Enormous Reach and Power

Nancy White, whose blog I follow, got me thinking with her quote "Yahoogroups has enormous reach and power."

Very few technology companies systematically deploy their assets in support of social change. Yahoo and Google have amazing technology assets. Do they systematically deploy yahoo groups? Do they make specific partnerships to deploy Google Aps to small groups? Do they hire a couple of head counts to do the marketing and outreach? Do they designate social change groups as a targeted vertical in their product organizations?

Based on conversations with main line product management folks, it seems like they don't think this way. From their actions in the aftermath of Katrina and the rapid innovation it spawned, my conclusion is that these companies haven't gone about deploying their assets in a systematic way in support of social change.

On the other side are companies like Salesforce.com that have actively created a delivery system and ecology for deploying their asset in support of social change. Oddly enough, the investment required would be very insignificant for these much larger corporations.

My next job, which I start next week is about deploying the core competencies of a technology company (product, services and people) in support of social change. I'll be asking a lot of questions about how to craft a delivery system and ecology.

The one big question I already have is why bother creating company-specific ecologies? Wouldn't it be far more efficient to use an existing ecology and methodology to deliver the assets of technology companies in support of social change (i.e. people, products, services)?

Product-ization

I often talk about what it takes to product-ize open source software. Most regular people consider open source to be "not ready" or "almost there". This interchange on the CiviCRM boards is a great reminder of the need for an ecology around open source products.

Basically, a small, no resource organization wants CiviCRM to work better with IE. The open source projects asks the no-resource organization to invest time and/or money into making CiviCRM work better with IE. The small organization gets frustrated and says:

Not working on the UI in the most common browser on the planet (especially for low-income people in need) is--to me--shooting yourselves in the foot WRT accomplishing your goals. But perhaps you are not building this "for the people," but really for geeks. If that's the case, then be clear about it. If your goal is to help non-profits, this is one place you fall very seriously short.

The simple fact is that the "people" don't have the resources to contribute, and the geeks and large budget nonprofits do.

Or is that really true?

Non-profit accidental techies with no time and little or no power in their orgs make up a huge portion of your user base (as I understand it, anyway). I am wondering if we should be discussing how to make this "community" model work better, because I don't feel like it's well-directed to do what you want it to do--supplement the good work you guys are doing.

And here is the crux... how do you make the community module work better? I think it is probably by providing clear, simple, low time commitment tasks to the community:

1. Take 1 hr talk to the CiviCRM team about how to do testing and test CiviCRM in IE. Then log the bugs found.
2. Take 1 hr, send an email to everyone you know asking for a volunteer programmer/geek to come in and fix those bugs.

Accept the fact that your hour may or may not make an immediate difference (this is the really hard thing to get folks to truly accept). But by becoming part of the community you move the community forward.

Drupal Saving the World

Jeff Robins, a Drupal visionary, had a great post on Drupal saving the world.

The entire history of CivicSpace is about using Drupal and CiviCRM saving the world. And the conclusion I have reached is that there is not an ecology in place to make that happen. In fact, the ecology is not even evolving at this point. That ecology needs to generate some basic things:

(1) Technical innovation
(2) Productization
(3) Marketing

There are some assumptions embedded in this analysis. In software there are three important concepts: a product, configuration, customization. A product can just be used by an end user, no muss no fuss. Configuration allows a lay end user to learn enough to set the software up how they need it to work. Customization requires special skills (PHP) to get the software to do what you want.

Getting CiviCRM to accept online donations is a perfect example. If you get CiviCRM through CivicSpace On Demand, it just works-- it is a product. Install CiviCRM yourself and you have to make sense of 50 or so options as you configure it.

Originally, I thought that software could have an impact on social change if it was configurable. I came to the conclusion that this is wrong becuase it is virtually impossible to market a configurable product to small groups involved in social change.

The average social change organization wants software to just work... just like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

So what does the ecology need to do?

