In the beginning…

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

It used to be, back in the early nineties, that a fax machine was the thing that made your business or project real. Then it was a website. Today it’s a blog. Not enough, or just not necessary, to have an office to house equipment like faxes; nor to simply make an offering on the web. Today it takes practice, and ongoing progress, public documentation and discourse, to make a project real.

Here are the first dozen or so entries in a development log started elsewhere and pasted in here as the big fat first posting in this new GivingMarketBlog. And so the GivingMarket seems more real today. Watch this space for ongoing progress.

August 23rd – Trust, Credibility, Accountability

Questions about trust and credibility come up with some regularity in conversations about the GivingMarket. This bit on TomMunnecke‘s [GivingSpace] email list puts these concerns in perspective. The conversations always assume that because there in an organization involved, that somehow there is trust and security. Sort of like, if it’s in the newspaper, it must be true. Robert Tolmach reminds us otherwise:
There is virtually no accountability or transparency in the social sector. As a result, money going into the sector is poorly allocated and much of it is spent ineffectively.
Organizations over a certain size (I think it’s $25k in revenues) have to file an annual Form 990 to the IRS (you can see them at www.Guidestar.org), but it reports on financial matters, not performance.
About the only criteria anyone looks at are what % of revenues go to administrative costs and what % to fundraising. While that will help screen out some truly egregious cases, it says nothing about how effectively the organization spends its money or what it accomplishes. Could you imagine people deciding whether to invest in IBM on the basis of those two numbers?
Jed Emerson promoted the concept of Social Return on Investment (SROI) but few funders or nonprofits think in those terms. It’s admittedly difficult (and in many cases impossible) to quanitfy social benefits or to compare them between sectors, but few funders or nonprfofits even think in terms of unit cost for goods or services delivered.
The BBB Wise Giving Alliance now has a site, http://www.give.org, which rates 500 or so national charities, but there is little on performance and thresholds are pretty low. For instance, they approve up to 35% of revenues being spent on fundraising.
Charity Navigator rates some charities on the basis of several financial criteria [here], but again they look only at financial figures without examining what the organization actually accomplishes.
It seems to me that if more gifts were made to /LittleIndividuals, there could be more direct accountability, not less. John McKnight has said that the one thing an organization can never deliver is care. Only individuals can take care of people and situations. I would add responsibility to that. Organizations are almost always specifically structured, legally and organizationally, to not take responsibility and not incur liability.

August 20th – Conference Call Notes

An excellent call with Penny and Jon, moving together in next two weeks to build list of people at /KindredSpirits, Jon will link that page to map for proceeding with technical get-it-up-and-running process, Michael will build out templates for /ProfilePage and /ProjectPage and we can all start fill in data for the GivingMarket project itself. That data is essentially the story of “what do we have?” and “what do we need?” Then we can work out invitation to the people to gather ’round the map, and look into addressing what’s needed to move forward with this: What must be created for a GivingMarket to be turned on, up-and-running, now? Considering dumping this /DevelopmentLog into a real, live weblog with comments and such, as well.
Some structural clarity came out of the call as well: Interra itself is a project that currently resides under the wing of the Rudolf Steiner Foundation, is emerging as a 501(c)(3) that will own all of its informational assets, with a for-profit subsidiary that will be licensed to process transactions. In this way, the whole thing is ultimately owned by the community. It’s not yet clear if GivingMarket falls with the bounds of Interra or not, but the two do clearly play well together, informing and supporting each other, and so we go on together. We will focus on the project(s) and possibilities and issues of common good, the things that attract our attention, more than we focus on the boundaries between our projects. We will work together to feed this attractor and work toward an invitation to bring together the next round of people this project needs to move forward.
Taking two weeks now until our next conference call, Sept 2nd — time to catch our breaths a bit and dig into the work of listing out the people, profile and project templates and stories.

August 18th – Domain Names and Why this Market is Needed

Registered domain names today: GivingMarket .com, .org. and .net… just in case. Also got this from DougGermann. It’s a good example of the kind of giving work that could be supported by a GivingMarket.
…a dear friend wrote and made the choice easy. She has for years been doing breakthrough work to help people with Alzheimer’s feel part of life again, to discover that they matter. Yet she is finding doors closed because she lacks credentials. Here is the glimpse that came to me as I struggled with her closed doors: Credentials are a crutch for those who would rather not think, examine, question themselves and find out. Credentials are a door to close not open. Opening doors for the work is the further work of the ones who would do good work.
I would love to see some of her stories, experiences, skills …and needs for funds, connections, etc. posted in a GivingMarket. Someday.

