wrythings

Today (Thursday) the Knight Center of Digital Excellence was launched in Akron, Ohio. I am deeply invested in the vision and language of Digital Excellence, and I hope the Center lives up to it’s name. Some words of wisdom for those undertaking this mission:

The path towards excellence starts with purpose, and not with technology. Be clear in your purpose, be strong in resolve, be prepared to fall and rise again. Digital is a word that often gets in the way: Strive first and always for human excellence and towards our higher individual and collective purposes. Excellence is a matter of character.

The Chicago Digital Access Alliance put this vision before our City, a vision of great ambition. We echo the historic Chicago mantra: Make no small plans. Has Chicago missed an opportunity? No. We have not. Not if we yet take up the challenge and establish what has been called for: A Digital Excellence Trust.

The wind left our sails when the Chicago wireless plans were put on hold. It was fortuitous that the vendor-driven segmented-technology model fell through, but the call for Digital Excellence didn’t have to stop there. We’re the windy city and our model was never tied to wireless technology. We have Olympic aspirations and Greenest-city-in-the-world goals. We know that these are deeply tied to a vision of excellence.

Excellence is our noble human calling. We’re not one of the Knight communities. How will we rise here and now to the challenge of digital excellence? Will we stir the soul of the city? Will we stir the soul of the nation?

GiftHub addresses the hypocrisy of Social Investing … summing up the challenge of our moment in history with this comment: “I do not claim to have an answer, within the context of an unchanging system, diddling at the edges with atomized investor and consumer choices. If there are answers they would have to be in scale with the problems, such as environmental depletion and collapse.”

Justice is the scale that matters. I have the image of Ma’at: the heart, a feather. Do we have an answer that goes beyond diddling at the edges?

I composed a short list of some essential readings that reflect a world-view appropriate to the Internet Era, I shared it with friends studying Community Informatics and Civic Entrepreurship, two domains seeking a better world. Since I recently catalogued (part of) my personal library using LibraryThing, it makes sense to share these here as well (as they are part of my virtual library).

These writings provide a conceptual matrix for an interesting breed of Civic Entrepreneur- (it’s a partial list) … really a new model of Citizenship and Society/Polity. They aren’t new to a lot of you - and if you have other works that you think really need to be on the list, please let me know.

Movement as Network, by Gideon Rosenblatt, also: The three pillars of social source

David Isenberg’s Rise of the Stupid Network

Pushing Power to the Edges (pdf) by Jillaine Smith, Martin Kearns, Allison Fine

The Cluetrain Manifesto (Doc Searles, et al.)

Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

Coase’s Penguin: (by Yochai Benkler … his book The Wealth of Networks is also recommended. There’s a wiki inviting discussion of his ideas.)

The list doesn’t represent any hierarchic ordering.

Via GiftHub:

Conference organizer fails to have Yes Men arrested

The long awaited report from the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Closing the Digital Divide was released Friday June 15th at the Community Media Summit convened by the Benton Foundation and the Community Media Workshop under the title The City that NetWorks: Transforming Society and Economy Through Digital Excellence.

Digital Excellence is both means and end for Chicago as the City of Excellence. The Chicago Digital Access Alliance (CDAA) had a large hand in bringing this vision into the public sphere. We’ll turn a critical eye to the details of the report, as is our duty, but for now we celebrate it’s release and the vision that has been established, and we offer our deepest gratitude to Julia M. Stasch for her service to our city in chairing the Mayor’s Advisory Council and shepherding this visionary and historical document.

Stay tuned for analysis and response.

While at NetSquared Y2 there was a tension between certain perspectives around profit, narrow-sense sustainability and the non-profit sector. Dave C. shared some links with his fellows in the grassroots and philanthropic sectors, asking for us to get to work on our language and conceptual schema to defend what is in fact different about what we do.

At the NetSquared conference recently, there was a comment made by a venture capitalist that “Some nonprofits just suck”.  This was partially attached to a discussion of nonprofit sustainability models, with a very large portion of participants taking it for granted that “sustainability” meant charging for services. There is an entrenched view that foundation grant funding and other donations can never be “sustainable”, and that there must be a return on services offered that eventually sustains the organization financially.

I responded to much of this. There’s a synopsis on the Nonprofiteer: http://nonprofiteer.typepad.com/the_nonprofiteer/2007/06/dear_nonprofite.html#comment-72142198

(thanks, Nonprofiteer, for the kind words).

The continuing debate lives here: http://www.tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/05/some_nonprofits.html#comment-71226258

and here: http://www.tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/06/philanthropic_c.html#comment-72140764

…and other comment threads on the Tactical Philanthropy site and elsewhere.

Coming under fire for offering services for free, by nonprofit funders who do not seem to understand the difference between “mission-driven” and “profit-driven”, forces me to suggest that we, as a sector, need to develop stronger language regarding these issues. Most of all, we need to work towards a different model of sustainability, so that we can pose alternate definitions when a potential funder equates “sustainability” with a system based on marginal returns for services offered. 

So my question is: “How do we measure sustainability if we’re mission-focused (nonprofit) instead of profit-focused (for profit)?”.

And related: “How do we communicate the difference to the venture capitalist, foundation, and other donor communities who we’re hoping will support our work?”.

In both cases, by “we” I mean all of us mailing list denizens, not our organization in particular.

Responses appreciated. Backup on Tactical Phil would be awesome (I think I’m outnumbered).

Dave.

Phil C. took up that flag long ago, but here’s a current link in response to this: Gift Hub: Something Here Certainly Does Suck

The key for me in the framing of these questions is whether one limits one’s view to the organizational boundary as one views each exchange or transmission of value, or whether one holds an ecological perspective on the flows and is able to see a variety of significant flows.