable return. Giving seems the older practice and bigger frame, so it seems best to cast this new market that way and let the Social Venture process unfold as it can or might as one or more rather specialized forms of Giving.

• What if the GivingMarket looked more like the financial markets? - What if the endowment/accounts dimension was also distributed rather than being centralized? Could investment brokers offer a quasi-mutual fund that would have a ticker symbol so that giving was part of a person's investment decision-making? Or perhaps it makes more sense to think of banks and brokerages opening "giving accounts" that would be like IRAs, funded with tax-deductible income and then invested in the GivingMarket which might then be more aptly called the community market. This level of diffusion -- with the market-making function distributed to community organizers and organizations, the account management function distributed to banks and brokers, and the giving function distributed to individual givers -- seems ideal, and most analogous to the current financial markets. Still it's a bit of a boggle to contemplate the catalyzing of such a distributed system. The question then is how to start it all in one place and let market competition take care of the distributing.

Updated... The account function would be automatically distributed if the member "account" were linked to a credit card account. Credit card accounts are already distributed across banks everywhere, at the discretion of the individual borrower. Credit card accounts can already facilitate the giving of money. On the endowment end of things, many investment accounts (e.g. charles schwab) offer a visa card that pays for purchases out of investment funds. So if this sort of an account could be kept open after death, with trading and giving rules pre-determined, then such an account would be a simple and effective and perpetual giving machine. The trading, trust and investment side of things seems simple enough to set up, if it's not already in place. What's needed is a viable GivingMarket... without which, there is no reason for dead people's money to pile up investment returns that can't be shared for any good, common or otherwise.

• What if it wasn't a single market, but a market of markets? - Maybe it's not one centralized Amazon, Google, EBay sort of market after all, but a simple module that could go up on any church or scouting or school website that would allow any org to host a GivingMarket? Maybe there is someplace central for all those who set up a local market to register their market so the whole thing could be centrally searchable? ...or would google take care of that anyway? Denise Paua lives and works in a small Australian village of 800 aboriginal people who are desperately trying to rebuild their community and their culture in a place so remote that it can be reached only by barge or airplane for 6 months out of the year. After talking with her, it's clear that she would and could use a market like this, listing local projects, that she could then refer non-locals to as she is travelling around and speaking at conferences about the successes they've been having there in her village. Many people are already asking her in these speaking situations what they can do to help. This is site and giving traffic that is just waiting for a URL, but Denise is too busy to set it all up. A giving market service that supported the creation of so many local giving markets as simply as [Blogger's] weblog service supports blogging, publishing, commenting and linking could be the difference that makes a real difference for Denise and her community.

• Is a GivingMarket technically possible? - [Google] handles billions of internet searches every week and operates the [GoogleNews] aggregator digests 1000 newspapers and news sites that are referenced by billions of humans each day. [eBay] started just a few years ago and now has 41 million members on their roster and 430,000 people earning their primary income in EBay-supported retail trade. [Interra] seeks to connect every credit card on the planet and engage the people who carry them in conscious, care-full, community-based consumption. Advances being made in online identity and other areas certainly inform and insure the implementation of this concept, but clearly we are already capable of operating systems on the necessary scale. If these systems can work with current technology, then certainly a GivingMarket could be opened and operated with the tech we already have.