August 18-20th – Catching My Breath

Time Off? Attempting to let this whole thing rest for a few days until we talk again on 8/20th. Please chime in, Jon and Penny, if there are things to add before our call.

August 17th – Structure and Relationship

Continued last night’s conversation this afternoon, and got a whole lot more clarity about how these pieces, GivingMarket, InterraProject, BALLEBC and other players might be fitting together. It seems that InterraProject will provide a service to BALLEBC and other community groups. BALLEBC will invite its members into the InterraProject site, where the service functions will operate. This delivers service to BALLEBC members and members to the Interra service. Mutuality Rocks. So where does a GivingMarket fit in? Perhaps as a peer to Interra, so that the GivingMarket also serves BALLEBC members and BALLEBC also delivers members to the Market.
BALLEBC then begins to evolve in the direction of becoming a broker of peer-to-peer market services. Other P2P offerings might include eBay/MissionFish and blogger.com. eBay would support peer-to-peer retail with Mission Fish inviting sellers to funnel proceeds to fund BALLEBC. Blogger supports peer-to-peer publishing. The idea here is that if a BALLEBC member understands any of the P2P marketplaces linked, then they probably understand all of them. Interra invites individuals to deal with organizations as peers, to open conversations with store managers, for instance, to ask what they are doing to support local life.
All of these things run on the power of individual choices, actions, and spending. The GivingMarket invites peer-to-peer action and funding. So it seems to require development as a peer to these other sorts of services. Thinking about the /BigChange enabled by the emergence of this sort of efficient market for giving, Interra seems a fitting longer-term home for the GivingMarket because Interra will always own the relationships with banks that will be required to support endowment funds and perpetual programmed giving and matching. This relationship seems to parallel eBay ownership of PayPal, because it made strategic sense for them to own the transaction.
So it looks to me like a many-to-many world is emerging. Many service providers, offering and inviting peer-to-peer connections, where individuals function with power previously reserved to organizations. Individuals as purchasing agents, retailers, publishers, project funders. On the other hand, many member-based communities like BALLEBC, who in this case is inviting organizations to care and responsibility — functions that can only be performed by individual actors. BALLEBC and other community orgs will invite business and other leaders to think and act as if their own personal quality of life depends on the decisions they make as individuals even though they are made for or within their organizations. In this way, the real healing happens when the lines between the servers and the served get crossed and recrossed. This is the power and the wholeness that springs up in OpenSpaceTechnology meetings and events. This is the power of markets, where many individuals in many organizations make informed decisions that add up to progress for the common good. Many-to-many… -into-One.
In summary…
    • Interra, BALLEBC and GivingMarket each grow as distinct entities and services
    • The three entities play exceptionally well together and can be piloted together
    • Long-term, GivingMarket scales bigger than BALLEBC and might be strategically owned by Interra
    • BALLEBC connections with Interra and GivingMarket sets stage for partnerships with other P2P markets/communities
    • GivingMarket extends the offerings of BALLEBC and Interra, can be supported, but needs to stand on its own
    • Interra grounds the whole constellation in the banking/credit system and individual wallets and purses
    • Interra ownership of GivingMarket might be necessary long-term to support /BigChange endowment accounts, etc
    Other things noticed going by…
      • Interra points need to be giftable to individuals… anyone can give points to anyone… which supports individual giving to individual friends initially and making a points-based giving market organically as the point system develops.
      • GivingMarket needs to be born as dollar-denominated market, with points being one of many additional sorts of gifts (air miles, used computers, referrals, advice, hours, etc) that could be made.
      • /ProjectPage(s) should spring from two main questions (the heart of any gift or commercial exhange): What do you have to offer? and… What do you need or want?
      • Retired folks might be prime market and often embody the server/served union… might be funders and funded for projects for instance, might have time to organize and money to contribute, but need partners to add to both sides.
      • Over time, individuals and organizations swim together in a sea of P2P markets, individuals sprouting new “organizations” via functions like /OrganizingPage and organizations taking care and responsibility via individual (personal) decisions of leaders and managers.

