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Several years ago, I was invited to a little gathering at the well-regarded Hollyhock retreat center on Cortes Island in British Columbia. Unfortunately, I had to cancel not long before the event. Despite several close calls since then, I have yet to get to Hollyhock for any sort of event at all. This year, it looks like I’ll actually make it - for Web of Change 2007.

Even more than most conferences, this one is billed as being about networking and relationship building (on top of the very obvious renewal that can be found at a lovely place like Hollyhock). And while I don’t think I’m actually listed myself, I do look forward to meeting the people who are scheduled to attend.

I’m scheduled to lead a session on what looks like a very rich agenda. It will be on a topic that will be familiar to many of my readers:

Asking the Right Questions: Methods for Breaking the Technical Frame of Reference in Strategic Technology Planning

Many observers will agree that common complaints about technology projects — resistance to change, long sales cycles, inappropriate technology, unexpected costs, unused tools — are often the inevitable result of technocentric planning. The only way to unravel this problem is to go to the source and challenge the questions we ask - our actual planning methods, not just our intent. This session will include a short presentation of the core concepts of an alternative frame, followed by a group discussion exploring specific tactics that have worked and which help flesh out the alternative model.

I’m pleased by the highly interactive format of this conference because unlike the usual call for “interactivity” in conference agendas, this one has the potential to actually leverage the expertise of the participants to advance the ideas that I want to explore. I’m always on the lookout for peers.

At the The Guru’s Handbook, Asher Bey writes:

Determine to study botany, and you will discover entomology plays an important part in botany. Determine then to study entomology and you will discover that insects and the soil of the land are intimately related. Such is the tapestry - the ecology - that is the study of the world: everything is connected.And so, how can you study one thing, knowing that any deep investigation of the matter will touch on other subjects that are just as deep, require just as much study, and that those will touch on others and so on?If you lucky and you are a good teacher, one day one of your best students will, in one form or another, ask you this question. Why, they will ask, should they study so hard, if there is always more left unrevealed, if there is simply too much to know, if nothing can be truly understood by itself?This is a fine moment: your student has realized how deep and connected is their world.How will you answer?

Asher’s writing is very dangerous for me. The Guru’s Handbook indulges my already far too philosphical tendencies, my affinity for abstractions. But because With (this blog) is devoted to exploring the topic of connection, I think I should essay a response.I’m going to conflate Asher’s questions as follows: Why learn anything if - because everything is connected - you’ll never really be done? (This isn’t an entirely complete translation, but I’ll address those nuances below.) I offer these answers:First, why do you care about being done? Do you believe that there is such a thing as “complete” understanding? Completeness is a judgment that’s made by teachers, learners, communities of practice, and institutions. Each has their own ideas about what lines in the sands of knowledge are useful to them and there’s plenty of room for disagreement. Those judgments are part of what makes up a paradigm in a field. As people reach the edges of the lines in the sand, some of them turn back, and take advantage of the notion that they are “done” (at least done enough) and others keep going. Those people either transition to new fields, or - because it is useful to them somehow - they spend increasing amounts of time in the areas outside the lines. If enough people do this, we arrive at the kind of large scale reshuffling of turf that comes with a paradigm shift.Second, why not see this neverending quest as a good thing? The fact that you are never really done can be seen instead as the great delight of the pursuit of knowledge. There is always another mystery, always another enlightenment, always another thread to pursue, always another unravelling. As I think Asher and others often teach, the greatest joy is in learning, not in learnedness.Third, not everything is connected in equal degree. If you look at some of the network graphs that are popular these days, you may see a path from any single node to any other node, but the paths are not all of equal length. You may see that everything is connected to something else, but some things are more densely connected than others. Paths of connection loop back upon themselves, the way dictionary definitions do. All of which allows you to see clusters in all this connectedness. A cluster that has been given a name becomes a field of study.Fourth, you’re done when you say you’re done. All of these considerations create a kind of provisional nature to any field of study, any topic of interest. This provisional nature means that we each get to decide when we’re done and in so doing, tell the story of our own learning, in our own terms. To tell that story ourselves, rather than to hope for and then accept a sanctioned one, is to be authentic. This makes the vast interconnectedness of things a fundamental blessing.I’ve saved the fifth, most radical answer, for last. It may not be quite right to say that everything is connected; rather it is useful to say that everything is connections. Tim Berners-Lee draws on the dictionary example that I cited, when he describes the role of his insights about connection in the origin of the World Wide Web:

In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related…. What matters is in the connections.

This brings us full circle to the ironic title of this piece. Frustration with the interconnectedness of things missed the point. It’s not that it’s hard to engage in making sense when everything is connected; it’s because everything is connected that anything makes sense at all.

I want to share a few thoughts about working and living together.

Many of us have devoted our professional lives to the challenges of people working together to make a difference in the world. If we want to use the Latin word, we can call that the practice of collaboration (to co-labor). Ultimately, collaboration is part of the practice of conviviality - the simple act of living together.

It is difficult to address the matter of work in a holistic fashion, because we have created a cultural divide between work and “life”. What kind of sense does that make? When people use the word “life” this way, they really mean just anything that doesn’t remind them of work, because mostly they don’t like what they think of as work. I see this as a form of denial. We are trying desperately to compartmentalize and cut off a part of our life that we often hate and over which we see ourselves as having no control. This just makes things worse.

Preaching “work/life balance” doesn’t help either. That reinforces the denial and further disempowers us.

What is needed is a reintegration of work into our lives. Yes, this will require different models of work, just as it will require different models of life in general. But it will bring us back to our senses and reconnect us with each other. Chopping vegetables with a partner in the kitchen, while you’re all preparing a meal for your family and neighbors - that is work. That is also life. Together.

Although the Council on Foundations has regularly invited me to cover their annual conference for Nonprofit Online News, 2007 was the first year that they opened themselves up to self-identified bloggers, podcasters, and online colleagial journalism in general. I responded to this invitation by taking my usual resource oriented approach at Nonprofit Online News and exploring a wider range of analysis and opinion on this blog.

I am wrapping up my own coverage of the conference with a survey of some of the more interesting commentary from those sources. Although I enjoy reading what other observers are saying about a professional gathering when I’m in the midst of it all, I prefer to avoid the echo chamber, take a deep breath, and get some perspective on the range of opinions in the days that follow the event.

As best as I can determine, the total number of posts about the conference come to less than forty. But for a non-technical conference inviting bloggers for the very first time, I think this is actually a number of which Jeff Martin and his colleagues at the Council can be proud. That becomes more true when you get a sense of the thoughtful quality of much of the commentary.

Of course it was good self-referential fun to read about Lucy Bernholz’ interview with Ariana Huffington, in which the very nature of the interview - as a reflection of the intersection of new media and philanthropy - is the topic being explored. Ms Huffington is quoted as saying, “…blogging, which is very intimate, very raw, very passionate, and very immediate. Foundations can make great use of this intimacy to personalize the charitable experience, to put flesh-and-blood to the raw data. To give us stories to go along with the statistics.”

I also appreciated Lucy’s skepticism about whether new media will preserve the (perceived) momentum toward new ideas that comes from the intense connections and discussions that happen at conferences. I have lost count of how many mailing lists I’ve been on in the last ten to fifteen years that were started in the enthusiasm of a conference session, but petered out within weeks as they lost the battle for everyday attention.

Perla Ni of Stanford Innovation Review reported on a few interesting conference sessions, including new interest in consistency between the investment and grantmaking sides of philanthropy, remittances as an anti-poverty strategy, and the range of issues at the intersection of immigration and philanthropy by any blogger.

Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, who was responsible for the optimistic comment that provoked Lucy Bernholz’ earlier referenced skepticism, was also responsible for the most thorough and (for me) the most interesting coverage of the conference.