(1) Technical innovation is required to productize Drupal and CiviCRM. Install profiles in Drupal are a first step, but need to be improved. There are a number of other technical innovations involved.
(2) The actual productization is the process of building things like Buzz Monitor.
(3) Finally, marketing is required to generate enough revenue to sustain products.

All the steps on this path so far have been done by people that forgo health insurance to change the world.... by $5K extracted out of a small nonprofit to fund $15K worth of innovation.... by little innovators operating with little in the way of larger institutional support.

Right now, the Drupal and CiviCRM ecologies do a great job of generating consulting dollars, so there are lots of healthy consulting firms. That open source software will be around forever.

But there seems to be very little movement in the ecology to build products that help small social change organizations on a massive scale.

On the commercial side, many of the firms are too young to be deemed good investments. And investors have a hard time funding technical innovation that is indefensible (open source community).

On the social change side, no one understands the technology strategy well enough to invest in Drupal changing the world. More importantly, we haven't been able to clearly explain how a million dollars invested today directly results in 10,000 grassroots groups sustainably (i.e. no additional philanthropic investment) using Drupal as a platform for social change on the web for the next 20 years.

Seems like an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Sustainable Nonprofits that Suck

There is a bunch of conversation on whether sustainability=earned income, how far you can push the nonprofits should be like businesses thing here and here.

Well I'd like to point out there are a bunch of sustainable nonprofits that suck. Let me define my terms. Sustainable nonprofits have enough cash income to fund their ongoing operations... that could be from an endowment, from a good development director, from a sustainable pool of individual donors, from earned income, whatever. Sucking is defined as not accomplishing measurable goals.

My version of suck (measurable goals) is, I think, the axis on which the whole nonprofit vs. for-profit thinking debate should take place. In business, you have a quick, measurable built in goal: profitability. Why can a CEO of a packaged foods company move over to and Internet media firm? The P&L is the same... the same basic measurements are in place.

It is a lot harder for the CEO of a symphony to switch over to being the CEO of a homeless shelter.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has a good article. One quote struck me:
“The lack of having a bottom line is truly under appreciated,” explains Schlosberg, “as is its importance in enabling an organization to have focus and come together. It becomes much more of a challenge to evaluate not only the organization, but individuals and their performance as well.”

Wisdom of Crowds

So Netsquared picked their 21 projects for the conference [by Netsquared, I mean the registered users of the Netsquared site]. This is basically the first phase of selection. As for the $100K minimum to be distributed to projects, "The format for allocation will be determined by vote of Conference participants."

I think they are applying the wisdom of crowds at the wrong stage. It will work in this case because the Netsquared community is pretty homogeneous, but if you ever hit scale (10,000 projects), the popularity contest that is the first cut just doesn't make a lot of sense.

In a general sense, I would approach it in stages:

1. Attract a bunch of applicants in an open process. Open, community process heavily reliant on networking and advertising.
2. Qualify those applicants. Use the media volunteer approach to still let "lay people" do it, but at least you make sure the basic criteria is met. This is a binary, qualified or not decision. Qualified projects move forward.
   
3. Review and select those applicants. Again, a media volunteer approach is perfect... anyone can participate-- you got the little "d" democratic going, but they have to think about the actual projects they are reviewing in a structured way, not just voting for favorites. A reviewer is assigned a project on a round robin basis, every project gets a score. Highest scoring projects move forward.

And that is it. You'd have to tweak the incentives a little to create better incentives for groups to recruit their supporters into the process, but the basic outline feels like it would keep to the focus on substantive issues rather than popularity contests.

Netsquared's High School Popularity Contest

Daniel Ben-Horin relates some comments from Siegfried Woldhek about the Netsquared Innovation Fund's process:

"What an interesting experiment this is turning out to be. Implicitly at least three new criteria were added to the official, sensible list.

• The size of the mailing list
• The activism of the inner circle
• The 2.0 savvy"

• 
  

My inbox has seen a lot of direct advocacy to get me to vote for them, making points about how the visibility is important to ongoing sustainability, etc. This is from groups and people respect, am impressed by, and really want to succeed.