      August 16th, late-night – Qualifications

      Penny and I talked a bit about the work that they did yesterday out in Vancouver, site design and partner meetings and such. Sounds like more questions than answers turning up. One issue comes up often, about what kinds of things are “qualified” for credit, meaning what is local, what is green, or sustainable or otherwise supporting the local living economy of beings. Penny and I came back to a new version of what we had decided a year ago in the formation of BALLE-BC. Back then, we said “members” were folks who posted a quarterly statement (even a single short paragraph would do) to say what it is that they had been doing or would be doing to support local living economy. Their posting would be their “dues” and would be the content that would serve as marketing, definition, values statement, ideas database, and to the extent that some of them would convene projects together or make referrals, then this pile of postings would also speak to the benefits of membership. We updated that for the Interra case, thinking that merchants should be required to post at doors/checkouts/pricing labels what it is that they are offering for sale that would qualify for Interra points. Then the “qualification” could be made by local purchasers, who could engage the management with good and bad feedback. The signs would also serve to invite individuals to join Interra, which could then steer them to local orgs like BALLE-BC. In this way, the requirements say nothing about local content, local ownership, what’s sustainable or green or good. The requirement is to talk. To post. To think up things your business can contribute. To offer them openly and allow for conversation. To keep updating the offerings. Raising consciousness. And to let the market then do its work of sifting the data, making choices, rewarding contributors and punishing laggards.

      August 16th – Modelling the Way

      Having started to map out the kinds of things that Projects would be asked to outline in their postings, I find myself looking at these working notes and beginning to shape them into a model for that… things like this /DevelopmentLog taking shape as a result of this.

      August 13th – Website Development

      Focusing on GivingMarket/HomePage and the pages linked there, working out more of the details of the user experience, mapping out pages and such. Interra and [BALLE-BC] will meet on 8/15-16 to work on larger user interface issues for the Vancouver pilot/launch. Next conference call 8/20.

      August 12th – Interra Project Conversations

      Thanks to Jon Ramer and the [InterraProject] for this [WorkingMap] of our work here. In recent conference calls, Jon has also mentioned some GivingMarket/KindredSpirits worth checking out.

      July/August – Working Conversations

      Meetings with a number of friends and colleagues from the Giving Conference and elsewhere, to work out potential for developing this sort of marketplace. Along the way, we began exploring the possibility of creating a GivingMarket within the [InterraProject] pilot with [BALLE-BC] in Vancouver, BC.

      July 9-11th – The Giving Conference

      A working session was convened in [OpenSpace] during the Giving Conference in Chicago. Here are the /ConferenceNotes from that session and some post-conference /AfterThoughts.

      Pre-Conference July – A First Conversation

      TomMunnecke called me to say that he couldn’t attend the conference, but wanted to get connected anyway. We had a great first conversation. Along the way, this notion of “gBay” came to me… a Google (Search, News, Blogs) meets eBay (individuals, auctions, exchange) sort of idea. Tom and I met as he passed through Chicago, the day before the Giving Conference. He met with a number of others, too… and stirred us all up enough that some of what we discussed with Tom showed up on the list of working sessions over the next three days of the Conference.

      March April May June – Origins: Ideas into Action

      PhilCubeta has been blogging for some years about the changes he wants to see in the way Philanthropy is done in America. He’d built up a good audience, ChrisCorrigan among them — but no organization at all. After reading for a couple years, Chris began trading emails with Phil, explaining a bit about OpenSpaceTechnology and eventually inviting me into the thread. I was interested, but didn’t have energy or interest for idle chatting. Phil assured me that he really did want something to happen. I explained how simple action could be, offering a way past a number of logistical obstacles. I had my own track record, going back some years, of organizing gatherings and bringing people together for action. I pledged my experience and organizing energies and a plan to do something about Phil’s issues. He pledged the seed money for meeting space. We both had people we wanted to invite, as did Chris and some others. An invitation was written, space found, people called and emailed and invited to join us. One of the people called and invited was TomMunnecke and one of the ideas that came out of those earliest conversations was this notion of a GivingMarket. More ideas have followed, conference calls, websites, new blogs, many more conversations and shared counsel on individual and group projects. This is what happens when passion, experience, energy and a bit of seed money come together for the good. Obviously this coming together was already possible and is continuing to happen all over the world. In this way, the GivingMarket isn’t making anything new. It’s making more and easier what is already happening naturally. And it is already unfolding and embodying, for itself, what it is inviting and supporting in others: A steady stream of small changes by /LittleIndividuals, all distance made good.

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