Net Tuesdays or Net2 Local gatherings provide a chance to connect locally with all those interested in the intersection of social technologies and social change. There are new groups forming every week: Join in!
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
Talkin' N2Y2 Blues
So it's been a long road to this long blog post; I've had lots of good discussions about this year's Net2 program with lots of great folks, including my fine friends at CompuMentor. And now I want to share my concerns with the Net2 community and hear what others think about the structure of the N2Y2 agenda.
I have nothing but love and respect for the whole CompuMentor posse. Marnie, I often name you and Jon Stahl as the two "sensei's" whose shared insights have been most formative in my journey to understand the nonprofit technology space. Daniel, you're arguably the most successful entrepreneur in the nonprofit tech sector, with 20+ years of success stories, millions a year in revenue, and a thriving array of programs, projects and products. And Billy, you're one of my best new buds, a man after my own heart who keeps it real, always wants to hear the truth, and sees yourself in service to the sector. Plus CompuMentor has partnered on and sponsored Aspiration events, so we're operationally grateful to boot.
And I totally appreciate the goal of this year's N2Y2 endeavor: to shine the spotlight on promising projects, connect them with resources and create greater benefit to the nonprofit tech sector. I so love that vision, and I've definitely benefited in no small way.
But in a nutshell, I find myself "triggered" and otherwise agitated by the design of the N2Y2 agenda, and I've spent a lot of cycles trying to unpack that and figure out why I'm not comfortable being a Net2 featured project competing in real time for cash prizes. I'm fearful of coming off as an ungrateful beneficiary or a whiny lefty, but there are some thoughts in my head that I just have to get out into circulation.
For starters, let me own my circumstances: I got myself in this situation plain and simple. I'm Executive Director of a small nonprofit with limited resources. The Net2 contest offered money for something we were already doing, and I knew my board and my partners expected us to enter Social Source Commons (SSC). I really don't like contests (more on that below), but by the time I threw our hat in the ring, there were 150 other hats already there, and I figured we'd enjoy a bump in traffic, get SSC on a few more radars, and happily continue on our quest towards building a compelling value proposition for our users. I was honestly caught off guard when we were named a featured project, grateful and honored but bemused and confused.
And let me say that the Net2 exposure has been nothing but good for business. We've seen our SSC site traffic double, correlated to the exact days of the contest and subsequent announcements. We've enjoyed corresponding jumps in new accounts and user-contributed content, and more folks are reaching out to us for partnership opportunities. And the process of answering the N2Y2 contest questions made for excellent introspection and self-assessment. Net2 has already realized its goals for SSC.
So then what's my problem?
It's in reflecting on the N2Y2 agenda as a mirror for the nonprofit tech sector as a whole that I really get sad. Funding for nonprofit tech is tough all over; putting an American Idol-style veneer on the process may be innovative on the funder side, but it sure doesn't feel that way on my side of that line.
The Net2 tagline is "Remixing the Web for Social Change", but an agenda model that pits 21 promising projects against one another in public doesn't seem to me the most likely strategy to engender more innovative mashups, interoperability or content sharing between those 21 projects or the sector as a whole. I'd be much more excited to see efforts that reward collaboration among projects instead of competition between them. The N2Y2 agenda format puts me in a veritable Prisoner's Dilemma: do I stand in solidarity with like-minded projects in my field as I have tried to do for years, striving to interoperate, collaborate and blur organizational and informational boundaries for collective sector benefit, or do I make calculated decisions to maximize return to my organization at the effective expense of others? I tag that conundrum with "yikes" and "no-win".
The N2Y2 approach is based on scarcity model (i.e., a fixed $100,000 pie where we fight for the bigger slices) rather than an abundance model (a broad pool of potential collaborators and funders with no set bounds on collective benefit). While the latter is arguably embedded in the former with the N2Y2 agenda, it's a matter of focus and primary paradigm. Michelle Martin recently did an excellent blog post on how "scarcity thinking" potentially affects content sharing in the nonprofit sector, and Michelle Murrain elaborated with her inimitable clarity on parallels in open source software and technology for nonprofits; I take their points and echo them in an open question: is the N2Y2 agenda model moving innovators in the nonprofit tech sector towards abundance thinking or scarcity thinking?