But quite honestly, it pisses me off.

First, an innovation fund is not about you. If you want to plug into your network and get them to review the proposals and add their brain power to the mix, great. Ethically (in my sometimes high-handed brain), that email should invite people to the process... not to the action of voting for you. There should be a single very short sentence at the end saying something like, "Please don't forget to review our proposal ."

Virtually every email I got didn't explain to me why the group met the criteria of the Innovation Fund:

• Use the power of community and social networks to create change
• Use existing, or newly developed technology tools for social impact
• Have a plausible financial model
• Have a clear way to measure success
• Exhibit extraordinary leadership, passion and resourcefulness
• Exhibit a passion for social change

If you aren't going to tell me why your organization meets the criteria, then basically you are running for homecoming queen on your popularity and the fact that you hang out with the cool kids. In fact, some really great projects that basically don't meet these criteria are going to have a lot of votes because of their advocacy strategy.

Advocacy is appropriate and good. Mobilizing your network to help you win by making your network part of the process is also appropriate and good.

Mobilizing your network to game a voting process suggests a weak understanding of how communities and social networks create real change (as oppose to raising a buck).

Content, Quality, Money

Michelle brings up the question of open content. Laura provides a most excellent and well thought out tirade.

Shockingly enough, I have an opinion. First in defense of paid/ copyright content: (1) it takes money to build content via traditional writer/editorial channels and the most traditional way to extract economic value from content is copyright. So I understand what Michael and Laura are saying and largely agree with it.

However, there are two things that fascinate me:
(1) Something like Idealware could be founded on an online community... something like Compumentor's consultantcommons.org (this is a tough challenge in and of itself). If Idealware started with free community content that was not produced in a traditional writer/editorial model, then packaged up the very best to deliver to the community, their dynamics and economics would be completely different. They could, for instance, implement a membership model... and their free content would drive membership in that community.
(2) Content is no longer a value generator... it is a consumer capturer. You need to capture the consumer with your free content and then extract value through alternate channels... ads, products, services, memberships, etc.

When will Techsoup acquire Idealware? They can then free the content to capture some "consumers" for Techsoup stock.

Selecting a Content Management System: Drupal, Joomla and Plone

I've been working with Idealware, joining with Ryan Ozimek and Patrick Shaw to provide a Drupal, Joomla, Plone roundup. I think that my co-presenters would agree that having a developer you trust is far more important than which CMS you pick... they all are great.

Few, CMSs, however, have a vision that fits with more expansive social goals. At CivicSpace our mission is to make advanced online community and CRM tools accessible to the smallest grassroots organizations. There is a specific type of technical architecture required to build technology specifically suited form small groups in the civic sector.

Dries Buytaert, the leader of the Drupal project has outlined some goals for Drupal... eliminate the developer and eliminate the designer. This is really about eliminating the need for specialized knowledge and limiting the complexity the end user is exposed to.

Part of the reason ASP solution are so appropriate for the nonprofit and civic sectors is that they promise the same thing... eliminating the developer and designer, but really haven't been able to deliver. I trust the 300+ volunteer developers of Drupal to accomplish this goal more that Kintera or Convio mostly because ANYONE can join Drupal at any time to help... crowdsourcing works.

Creating Options

How can you not just love Michelle:

Sometimes, the forward march of technology seems like this train I'm riding on - inexorably traveling down the track of capitalist profit while nonprofits are hanging on to those little hand-powered trucks that we, the people who serve them in this realm are working really hard to pump up and down, so we can try and gamely keep up. And while they watch really large organizations zip by them in bigger, better vehicles, looking exactly like they know where they are going. But no one seems to be asking "why are we on this track in the first place?" "Is being on this track going to really help me save the whales/feed people/organize/save the planet?"

Power to the edges, open source, the inexorable lowering of technology costs... all these factors create an opportunity to build a new track, to innovate and create lots of ways to save the planet.