Some of Sean’s best posts included explorations of specific conference sessions on structuring grantmaking to more closely relate to performance, how focusing on addressing root causes can sometimes lead philanthropists to withdraw funding from those closest to the communities in need, how to get beyond a tension between defensive complacency and tiresome arrogance in our discussions about “old” versus “new” philanthropy, how we should be designing communication about impacts and lessons into grantmaking programs from the start, and the Packard Foundation’s radical new experiment in transparency.

Sean’s podcasted interview with the afformentioned Jeff Martin shows up way before any CoF web page on a search for “Jeff Martin Council on Foundations”, which I think just shows that Jeff’s venture into opening up to new media is just taking its first steps. The interview itself explores that venture and relates it to a vision of greater transparency for the sector in general. I think it’s very exciting.

Part of that effort toward transparency is the Council’s decision to publically post session videos, although for now it’s just plenaries (in Windows format, of course). My favorite of these is the presentation on the two Studio Conversations. One of these explored issues of religion and philanthropy, which concluded among other things that the fear of religion in public life is actually a fear of the imposition of particular, parochial values on the state, not the fear of the passion for justice that infuses so many religious traditions. The second of these was about the tension between grantmakers and the organizations they fund, and both the damage and dynamics of the power imbalances that result from the funding relationship. I look forward to watching the promised video of that one.

All in all, the Council’s steps toward its own transparency parallels its commitment to promoting such transparency in philanthropy in general. The active presence of bloggers is both a step in the right direction and, given the anxieties that grantmakers seem to have about blogging, an early indicator of a powerful shift. I look forward to seeing how it plays out in the years to come.

I want to write my first critical words about this year’s Council on Foundations Conference, but I fear that they will seem terribly naive. What can I say? Although I’m fiercely practical, I try not to let that dull my critical faculties or my sense of outrage. Despite my clear understanding that I should not have expected anything different, I find myself dismayed by the Council’s 2007 Awards Gala.

It certainly wasn’t the food that left a bad taste in my mouth nor can I complain about the grandeur of Benaroya Hall. And I wouldn’t for a moment want to take away the pleasure and credibility given to the winners of these awards, many of whom - even to my eyes as a relative outsider - are clearly deserving. But several things left me uncomfortable.

A Tribute to Rapacious Profiteers

First, there was the utterly uncritical video celebrating the thirty year anniversary of Philanthropy Northwest, the local regional grantmakers association. Philanthropy Northwest is actually a truly outstanding organization, in my limited experience. But the video came across in part as a tribute to some of the most rapacious profiteers the region has ever seen.

Let’s just use the Weyerhauser company as one example. After stripping the midwest of old growth forest near the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Weyerhaeuser looked west for more trees he could cut down. The Northern Pacific Railroad, under the control of James Hill, sold him the land he wanted. Of course, that land had simply been given to Northern Pacific years before by the US government as part of lucrative deals with the railroad barons.

So, I sat in the plush hall thinking: The US government displaces the indigious population to sieze control of the land. Something that belongs to no one becomes the property of the state. Then, rather than keeping it in the public trust, the government gives it to private interest, in a deal widely recognized to be far in excess of what it would take to build the railroads. Then Weyerhaeuser buys it at a price of less than ten cents per thousand board feet of timber and becomes incredibly wealthy and powerful as a result. Then we celebrate how the company he created actually gives something back to the community.

Maybe that’s why they call it “giving back”, rather than merely “giving”. To give back is to return something. I invite you to consider for a moment what the opposite of “giving back” may be. Could we ask whether humanity and the planet would have been better served if the basis of the Weyerhaeuser wealth had stayed in the piublic trust in the first place?

