Sent this off after some wild, though not misplaced, enthusiasm for Kickstarter, Indiegogo and a few other newish online fundraising services; the soft lead-in and enthusiastic closing paragraph are not included.

No fundraising tool will replace an engaged membership who well-understands the necessity for monetarily supporting the organization’s activities. Yes, a certain tool may be marginally more effective for certain kinds of asks or circumstances, but the common framing of tools (especially new/hot online tools) as alternatives to the regular grind of individual giving and relationship development (“cultivation”) is a LIE.

When evaluating any tool, the questions to ask is:

1. Why is our existing fundraising strategy/planning insufficient to meet the need for which this tool is the (potential/alleged) solution?

2. Why can’t we ask our membership to fund the need directly or through existing channels?

Which is not to take a reactive stance against any adoption of any new tool, but to ensure that we are investing in creating a stable base of individual donors who will fund us regularly and consistently—and building the organizational capacity to ask people for their money honestly, confidently and DIRECTLY.

See also FreeGeek Chicago’s Funding Statement; an excerpt:

We believe these questions should be kept in mind when pursing funding:

• How does funding sustain or improve something FreeGeek Chicago already does?

• How does funding make FreeGeek more sustainable?

• Who provides the funding? Do their values and behavior match FreeGeek’s mission and values?

• Has FreeGeek planned for the time when funding runs out? Where does it leave us?

• What forms of overhead does the funding create? Do we have the organizational resources to properly manage the transactions?

• What forms of accountability go along with the funding?

• How could the obligations of funding affect our organizational structure and community process?

• Can the goals of a funding source be better filled by another organization (either existing or to be created) outside of FreeGeek?

• Does the funder require personal information from participants? Are we comfortable asking for that information?

From “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron who ask the question “who would have suspected that as technology and freedom were worshipped more and more, it would become less and less possible to say anything sensible about the society in which they were applied?”:

The Californian Ideology derives its popularity from the very ambiguity of its precepts. Over the last few decades, the pioneering work of the community media activists has been largely recuperated by the hi-tech and media industries. Although companies in these sectors can mechanise and sub-contract much of their labour needs, they remain dependent on key people who can research and create original products, from software programs and computer chips to books and tv programmes. Along with some hi-tech entrepreneurs, these skilled workers form the so-called ‘virtual class’: ‘…the techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developers, and all the other communications specialists…’ Unable to subject them to the discipline of the assembly-line or replace them by machines, managers have organised such intellectual workers through fixed-term contracts. Like the ‘labour aristocracy’ of the last century, core personnel in the media, computing and telecoms industries experience the rewards and insecurities of the marketplace. On the one hand, these hi-tech artisans not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment. As a result, the cultural divide between the hippie and the organisation man has now become rather fuzzy. Yet, on the other hand, these workers are tied by the terms of their contracts and have no guarantee of continued employment. Lacking the free time of the hippies, work itself has become the main route to self-fulfillment for much of the ‘virtual class’.

The Californian Ideology offers a way of understanding the lived reality of these hi-tech artisans. On the one hand, these core workers are a privileged part of the labour force. On the other hand, they are the heirs of the radical ideas of the community media activists. The Californian Ideology, therefore, simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism. Ever since the ’60s, liberals - in the social sense of the word - have hoped that the new information technologies would realise their ideals. Responding to the challenge of the New Left, the New Right has resurrected an older form of liberalism: economic liberalism. In place of the collective freedom sought by the hippie radicals, they have championed the liberty of individuals within the marketplace. Yet even these conservatives couldn’t resist the romance of the new information technologies. Back in the ’60s, McLuhan’s predictions were reinterpreted as an advertisement for new forms of media, computers and telecommunications being developed by the private sector. From the ’70s onwards, Toffler, de Sola Pool and other gurus attempted to prove that the advent of hypermedia would paradoxically involve a return to the economic liberalism of the past. This retro-utopia echoed the predictions of Asimov, Heinlein and other macho sci-fi novelists whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, superslick salesmen, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists. The path of technological progress didn’t always lead to ‘ecotopia’ - it could instead lead back to the America of the Founding Fathers.