I come back to a single issue: innovation and saving the planet is a human-scale issue... people to people communicating. Actually saving the plant is a systems-scale issue... millions of human-scale activities aligned in the same direction. Yet the only path to "scale" available to us is capitalist profit track... Adam Smith had it right when he recognized the power of capitalism to coordinate individual activities.

Until we find other paths to scale that are in line with social change, we will have wonderful micro-interventions that, unfortunately, stay micro.

Values, Mergers, Investment and Mission

Michelle Murrain made a great observation on the Convio/ Get Active merger:

In the final analysis, in the days, weeks, months and years following these, and other mergers, no fewer people will be homeless, no fewer women will be battered, no fewer children will be hungry, no less environmental damage will be done, no more people who need it will get mental health services. But a few more people will have a lot more money in their bank accounts. And this, I think, is one really important thing to think hard about. Are the means that progressive organizations use to reach their ends truly in line with their mission?

And this goes back to the hub-bub over whether the Gates Foundation should consider it's mission when investing its 60 billion dollars. Interestingly enough, 96.9% of those voting in Lucy Bernholz's poll would be considered naive by the CEO and COO of the Gates Foundation... they think the mission should impact the investment strategy (to be fair, I am not entirely clear that the Foundation's position is anything other than "let this blow over").

We generally believe that the business of doing good is just like the business of supplying mercenaries to Africa... the companies use the same financial tools (Cash Flow, Balance Sheets, etc.). And these tools' strength is their value-neutrality. ROI, stock price appreciation, profit are all really efficient ways to run an economy because they make no commentary on the actual activity.

In the end, a financial transaction in the social sector should be measured by how many fewer people are homeless. The new breed of social enterprises in the nonprofit technology sector... Democracy in Action being the first clear success and leader of the pack... hopefully will measure themselves in those terms as we move forward.

Mergers, Open Source, Open Standards and Wishes

The esteemed Holly Ross writes,

I also think that the physical act of integrating two disparate systems, especially in the case of Convio and GetActive, will cause them to create the kinds tools that will be used to share data internally at first, but can then be spit polished and prettified for use by the general consumer.

Lets chew on this a bit. I have a corporate quarterly profit goal. I build tools to port data from Get Active to Convio as fast as possible. (1) Those tools are probably not general purpose, they are designed to get the job done and get it done fast. (2) If they are general purpose, who is going to polish them? Convio will if it leads to porting data from Blackbaud to Convio, but I doubt they would release the tools to facilitate the other direction.

And here an aspect of the difference between (distributed) open source and open standards. If the clunky tools were released into the community, all kinds of people would have an incentive to polish and prettify. If they aren't released to the community, they will serve quarterly profit targets.

I was thinking that the CiviCRM/Drupal community should run a marketing campaign... "you have to migrate anyway, migrate to open source." I suspect the tools and the companies have a few more years of maturation before they compete head to head with Convio, but I like the marketing campaign. :)

Reinvention of the wheel again...

One of my irritations in life is when dollars dedicated to social change get invested invested in duplicative technical infrastructure.

So I've been looking at DonorsChoose, Kiva and GlobalGiving. From a software perspective, I pretty much can't tell the difference between them. Authenticated user creates project, visitors contribute money to project, project contains some rich information about the project, there is some accountability structure and reporting.

Why did they have to build three incompatible software systems? Why not standardize on single open source platform? That way each organization's investment in the open source foundation benefits all users. Over time the cost of innovating and maintaining the software per organization falls drastically. [I'm not naive... there are lots of good reasons, but still.]

Better question... where is the "micro-project" data standard so small fundraising opportunities (a school in need of a whiteboard, a village in need of a goat) can be syndicated quickly and easily across the Internet?

Lets build our technology with the same eye toward social change we use when developing our projects.

Online communities with fundraising microsites

From the CivicSpace Blog.

We think anyone should be able to create a Kiva or Global Giving style site for their social change project without having to pay for rebuilding the same basic technology over and over. Ultimately, we want to allow anyone to launch a Kiva or Global Giving style site for a low monthly fee with open source software (Drupal/CiviCRM).