When We Do It, It’s Good, But When They Do It…

Second, there was the hypocrisy of the political agenda evident in at least some of the awards. Now frankly, I actually rather like political agendas, even ones with which I disagree. It’s when they are ignored or cloaked in neutrality that I find myself growing critical. In this case, unlike the Academy Awards which the evening openly tried to emulate, I could find nothing in the program book or in the presentation that explained how the awards were made, let alone what the criteria were.

Two back to back awards will provide my example here. A Critical Impact Award to the Humana Foundation (the corporate foundation of an insurance company, I believe) for their work on the Romanian health care system since collapse of the authoritarian government there. The very charming Hodding Carter and the program book both seem to ascribe the state of the health care system to communist rule.

Of course, I thought immediately of Cuba. Though it’s not the kind of police state that Romania was, it is governed by a communist party in a fairly authoritarian fashion. It also has, by any reasonable metric, one of the most successful health care systems in the world. So successful that they routinely send thousands of doctors around the world, helping out in natural disasters. They may be best known for their aggressive work on curing blindness in countries that are even poorer than Cuba.

Imagine the irony of then watching the very next Impact Award be given to the Seva Foundation for their work in Asia and Africa treating poor people affected by cataract blindness! While I admire the Seva Foundation, why is this worth honoring when an NGO does it, but it’s dismissed by implication when done by a communist state? Indeed, what purpose could the utterly innaccurate “communist” dig serve in the first place?

We Talk, You Listen

Third and finally, there were the awards for excellence in communication. I am very pleased that these awards exist and especially pleased that they are awarded for so many different types of communication and to so many different sizes and kinds of grantmakers. I am already finding myself seeking out specific reports that were awarded here and I will pass on to my readers the ones I find that might be useful to you.

The main thing I was looking for at this conference was an awareness of and appreciation for how networks are changing philanthropy. I had hoped that the communication awards would be a promising place to look.

At first glance, I’m disappointed. As best as I can tell, every type of communication here is broadcast in nature. I could be wrong and I plan on taking a closer look at the website and advocacy campaign awards to try to evaluate this further. But what I see on the surface is this: It’s all talking and no listening. And nothing whatsoever in the way of enhancing communication between stakeholders. In the era of networks, we shouldn’t just reward the kind of communication that is a one-way street from foundations to the rest of us.

In 2006, the Council on Foundation asked some of their members for answers to three questions:

1. From your vantage point, what are the two or three most important and urgent challenges that you would identify as priorities for philanthropy?


2. What is the philanthropic opportunity? In other words, describe how effective philanthropy could make a difference in respect to these challenges.


3. Do you know of any good examples of promising practices on which to build? Please provide details on how we could learn more about them.

The top five issues that they identified are intimately related to my inqury into the relationship between grantmakers and the new world of networks. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Capacity-building


• Collaboration


• Communications


• Effectiveness


• Relations (government & corporate)

I haven’t taken the time to read the rest of report yet to see what the details are in each of these five issue areas, but I look forward to seeing whether and how grantmakers are leveraging networks, participating in networks, and lowering the barriers to the building of networks.

I’m cross posting part of this to Nonprofit Online News, where I will be be posting specific resources for a broader readership. If you’re interested in those resources, I recommend you watch there as well.

Jeff Martin of the Council on Foundations suggested I speak to the folks at the Annie E. Casey Foundation about my interest in how grantmakers are (or are not) paying attention to the new world of networks. While he hunts down someone that I can meet with, I took a moment to peruse the Casey Foundation’s website where I came across two reports (out of what looks like a series of five) that focus on social networks.

The first of these reports is entitled Tapping the Power of Social Networks: Understanding the Role of Social Networks in Strengthening Families and Transforming Communities. It’s an overview piece that defines some terms, compiles key findings from the literature, and presents Casey’s point of view on the potential of social networks within the context of the foundation’s programs.

The second of these reports is entitled Ties That Bind. It takes a grassroots approach to the topic by synthesizing interviews with people who have been affected in some way by the Casey Foundation’s network oriented approach.