Freedom is Slavery

If its holy precepts are refuted by profane history, why have the myths of the ‘free market’ so influenced the proponents of the Californian Ideology? Living within a contract culture, the hi-tech artisans lead a schizophrenic existence. On the one hand, they cannot challenge the primacy of the marketplace over their lives. On the other hand, they resent attempts by those in authority to encroach on their individual autonomy. By mixing New Left and New Right, the Californian Ideology provides a mystical resolution of the contradictory attitudes held by members of the ‘virtual class’. Crucially, anti-statism provides the means to reconcile radical and reactionary ideas about technological progress. While the New Left dislikes the government for funding the military-industrial complex, the New Right attacks the state for interfering with the spontaneous dissemination of new technologies by market competition. Despite the central role played by public intervention in developing hypermedia, the Californian ideologues preach an anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism: a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism. Rather than comprehend really existing capitalism, gurus from both New Left and New Right much prefer to advocate rival versions of a digital ‘Jeffersonian democracy’. For instance, Howard Rheingold on the New Left believes that the electronic agora will allow individuals to exercise the sort of media freedom advocated by the Founding Fathers. Similarly, the New Right claim that the removal of all regulatory curbs on the private enterprise will create media freedom worthy of a ‘Jefferson democracy’. [28]

[…]

Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is ultimately pessimistic about real social change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not struggling to build ‘ecotopia’ or even to help revive the New Deal. Instead, the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right have converged into an ambiguous dream of a hi-tech ‘Jeffersonian democracy’. Interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where hi-tech artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the ‘virtual class’, the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the Californian Ideology’s technological determinism is not simply optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the future.

From the response by Louis Rossetto, Editor & Publisher, Wired Magazine:

A descent into the kind of completely stupid comments on race in America that only smug Europeans can even attempt. (Any country which prohibits its own passport holders from residing within its borders, or any people who are currently allowing genocidal war to be waged in their own backyard after the stupefying genocide of WWII, shouldn’t be lecturing Americans about anything having to do with race, much less events which occurred 200 years ago.) The charge of technological apartheid is just plain stupid: “Already ‘red-lined’ by profit-hungry telcos [isn’t every company, by definition, “profit hungry?”, although that description in this context is also stupid since telcos are regulated monopolies with government enforced rates of return], the inhabitants of poor inner city areas are prevented from accessing the new on-line services through lack of money.” Oh really? Redlined? Universal telephone access is mandated in the US. And anyone with a telephone has access to online service. Lack of money? On-line is cheaper than cable television, and you can get a new computer for less than $1000, a used one less than $500.

The utterly laughable Marxist/Fabian kneejerk that there is such a thing as the info-haves and have-nots - this is equivalent to a 1948 Mute whining that there were TV-haves and have-nots because television penetration had yet to become universal, the logical conclusion being that, of course, the state had to step in and create television entitlements. This whole line of thinking displays a profound ignorance of how technology actually diffuses through society. Namely, there has to be a leading edge, people who take a risk on new, unproven products - usually upper tenish types, who pay through the nose for the privilege of being beta testers, getting inferior technology at inflated prices with the very real possibility that they have invested in technological dead ends like eight track or betamax or Atari. Yet they are the ones who pay back development costs and pave the way for the mass market, which, let me assure you, is every technology company’s wet dream (the biggest market today for the fastest personal computers is not business, but the home). Not haves and have-nots - have-laters.

Last year I interviewed Richard (Dick) Howe, Lowell’s Registrar of Deeds about the impact of his participation in a Community Mapping class I taught at LTC in Spring, 2006.

The interview came about as a result a NTIA administrator asking the Transmission Project for evidence of a community training initiative that resulted in the creation of something of lasting economic or social value to a community, specifically a brief “ example in which tech training –> spurs creativity –> results in innovative outcome”.

This is what I submitted:

As a result of community technology training, the city of Lowell, Massachusetts better targeted public safety resources during the foreclosure crisis. After attending classes on online community mapping offered through the local Community Media Center, Lowell’s Registrar of Deeds created a series of maps of foreclosed properties in the city. These maps helped the city government see foreclosures not as isolated incidents but as patterns within specific neighborhoods. This analysis allowed the city to better target these areas in distress with police and public services, helping reduce the safety and community impact of foreclosed and abandoned properties. Speaking about the online community mapping class, Registrar of Deeds Richard Howe said “Beyond the nuts and bolts, it was inspirational and opened my eyes to that type of technology”.

Beyond that brief summary, my interview with Dick gave me a lot of insight into how he benefited from the online community mapping class—benefits I hope I and others are able to reproduce in all their technology trainings. Those benefits Dick explained fell into three broad categories: functional skills, a greater general appreciation of technology, and a sustained curiosity for the topic.

Function Skills: 1. As a result of Dick’s participation in my class, he gained the functional ability to create map mashups using tools like batch_geocode, Google Maps, MapBuilder.net, Platial, etc.