The benefits of open source is that you can focus on the mission and share the costs of the technology, building a community of folks supporting social change.

There you go

Have you ever wondered why everyone - grandmas, kids, CEOs - can figure out how to use Amazon, eBay, Google but the otherwise-intelligent staff of nonprofit organizations often need extensive support from the companies or associations that provide them with grants management, CRM, web-conferencing and other software?

That says it all. We're working on it!

CiviCRM Team Start Outlining Architecture

CiviCRM is an incredible open source framework for constituent relationship management. But as a user it takes some learning to understand the basic structure of groups, relationships, activities and contacts.

As a developer it gets even more complex. Luckily the team has started to blog about the architecture of CiviCRM. Check it out.

Customers want it all... why not?

The guys over at DIA uncovered a quote I missed from the DotOrganize survey:

Users tend to expect technology vendors to provide around the clock support and intensive customization at below market value.

On one hand, I love this quote because there seems to be a complete disregard for the cost and complexity of technology in the civic sector. The market value of a high level of service is pretty expensive.

But more importantly, it unscores the fact that our current technology delivery models are ill suited to deliver super-low-cost technology to the grassroots. Sure, if every group would let me sell internet ads and cell phone service to their constituencies, I could provide them with great service for free. Probably wouldn't get many customers though since groups' constituencies would probably object.

At CivicSpace we recognize there are three big levers in a service provider's financial model. First is the cost of customer support. If I give customers a 24-hour 1-800 number, I have to charge customers a lot of money. Conclusion: time for a new model of customer support.

Second is the cost of customer acquisition. If I send a sales guy yout to the customers, I have to charge the customer a lot of money. Conclusion: time for a new customer acquisition model.

Finally, if I have to spend a bunch of money on programmers and acquisitions to deliver the functionality customers need, I have to charge the customer a lot of money. Time for a new R&D model.

Providing technology services to the grassroots as a business is a lot like providing cell phone service to consumers... consumers will ask for far more than you can afford to deliver and your competitors will be driving down margins like there is no tomorrow.

But by rethinking the model, challenging the assumptions, and changing the way we achieve our mission, we think CivicSpace has a model that can use all the major financial levers to deliver around the clock support and intensive customization to the grassroots at a market rate far below what the current providers can achieve. Stay tuned.

Scale

George Hotelling won the Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest.

I am fascinated by the selection. On one hand I completely agree with it... CitizenSpeak provides a key function for the grassroots. It makes a difference on the ground and was put together with incredibly few resources. It is a triumph of a small group with no resources creating a high-impact solution. They will use the prize money to do something fantastic.

On the other hand, it exemplifies the complete disregard in the sector for basic infrastructure. CiviCRM is building the water pipes and sewer system, CivicSpace is building the electricity and public transportation, and Citizen Speak is the nice little house on the corner that has electric lights, is public transit accessible, and has running water and a toilet.

It also highlights the importance of ecology. CitizenSpeak can store the CRM information in CiviCRM. People can install the CitizenSpeak module in Drupal or the CivicSpace download. CivicSpace On Demand can offer CitizenSpeak functionality in our hosted service. This is the power of open source and more importantly, the community behind open source.

Congratulations George and Jo. Well earned and well deserved.

CSOD Beta

Kinda cool. CivicSpace On Demand went to beta last week. Nice to see groups using it and partnering with us improve it.

CivicSpace On Demand offers an integrated, simple-to-use solution for running a group's website, collecting money (donations & memberships), sending sophistocated emails/ e-newsletters, and maintaining a constitutent relationship management system. It is entirely web-based, avaliable in minutes and accessed through your web browser. Based on Drupal 4.7 and CiviCRM 1.5, we look forward to continuing to contribute back to those open source communities.

Ask around, maybe you can get access to the beta :)

CiviCRM Up for a Prize

CiviCRM (more specifically, Lobo) has been nominated for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for software in the public interest. Reading the wonderful testimonials from the CiviCRM community, I realize that CiviCRM is equal parts great people, great ideas and great software.