I’m going to wrap up my formal blogging about the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference with one last post that links to a lot of interesting people. Here are fourteen people that I didn’t get to speak with at the conference, but wish I had. I hope I don’t have to wait until next year to do so.

When I was demoing my “secret project” more than one person told me I should talk to Allan Benamer of the Coalition for the Homeless. I’ve wanted to meet Alexandra Samuel ever since I started reading her blog. Although I am a little skeptical about most “games for social change”, I’m excited about applying the power of games (the fun, the learning, the social aspects), so I think that it would have been a pleasure to discuss these ideas with Benjamin Stokes. I wish I had met Sarah Golightly. Shall I admit that it’s because of her name? Network for Good has slowly evolved into something more than a cautious giving portal and I wanted to explore their future directions with Bill Strathman and Katya Andresen. I used to serve with Carnet Williams on the NTEN board and I am intrigued by his new venture. I would have enjoyed connecting with Charlie Brown because I appreciate the Changemakers project, even if it weren’t part of the Ashoka mystique. David Weinberger and I are both part of the Grantsfire project and we’ve corresponded about some publishing matters, but I have yet to actually meet him. I recently became acquainted with the Praxis Project and thus would enjoy having met Josue Guillen. I reviewed Madeline Staniosis‘ book and I have a little project in which I would love to involve her. The AFSC has been a client of mine in years past and their values are close to my own, which made me want to meet Robert Goodman. Finally, Ruby Sinreich is a sharp thinker and another person who I’ve wanted to meet since reading her blog.

The newer backchannels at the Nonprofit Technology Conference pretty much fizzled in my opinion. The Gabbly chat rooms were empty. Twitter was talked about more than it was used. And I’m unsure whether texting had a conference-wide impact. But the older blog-like backchannels were alive and well. Several hundred posts and photos, along with a number of audio and video recordings, held up a mirror to the conference and brought it to a larger audience. What follows here are five of my favorite comments and one truly impressive compilation of annotated links.

Phil Klein expanded on a compelling vision of the nonprofit sector as a single organism:

To me, this event is where I can most clearly see that the nonprofit sector is a single vast enterprise, made up of a wide diversity of organizations and constituencies sharing from few to many common ideals, interlinked through network organizations and associations, common funders, communities of need, interest, commitment and geography, and most fundamentally, by communications technologies that facilitate the actions of citizens, the coordinations of efforts, the coallescence of brain power, the fueling of civic entrepreneurialism and innovation, and the day to day work of small teams loosely joined.

The best question that Deborah Elizabeth Finn asks is about how we find the people we want to meet with at a conference of this size:

The second challenge was in finding the people I wanted to talk to. There were any number of folks in this category - some of whom I had never met in person. It wasn’t easy to locate them, even with the Twitter backchannel. My one real Twitter success was in putting out an APB for David Geilhufe; he actually showed up in my corner of the plenary session room within ten minutes of my expressing a desire to find him. In many other cases, I merely heard vague rumors that someone I longed to meet had been sighted.

Reflecting my own sense that the nonprofit technology community is still too anxiety driven to stray far from simple tech promotion, Michelle Murrain pushes the community beyond that with a bunch of great questions (the numbers are mine):

(1) Asking whether technology implementations in their organization in the past have really facilitated their mission? In what ways have they not? (2) Asking whether technology played a beneficiary, damaging or neutral role in internal organizational dynamics and staff morale? (3) Asking, before implementing a new technology - what problem is really attempting to be solved? is it a problem that can be solved in any other ways? (4) How does increasing use of networking technology, on-line presence, and internet communications facilitate or hinder work that is done face to face? (5) Making choices about technology not just based on cost/TCO or feature set - but to bring in issues of the effects on staff, organizational dynamics, and the role of factors such as organizational determination of data destiny, source and ownership of software, and environmental impact. (6) Being mediators between vendors and nonprofits - to look at issues that are technological, and issues that are about personality, behavior and organizational structure and dynamics (on both sides). (7) Looking at the bigger picture - how does what an organization does with technology affect the larger community, and the planet?