Dick used these skills to plot foreclosures in Lowell, extracting data from the registration of deeds and creating map mashups to show geographic distribution. These maps got some attention from the Lowell Sun newspaper and the Lowell City Council, alllowing them to “see” neighborhoods or sub-neighborhoods with significant foreclosures. These maps helped the city to allocate resources (police, public services) in a more rational manner and helped shift the perception of foreclosures from isolated events to more systematic patterns. That helped the city direct limited resources to issues caused by crisis (abandoned properties, crime, etc.). Without a visual depiction on a map, planners and public servants would have had to rely on their knowledge of the city.

On his personal blog, Dick mapped campaign contibutions for congressional and county seets. He took data from the campaign contributions and mapped where residents were contributing from.

An issue Dick identified though was that he never cracked through to a larger scale. He created the maps manually and because of geocoding limits, he would have to break the dataset down by neighborhood before recombining them. He further has had difficulty making the climb to more advanced tools like ArcGIS.

**Greater appreciation of technology: **For example, on his blog Dick takes pictures of olding building in Lowell. When he purchased a new digital camera, one of the big selling points was that the camera imbeds GIS data into the picture. Furthermore, Dick says he now is always on the lookout for websites and apps to use for communications:

“I was given imagination and vision on how it can be used,” he said. “If a project came along, I’d have the motivation to figure it out.”

Sustained curiousity: Dick says he is more likely to look behind the scenes of technology and do stuff. During the class I talked about the power of Drupal and its plugability and CMS features, which we were using for mapping. This led Dick to create a Wordpress blog and move off of Google’s free services. He’s now teaching himself PHP & MySQL.

“It got me interested to look under the hood” Dick says, and gave him confidence to to try things that he would otherwise have thought were too hard to use, but is more functional and tailorable to what he wants.

In his work as the Registrar of Deeds, Dick uses the knowledge and experience he gained in class. Working with different state agencies and contractors, like MassGIS and Applied Geographics, he is trying to better link deed and ownership information with maps, shapefiles and photography resources. Dick does though see difficulties in the bureaucracy as different priorities, such as access-limitation and security, results in pushback. He takes the long view: it’s a failure of imagination today but folks will catch up eventually.

Ultimately, Dick said the class “Raised my sights and capabilities to the stuff that can be done.”

I put this chart together after a friend told me my project productivity was unusually high. I picked out the major web projects I’ve done over the past several years and highlight how they’ve influenced subsequent (or previous) projects. Every one of these projects launched or shipped… except the DigitalBicycle, which is why it holds a special place in influencing all Project Design (we never did make those “defunct” t-shirts).

This month, the lights on Meet AmeriCorp—a directory and messaging service for AmeriCorps members that launched in 2006—has gone dark for the last time. With over 450 members and a long history of technical problems and blackouts, I’m relieved to pull the plug though a little sad that the 80,000+ AmeriCorps members who serve every year still have great difficulty connecting with eachother.

Meet AmeriCorps started as ServiceSpeak in 2005, which was my introduction to CivicSpace—Howard Dean’s presidential campaign-technology spinoff—and eventually led me to Drupal, the platform Meet AmeriCorps is built on (Drupal 4.7, to be exact). The design was minimal, but I spent many hours on enriching the experience for users—which still annoys me 5 years and 3 major Drupal releases later that Users are still 2nd class Drupal citizens when it comes to treating them like a fully-fledged content type. This meant repurposing a lot of specialty node fields and taxonomy code (like tag clouds) for users; and creating rich lists of users and fun stuff like geographic hierarchies (clicking through a weighted tag-cloud of States to see a weighted tag-cloud of Cities). Looking back, the code wasn’t pretty (and there were a few hacks to core [shudder]), but Meet AmeriCorps, for being 5 years old, still has more character and spunk than many modern Drupal-based websites.

Technology aside, Meet AmeriCorps scratched a lot of philosophical and ideological itches—from organizing to communication and technology—in a time when no one was sure if Facebook would stick (not to mention the advertising and personal data collection, either). Last year, when it was finally clear that Meet AmeriCorps should be sundowned, I penned this open letter about the project and the AmeriCorps ecosystem in general:

Since we launched this website, first as ServiceSpeak then Meet AmeriCorps, our goal has always been to connect AmeriCorps members and alumni. Networking members, within communities and across the country, enables them to learn from one another and bonds them in the shared experience of service. We believe this creates greater well-being in members, greater impact upon the communities they serve, and greater strength to national service as a whole.