And it's not just the competition component of the N2Y2 agenda I lament. Those who know me and my work know I have no shortage of opinions on agenda design for nonprofit events. The notion that a great majority of 350 brilliant people will be in sit-and-listen-mode for the better part of 2 days represents a real opportunity cost to me; an event that aims to remix the web for social change should arguably remix the agenda for social interaction :^) I also question to what degree the agenda's competition component favors those demographics who are most comfortable speaking in English to large crowds; will the innovation and potential of those presenters who are shy or non-native English speakers really be borne out in this format? Does ability to pitch a room really equate to ability to best impact the sector and change the world?
(Agenda side note: I'm really grateful for Net2's willingness to let me facilitate a pre-event collaborative session among the featured projects in response to my concerns, but I continue to worry whether any collaborative ethos we establish on Monday afternoon will crash like a wave on the beach come Tuesday morning.)
And I wonder aloud how the N2Y2 contest processes (both pre-event and at-event) reflect the values of "content from the edge" that is so often said to characterize this era of internet innovation? It's pretty web 1.0 to let a community vote in a prescribed process; it's much more au courant to let the community design the process. Wikipedia was a total failure before it was a total success, Del.icio.us took years to become usable; they succeeded when they enabled the users to drive the whole process. Looking to the future, I heartily encourage the Net2 team to consider how it would work to engage the community at the outset of the Net2 process design, not just once the rules have been cast.
The internet has catalyzed many "flattenings" in the information economies; blogging has allowed myriad citizens to become de facto journalists, Wikipedia has surfaced an unprecedentedly large community of domain experts who previously would not have been so recognized, and YouTube has fundamentally shifted video production values from expensive sound stages to lo-fi domiciles. Peer-networked economies are taking the best of what many have to contribute and mixing them into wholes that are greater than the sum of the respective parts. But an N2Y2 agenda that puts 21 projects in lonely spotlights and invites them to speak across a conceptual moat to funders, appointed experts and invite-only voters profoundly reinforces old-school dichotomies of power and control, not new-school memes of movement as network.
A phrase that has always held profound resonance for me is "be the change". As such I've struggled my entire adult life, trying to evolve from the ethic of competition that was drilled into me in school to an ethic of collaboration that puts collective benefit ahead of individual achievement. This is to me not so much a matter of self-righteous do-gooderness, but instead a matter of pragmatism. With 25 years as a teacher, corporate software engineer, dotcom exec, and nonprofit director under my belt, my empirical data all points in one direction: to take on global challenges ranging from climate change to loss of civil liberties to hunger to human rights, we have to more effectively pool and coordinate our efforts, not fragment them through competition.
Some may say "competition is a natural state of the world" and "competition breeds innovation"; having had the privilege of a 10-year run in Silicon Valley, I would concur. But in the context of N2Y2, such thinking begs the question of the ultimate goal: is it to fund the coolest tools, or realize the best possible world? I would argue those are not synonymous goals by any means, and that a contest predicated on individual project gain can not possibly yield maximal collective benefit. I realize those are fighting words, but I'm ready to stand my ground. Peacefully :^)
So in a nutshell, stepping on stage at N2Y2 will make me feel immensely conflicted. That's my problem, and nobody else's, but as I've struggled to cast words to convey my mental wrangling, I've felt the need to share the same, and seek feedback and insight from the wisdom of this crowd.
Again, thank you Net2: you've challenged me to be better, you've grown my audience, and you've forced me to analyze in rich detail why I do what I do. I salute your efforts to innovate in the funding of promising social change technologies and I know that your intentions are nothing but righteous.
I look forward to the learnings that a community of comments will yield.
thanks & peace,
gunner
- gunner's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Email Updates
Latest Comments
- Thanks, Joe!
1 week 8 hours ago - Late to thank you for this incredible post
3 weeks 5 days ago - Thank you!
3 weeks 6 days ago
Form and Function
I agree with most of what Gunner has written. There seem to me two arguments intertwined within his post. The first has to do with a set of values. The second has to do with the consequences of 'legitimatizing' values with which one doesn't agree.
I do not differ at all with the first argument. I share those values and try to act on them.
Regarding the second, I have become less of what I would call a purist on this point over the years. I have seen tremendous results from closely controlled, hierarchical management; I have seen terrible results from earnestly democratic decision-making. And, of course, I've seen even more of the reverse.
