A letter that made me feel better.... Professors Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, Jeremy Weinstein, along with Hilary Cohen and Mohit Mookim, sent the following letter to students last week. Posted by permission. ****** The crisis that is unfolding around the world with the coronavirus pandemic is frightening. And it appears likely that things will become worse before they
Why “Blank for Good" is Bad (UPDATED) IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please read this response and thread and my apologies for first using logo without permission. I very much appreciate having this broader perspective brought forth from @CassieRobinson, Stefaan Verhulst and others. Original post Since we started the Digital Civil Society Lab I’ve been invited to countless conferences,
Media's past, civil society's future? For the last decade(s) or so, there has been much attention to the blurring of lines between nonprofits and social businesses. Much of the pressure is self-inflicted by funders and nonprofits looking for sustainable revenue models. The rise of impact investing is part of this story. I'm
Hey nonprofits, your rent is going up 10X Do you work for a "dot org?" Do you know there's an effort underway (currently put on hold by the California Attorney General) to sell the registry of .orgs to a private equity firm? At a time when hands wring over closing civic space and the
Artificially Intelligent Associations My next big research project (I hope) will be coordinating a distributed team of researchers from many disciplines to better understand how our digital dependencies influence our associational opportunities and rights. For example: * How do the personas that data-driven algorithms create for us align with, or not, how we see
Job boards for social sector, public sector, nonprofit, tech and policy jobs Students often ask me for information on jobs. There's a noticeable (and welcome) uptick in interest in jobs in the public or social sectors at the intersections of policy, analysis, technology, and data. I asked Twitter for relevant job boards and here are the resources I received.* Internet
"Hey (random woman's name applied to a connected digital speaker), donate money to...." I heard this story last week, from the mother of a toddler. The kid is home, playing with grandpa. Kid is just past the peek-a-boo stage, now experimenting with hide and go seek. Like most kids of this age, hiding generally involves standing on the other side of a chair
Nonprofits and artificial intelligence I’ve participated in a lot of conferences, panels, discussions etc. about “nonprofits and AI,” “foundations and AI,” “AI for good”* and so on. The vast majority of them miss the point all together. It’s not really a question of these organizations using artificial intelligence, which is how every
Software Kills Yep, deliberately trying to provoke you with the headline. Here's what provoked me: The news that two airplane crashes killed a total of 346 people, in part due to a software upgrade that was "optional." (read: cost more) This story about electronic health records (software) and
Responsible data in civil society The World Food Programme recently announced a partnership with Palantir. There’s a lot to be concerned about here - in this specific instance and in the broadest possible sense for understanding civil society’s role regarding digital data use. Please read this open letter https://responsibledata.io/2019/02/
The year (and decade) ahead The tenth annual Blueprint - Blueprint 2019 - went live in December. You can find it and the entire decade's archive here. On January 23rd we'll be hosting our annual "prediction-palooza" (free, online) discussion about philanthropy predictions. Information on that is available here. In
Media Manipulation and Giving Tuesday Like many of you I woke up this morning to an email inbox full of leftover Black Friday ads, a whole bunch of Cyber Monday ads, and the Xth day in a row of #GivingTuesday announcements. Among those was the first clearly-designed-to-misinform #GivingTuesday astroturf email that I've received.
Verify the data Three tweets from yesterday: Depending on a commercial company for our giving infrastructure is problematic in several ways. First, at any point in time the company (and this company has done this repeatedly) can change it's commitment, algorithm, priorities and leave everyone who was using it without recourse.
Flipping assumptions about algorithms I've had countless conversations with well-intended people from a number of social sectors and academic disciplines who are working on digital innovations that they firmly believe can be used to address shared social challenges. Some of these approaches - such as ways to use aggregated public data -
Shining lights on generosity You know the old trope about how people looking on the ground around a streetlamp for their lost keys, even if they lost them down the block, simply because "that's where the light is?" (http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Man_Under_the_Street_Light) This
First question... I've been talking to a lot of nonprofit and foundation folks + software developers lately. The good news is these two communities are starting to work together - from the beginning. But there is a long way to go. Just because you're working in or with a
Liabilities and line items A lot of work on responsible data practices in nonprofits has focused on staff skills to manage digital resources. This is great. Progress is being made. Digital resources (data and infrastructure) are core parts of organizational capacity. We need to help board members understand and govern these resources in line
Your tech vendors are your landlords https://www.eff.org/wp/clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-terms-service No one reads the Terms of Service. Few of us understand who has access to the data we generate all day every day. Rachel Maddow and others continue to refer to Cambridge Analytica/Facebook as the former "stealing" data from the latter,
Hacking civil society (Image from Charlie Chaplin, The Circus) I've been saying - explicitly since at least 2013 - that the digital policy environment and the digital ecosystem are civil society's domains. This article on why the Russians might hack the boy scouts spells out the same point fairly
dafs A new DAF? Nonprofit Advocacy News, a regular newsletter from the National Council of Nonprofits, is a great source of information. The issue I received in early August had this little nugget: "Flexible Giving Accounts: A new bipartisan bill (H.R. 6616) has been introduced to allow employers to create flexible giving
The social sector and shiny objects (e.g. blockchains) Like people in general, civil society organizations are easily distracted by shiny objects. Although I pinged blockchain as a buzzword a few years ago, the frenzied hype of last year's bitcoin boom and bust (probably manipulated) finally brought the idea through to general public. There probably are good
digital civil society Civil society and threats to a free press It's August 16, 2018 (Forty seven years to the day since President Nixon's administration admitted to keeping an "enemies list" of the American people). Today, newspapers across the United States are running editorials on the importance of a free press and declaring their outrage
The nonprofit/volunteer layer of the internet's content infrastructure I've been thinking about the role that volunteers and nonprofits play in providing curatorial and editorial support to the internet ever since 2014 when I learned that Twitter was going to "partner" with several women's organizations following the murders in Santa Barbara, California that
digital identity Digital identity and civil society I posted this reflection over on DigitalImpact.org - regular readers of the Blueprint - send me your notes! For those who don't want to click over (and you should) the piece discusses the technological work being done on digital identities - where you would control yours -