5 years ago the technology needed to create a successful online community required both commitment and technical skills. Frustrated with the lack of investment by AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), we spent considerable time surveying, designing, building, launching, and incorporating feedback into Meet AmeriCorps. We were informed by our own experience as AmeriCorps members and motivated by our desire to better recognize the innate experience and ability of its corps members.

Today, anyone can create an online community without significant resources or technical skills. Online social media and social networking tools now require only passion and commitment to create thriving communities of practice. Many new communities have already been created by other AmeriCorps members who identified the same needs and opportunities we did so many years ago.

Unfortunately, AmeriCorps and CNCS still place little emphasis on connecting and networking their members. Official websites are created without community input, poorly designed, rarely communicated to members, unmoderated by knowledgeable staff, and frequently replaced with equivalently disengaged websites. Communication tools are designed for top-down announcements rather than bottom-up dialogue, and even then are used rarely to meaningfully inform members or recognize their abilities and impact.

We are glad that technology is now accessible enough for AmeriCorps members to connect themselves. We are disappointed that that AmeriCorps has not done more to lead, nurture, facilitate and inform these networks. With the energy of the Obama administration and its complementary focuses on both national service and empowering uses of technology, we hope that AmeriCorps and CNCS will better recognize the individual benefits and national impact a purposely and well-connected corps can have.

In community,
The Meet AmeriCorps Team

This afternoon I have been following the mis-framing of Chicago’s newly announced plan to release 10 years of… not crime statistics as has been reported, but… police incident reports. From the Boston Globe:

Chicago to publish crime stats online

CHICAGO—Long a city with a reputation for withholding information, Chicago now wants to make public every crime over the past 10 years – a highly unusual move among the nation’s major police departments.

Starting Wednesday, millions of crime statistics dating to 2001 will be posted online in a searchable database. It will be updated daily, providing fodder for residents to evaluate their own neighborhoods, academics to study crime and techie types to create websites or apps.

I’ll harp on that last sentence in which the “techie type’s” activities are described so rudderlessly: this data will fuel a hundred red and green heatmaps, but probably provide little opportunity for reflection on the true nature of this data—police incident reports—let alone the politics, policies and policing that generated this data in the first place. Just as an example, this is from a WBEZ story entitled “ The downside of hiring more cops in Chicago”:

But there are also costs with increasing the number of police on the street and those costs can be tough to measure. “The good intentions of actually creating the uniformed presence to lower the immediate problems of crime may have an unintended result when you’re looking further down the line,” according to George Gascon. He’s the district attorney for the city of San Francisco, and before that he was the chief of police. He says low-income, often minority communities, are flooded with police, and residents are over-criminalized. Lots of people are arrested, sometimes for small infractions.

Kids get criminal records, they’re cut off from educational and employment opportunities, and all of that ultimately makes the crime problems worse. “I’m not saying that we should look the other way to crime, to the contrary. What I’m saying is that the strategies that we used in the past have not worked well, and we need to evolve away from that. In many neighborhoods basically we have been at war with our people,” Gascon said.

An incident does not make an indictment, and an infraction need not be a crime, let alone a conviction; nor should we forget what goes unreported. And yet this dataset is being distributed and—this is the actual problem—represented by the media and (soon) a myriad of websites and apps as full-stop crime.

This is not a criticism of the police or the City of Chicago, who should be commended for being more transparent and making this information more readily available; this is a plea for the media and application makers to appropriately label this data and use it with an understanding of its limitations.

Ben Fry, on visualization future and data literacy looks toward the future:

“I think the real thing that’s going to change is that we’re going to start understanding that visualization isn’t this sort of monolithic thing… I like to look at it a lot like writing. You have novels and poetry and haikus. You know there’s lots of different types of writing and styles of writing — and I think the same thing happens in visualization… some things are tools for analysis and some things are purely for entertainment, and there’s not so much a spectrum that there is different ways of addressing it.

But this understanding and widespread “data literacy” is not here yet. It’s up to us so called techie types to exhibit “Data Leadership” and work to better interpret and explain the complexity and nuance of our analysis—the absence of which I’ve complained about before.

Data leadership is appropriately labeling data. Data leadership is presenting data with a recognition of its limitations. Data leadership is consideration for how your presentation of data may be interpreted and responsibility for the consequences.

Data leadership is ultimately a recognition of the broader context of human experience and how information is collected, analyzed and integrated into our lives and decision-making processes—both individually and socially. I realize that’s awfully heady for discussing glorified spreadsheets, but to riff off the old chestnut, you can’t manage what you misrepresented.