One of the keys of evaluating open source is evaluating the community. I think CiviCRM has been able to build a community worthy of the civic sector... real support, a friendly face, and a committment to 'customers' and incusiveness.

If you use CiviCRM, please offer a post about why.

Some neat quotes:

" Always polite, always helpful (Lobo) is the main reason many of us can even deal with a project with the ambitions of CiviCRM."

"We had skilled tech volunteers but couldn't afford a "turnkey", and extensive research in 2004 into both commercial and "free" CRM solutions showed that there was a dearth of affordable, flexible and easy to use web-based CRMs for small NPOs like ourselves. When CiviCRM came along, it was clear that it would meet our needs and talk to our values."

And my favorite:

"At first I had trouble envisioning a sucessful implementation of open source. This perception changed as I became more involved, but they drastically changed when I started working with CIVICRM. There is a clear gap between CIVICRMand the remainder. Not only is CIVICRM a robust piece of software, it was clearly built by a team that is privy to the needs of the organizations it serves. This is not an uninformed effort; CIVICRM is as close to a custom solution that I could ever hope to get, even if I paid a team of developers to work only for me. It is one of the most well thought out pieces of software I have ever used."

technorati tags:nptech, drupal, net2, civicrm, civicspace

Hacking for Good

The sucess of an open source ecology is based on a bunch of things. One of those things is raw innovation. 100 programmers in a room building "stuff" is a fountain of innovation.

CivicSpace exists to harness that innovation and make sure the largest possible audience of civic organizations can access it. So naturally we are involved with Silona's grand plan.

We need nonprofits to participate so the coders don't go creating things *they* think would be cool. We need experienced Drupal/CiviCRM coders so that hackers move the ball forward rather than building code we can't utilize in the community. Visit the wiki and participate!

*The League of Technical Voters is sponsoring a programmer lock in!*

*What:* We are going to lock in 100 programmers for 48 hours developing Open Source Software for non-profit organizations.

*When:* October 13-15th 2006

*Where:* Austin Texas at Ventana Del Sol

*Why:* To make the world a better place, have a great time, andlook cool doing it. To top it off, Austin Texas is great in October!

*How:* http://lotv-lockin.pbwiki.com/ Sign up, catch up, and pipe up! Password is: transparency

*The Madness*

We are going to have 5-15 minute events happening every 3-4 hoursto keep all the programmers motivated. Everything from surprise gueststo various styles of performers (like firespinning at 2 am.) We willkeep everyone fed all 48 hrs (not just pizza) and hydrated (not justcoke). However, we aren't promising showers or beds. This event isonly for the most hardcore programmers out there, 'cause this is gonnabe intense.

-------------------------------
FAQ
-------------------------------

- How the hell is this gonna work?
We are using Drupal and php. We'll have a list of modules andfeature sets that people will grab and run off to develop. We willalso have a few optional speakers and tutorials on getting started inDrupal if you are new to the environment.

- Why Drupal, you may ask?
Mainly because of the supportive community, modularity and featurerich pre-existing code base. We have a large set of features that wewill have to implement or fix in a short amount of time. If you wannaprogram in something else... lets talk about version 2.0. When theLOTV site reaches the amount of traffic that will break version 1.0, weshould have the resources to build the next one.

- Why php?
'Cause we are using Drupal... duh...

- Nothing will work and you guys suck.

So who pissed in your wheaties this morning? We don't honestlythink that at the end of 48 hours everyone's code will miraculouslywork. We just want to get this organization kick started and createsome useful tools for other Non Profits... and maybe raise a littleawareness about Open Source Software and Non Profits. No other groupsout there understand more about collaboration than Non Profits. Socome on out and save the world for 48hrs! It may make you less grumpy.

- Who is this League of Technical Voters?

Our primary goal is to involve more technical people in thepolitical process, especially in relation to the use of technology bygovernment. We plan on doing this through tying together blogging,social networking and community management tools. We aim to rule theworld and make the world rule! Join us!

http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org