My point is that while form predicts function, it doesn't determine function. And so, over time, I have come to a position of working with what we have when we have it and trying to work with intelligence, integrity and passion (and, as a close fourth, humor, though you wouldn't know it from this earnest expostulation). Do some things I don't support get "legitimatized" by my support (the Marxists used to say "recuperated" which I always thought an elegant if delusionary choice of words)? Yes. Would it be better to not try then and let the system rot from within? I don't think so (anymore).
NetSquared is so darn imperfect it makes you just want to spit. At every step of the way, there is a road not taken that might have led to a more beautiful place. But the road taken, however problematic and even tortuous, seems to have led us somewhere pretty interesting.
When I read from Gunner:
"... the Net2 exposure has been nothing but good for business. We've seen our SSC site traffic double, correlated to the exact days of the contest and subsequent announcements. We've enjoyed corresponding jumps in new accounts and user-contributed content, and more folks are reaching out to us for partnership opportunities. And the process of answering the N2Y2 contest questions made for excellent introspection and self-assessment. Net2 has already realized its goals for SSC."
and from Randy:
"... By participating in this competition our message has gone out to large numbers of people who would never have heard about our cause. Media has contacted us. We have networked with other organizations in the competition, and I for one have better honed my communication abilities and planning processes. I have won before ever attending the main competition"
...I do think it's fair to say that baked into this messy design and awkward architecture is much that isn't about competing or money. Gunner writes,
"...an agenda model that pits 21 promising projects against one another in public doesn't seem to me the most likely strategy to engender more innovative mashups, interoperability or content sharing between those 21 projects or the sector as a whole."
And I respond: high school geometry aside, sometimes a straight line isn't the shortest distance between two points. As we head into the final week, we can see that the projects are talking to each other, and not just "competing." Actually, I think it's fair to say, the blizzard of information and resources we have unleashed on the projects has pretty much numbed them to the competitive aspect and imbued them with collaborative zeal (if they but have the time to respond to all our emails).
In all fairness, it must be said that nothing has been proven. I can think of scenarios whereby what has been started doesn't scale. I think that it's a delicate mix--to catalyze a process and then know how and when to step back and let the process follow its own logic. It will be tricky figuring that one out. But we can already say, I think:
• New people are in play. Of course, they were already in play in their own worlds, but now they're in contact with intriguing new social web projects and they're acting as business advisors and champions and reviewers and who knows what else over time. This seems like a good thing.
• New money is in play. We've been able to get philanthropy highly involved in this conversation. These people can't be expected to write checks right away -- many of them are the technologists not the program officers -- but they're engaged in a new way with social web projects. Allen, you know better than just about anybody about the blank stares this kind of work gets from traditional philanthropy. I think if NetSquared did nothing except change that a little, it would be a very positive development.
and
• New audiences are tuning in. This is the hardest to define but arguably the most important part of what we're doing. Certain memes spread like wildfire within a contained constituency and then...stop. They don't crossover to the pop charts, as it were. I think a certain amount of what happens in the Open Source world and the social media world can be somewhat oxymoronically described as "contained memes." NetSquared is trying to simultaneously be an implementation project--stuff gets done in real time by real projects for real goals--and a popularization project that widens a conversation and an audience. It may be too wide a straddle, but we'll give it a try.
So back to your first argument. I agree with it. I think we only differ in whether NetSquared is some kind of setback for those values or whether, in a clumsy, exploratory way, it actually tills the soil and applies a good layer of mulch from which lively value-able plants can grow.
I think we both might see this somewhat differently after Net2 actually happens!
In any event, let me say to the world, with critics like Allen, you really don't need friends. He has been at our side, provoking our thinking and leaning into what needs be done since day one of NetSquared One. We take what he writes here very seriously and thank him for writing it.
You make a great point
I couldn't agree more with the take-away message of Gunner's post... Scarcity-thinking is so 20th century.
Gunner deserves a lot of attention at next week's conference just for raising these points and stating them so eloquently. I'm almost curious if his post is actually "a calculated decision to maximize return" disguised as a rejection of the ethos of competition. That's a joke ;-)
You may recall that in an earlier post I referred to my group fundraising campaign as the "collaborative half-time show" within the broader NetSquared competition.