(Thanks Justin, Bec and David for drawing my attention to this.)

I seem to be quoting this all the time, so I may as well archive it here. From Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice, authoring “Why GLAAD Doesn’t Represent Me”: a response to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) coming out in support of an AT&T-T-Mobile merger:

Worldview. Why does AT&T have such power in civic organizations from the DC beltway to your hometown? Well it isn’t because these organizations are dumb, or simply because they are struggling for resources or ill-informed. No. These organizations are often run by brilliant leaders of integrity. Instead, I think it’s because many groups have internalized a worldview that prioritizes getting our piece of the American pie, rather than one that seeks to remake the pie into something we can not only eat, but create and control. In the context of decimated public and municipal infrastructure, and an economic environment where jobs are scarce- the promise of contracts, work, and money, coupled with the belief that wealth equals freedom, promises mean a lot. Even if history proves that when it comes to big industry, promises not guaranteed by regulation are made to be broken. As a movement for justice, part of our mandate is to shift beliefs and values about the role of corporations in our lives.

Photo from  awesome teacher @paulramsay who used PrintAndShare.org to  share his classroom’s DonorsChoose Project.

As a result of building PrintAndShare.org I am hyper-sensitive to the drawbacks of URLs—which is my service’s weakest link. I’m using bit.ly shortened URLs that unfortunately have an ambiguous mix of upper and lower-case letters; ambiguous both in terms of typeface (els and ones may look identical), but also that many people expect URLs to ignore case; for bit.ly that can be difference between reaching the specified DonorsChoose project page or… well… anything else on the internet which, statistically-speaking, I can say is something they definitely don’t wish to see.

Regardless, I’m disappointed that bit.ly doesn’t acknowledge the need for transcribable URLs. Below is a ticket, since closed, from their support forum (I’ve reformatted it):

From Chris Rabb’s Invisible Capital on business plan competitions.

As a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator, I know firsthand the opportunities they have to help their clients develop invisible capital as well as the challenges that incubators face. When I was the vice president of entrepreneurial programs at a nonprofit-based business assistance organization born out of an independent study conceived by Wharton MBA students, I was asked on occasion to be a judge for a business plan competition, a feature of the program mandated by its well-intentioned philanthropic funder.

The participants were all under twenty-five years old. Some were high school dropouts, while others had earned their GEDs. Some were attending or had received an associate’s degree fro the Community College of Philadelphia, and a few were students at the University of Pennsylvania or Drexel University.

Invariable, the winners of these business plan competitions were students from the more selective schools. Were they more entrepreneurially oriented than their counterparts? No. Were they harder working? No. Were they more business savvy? No. Were their ideas or business models more compelling than those of their less educated peers? Rarely. So why did students from elite schools always win these competitions? Two words: invisible capital.

The Penn and Drexel students were more adept at using technology. They could write better. They were better trained in conducting research. They were more confident speaking in front of audiences. Their projects were often connected to experiences they had working in other professional or educational environments, and their plans incorporated how they would secure funding, talent, or customers based on their various social networks. They had more human, cultural, and social capital, not to mention economic capital. It wasn’t even close.

The problem with these competitions, I soon realized, was they did not rate the viability of the business model but the ability of the contestant to advocate for her venture in clear, substantive, and compelling ways. While this is important, it was not supposed to be the purpose of the competition, which was to reward the person with the best business plan, one that (at least in theory) would be related to the most viable business model. However, the contests always turned into a virtual beauty contest, where beauty was defined by eloquence, clarity of thought, poise, presentation, and the use of language often associated with conventional intelligence (aka cultural capital). Eliza Doolittle [of “Pygmalion”, which Rabb references throughout this chapter] mimicked the patrician ladies, and in so doing, she was accepted as their peer regardless of her intellect, values, or skills. To them, Eliza’s most important tacit skill was her ability to assimilate.

The winners of these business competitions walked away with a nominal prize, big smiles, and their egos stroked. The losers left with serious mixed lessons. First, many undoubtedly thought that their business concepts and models were inferior to those of the winners, without any indication why that was the case (when in fact it rarely was). Second, they did not know how influential their lack of invisible capital was in diminishing their chances of excelling, largely because they didn’t even know that the were being judged (albeit unconsciously) on the amount of invisible capital they brought to the competition.

This August marks the completion of my 7th year in Boston, with the loose exceptions of the 1 month I commuted into Boston from Ashland, and the 1 year I commuted out of Boston to Lowell.