Michele Martin loves these questions too, and adds three of her own (again, the numbers are mine):

(8) If we select a technology solution, what organizational and managerial changes do we need to make in order to ensure that we achieve the objectives of the technology implementation? (9) How does this technology improve conditions for our primary customers? (10) In what ways does this technology support and facilitate human connection? Does it appropriately replace people-to-people interactions or does it make us more faceless and anonymous?

Shannon Turlington’s write up of Dave Weinberger’s keynote address is especially good reading for any of you who are stuck with Intranets that can’t quite capture the knowledge that you know is out there in your organization:

Weinberger’s address was about the power of the new web, which enables us to take back control of our world from broadcast media, restore its complexities and externalize meaning. Instead of being passive consumers, we are now active participants shaping the web into what we want it to be, and look at how knowledge sharing is exploding. If we want the same thing to happen inside our organizations, we have to give our people the right tools, make those tools easy for them to use and then get out of their way.

Finally, Beth Kanter displays her information packrat skills with a thorough annotation of almost ninety web pages that have been tagged recently as having to do with nonprofit technology. Many of these are specific to the 2007 NTC.

I want to pick up the thread I started earlier and mention a few more people that I was very pleased to be able to see at the conference. Although one can hardly call a five minute conversation “catching up”, there is something wonderfully grounding about a face to face conversation. It provides a powerful complement to the online conversations that we all have. Each makes the other a richer experience.

I had a great time digging into Teresa Crawford’s work. She helped me clear up some confusion I had about some projects she’s worked on and she gave me some great input on the “secret” project. Britt Bravo has a recent interview with Teresa at Netsquared entitled “Internationalization of the Social Web”.

Peter Crosby is someone I’ve been hoping to find a way to work with, but in the meantime I guess we’ll just keep running into each other. I see him everywhere, including on my trip to South Africa last year. He brought up an idea that’s stuck with me: By the time we turn fifty, we should be in a position to take aim at the “last big project” - the lasting difference we want to make in the world, the final thing for which we want to be remembered. This might be a phenomenon unique to the privileged classes of the world, of course, but that just underscores the responsibility involved.

I was briefly introduced to Darian Heyman of the Craigslist Foundation. I’ve been intrigued by their “Nonprofit Bootcamps” and would have loved to ask him a few questions about them. I’ve been involved in some “boot camp” like endeavors in the field of training writers, but those have taken the model of six weeks of intensive bonding and training, which is not the Craigslist model. But I like any organization that works hard to take a catalytic approach, so I look forward to comparing notes with Darian.

I didn’t do all my work at the conference in the hallways. I attended two sessions. The first was one at which I had hoped to be presenting, but which ended up being a one man show by a fellow from Kintera. The topic was The Power of Listening. I was disappointed by how much it focused on gathering marketing research, rather than on the actual social and emotional experience of being heard.

I thought that Michael Stein did a fine job presenting the basics of Microformats, although as with much of the program there was evidently another session on the topic as well. The duplication is confusing and makes it hard to make the most out of people’s precious attention. But was pleased to see people interested in this very net-centric topic, because microformats are a critical piece of at least two project with which I’m currently involved.

I always enjoy talking to Rob Stuart. He’s focusing his attention these days on reforming the urban political landscape of Philadelphia, but he is very much one of the shapers of the entire web of nonprofit technology communities as they exist today. His critial insights into the relationships and cultures that truly drive how much of civil society works are both valuable and sobering.

Rob and I both got a chance to spend some time with Marty Kearns. Marty is one of the best thinkers around on the subject of network-centric communication strategies and is in the middle of one of the most ambitious current projects in that category. The challenge we discussed was how to fund investment in a network, when organizations and funders are attached to the credit that comes with “ownership” of an issue. Very important stuff.