In the next few hours, I will be emailing the 21 organizers of the featured projects. I'm going to ask them to post one of my fundraising widgets on their homepages, and more importantly, invite their supporters to contribute to a campaign that recognizes all 21 projects equally.
It's an unprecedented proposition:
The return on collaboration in this case is 25% more in grant-money for the majority of projects attending next week's conference.
The only way we'll raise an additional $500 per featured project is if all 21 projects make it happen. They are the ones with email lists large enough to recruit 500 donations of $21.
Will the organizers of the featured projects take up the call for collaboration in an environment of competition?
We'll find out in the next few days.
Thanks for this thoughtful response to Net2
Gunner,
Thanks a lot for this balanced and thoughtful response. We're in the thick of things right now and I feel like I need some time to digest this but, mainly, I'd like to see what other folks think. Do Gunner's resonate with you? Do you have suggestions? Do you have a different set of ideas? I'd like to see the community of comments too!
:mw
(we've been collecting the tough love folks have been giving us on this feedback page.)
Marnie Webb
Net2 team
I think that Gunner's
I think that Gunner's thoughts really resonate. Specifically, I think there was a real missed opportunity to architect a process that truely reflected the principles of Netsquared. Those principles should be at the core of every action, decision, agenda and communication.
Rather than build a community of projects, a continuing "showcase" that openly and virally attracts supporters, the architecture of the process set up more of a competition/ culture of scarcity structure.
It is not easy to do anything this complex and at this scale. But I would suggest that the majority of the planning for next year be completed in the 2 months following the conference, so that a more sustainable architecture can be put in place for next time.
Well...."
Some very fascinating and - as stated earlier - very eloquently stated concerns. However I will approach this from a significantly contrasting perspective.
While it is stimulating to address this from the standpoint of theoretical debate, I am forced to approach it from a contrastingly - and desperately - bottom-line point of view.
While there may be some here who view my desperate sounding pleas for support (over the past two months) as rather plainly stated or even overly dramatic, there is a logical reason and it is at the core of why I am perfectly comfortable with this competition and actually invite more of this type of public platform for similar endeavors.
You see I believe that RFP's and grant proposals are very much a "competition" for attention for projects. Perhaps we just choose not to view it as such. Most any non-profit however - like it or not - is forced to function in such arenas and/or competitions.
However, where else can I offer a proposal to gain assistance for people in need - while at the same time garnering attention from the public, the media, foundations and major corporations? If there are other such opportunities and I just have not noticed them, please point them out to me so I can offer our pleas for support there as well.
I suppose you can look at my requests as really almost demonstrating a bit of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Perhaps it is. I have been in so many disasters over the past decade and have seen so many people in dire need, and sadly I have seen so very few people come to their aid.
Our request for aid isn't a theoretical concept or a simple attempt to gain the support needed to continue a paycheck for those involved (and I certainly do not mean to suggest anyone else's project is either). I simply want to make the point that I have personally witnessed countless people suffer and die. While my ultimate goal is to find more support for a project that I know will save countless lives, this competition also provides a platform upon which to voice the needs of these people to the public. A public the majority of whom - are not even aware of these tragic needs.
CONCLUSION:
While I understand and can relate to much of the concern you have raised here (and I would love the chance to visit with you regarding this at the conference) I still feel very strongly the "competition" aspect of this has some very strong benefits that should not be the "baby that is thrown out with the bath water."
Competition makes us all work harder to be better at what we do. Additionally, - in this case - competition also makes for the attraction that brings the public interest to the venue. An interest which some of us desperately need in an effort to save more lives. That is a benefit that lives on even if you don't win the bigger cash prizes. I believe if approached properly the competition is in itself a benefit to each and every one who participates.
By participating in this competition our message has gone out to large numbers of people who would never have heard about our cause. Media has contacted us. We have networked with other organizations in the competition, and I for one have better honed my communication abilities and planning processes. I have won before ever attending the main competition (however please - those of you who are involved in the next voting process - don't think I am finished being satisfied ;-p).
You asked for input. There's mine. File it where you may. I certainly do not wish to offend anyone. But if I need to step on a couple toes to save some lives, I for one am perfectly ok with that.
That leaves one last regret. I sure wish I could write like you. What a gift!
Randy Roberson - Disaster Logistics
H.E.L.P.
rroberson@disasterlogistics.org
www.disasterlogistics.org