open Democracy News Analysis - peer power: reinventing accountability - Comments

lkcl on "Philanthropy on the commons"

lkcl — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:43:42 +0000

anyone interested in sustainable philanthropy should read "Creating a World without Poverty" by Muhammad Yunus.

here is an article describing the parallels and the good match between free software and the "social business" concept.

professor yunus describes the failure of every single model of business and every single system involving money-transfer between humans to actually deliver and/or be sustainable.

and describes a simple enhancement - actually a very simple change - to the traditional capitalist model - which actually gets results.

the results are startlingly effective.

government funding is ineffective.

charity is ineffective.

phlilanthropic giving is ineffective.

profit-maximising-business is ineffective.

cooperatives are at risk from take-over (ineffective).

"social business" is getting self-sustaining results.

all this is illustrated clearly, concisely in his book.

srheywood on "Philanthropy on the commons"

srheywood — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:10:36 +0000

dstoker

What's missing from this picture is the "third sector" - the voluntary / non-profit campaign or charity or association of citizens which relies on member-donations in cash or kind, and isn't either a profit-making business or a state- or grant-funded enterprise. I'm peripherally familiar with some of these and people I know who are a bit more experienced tend to get hacked off by the local "social entrepreneurs." The story seems to be that some bright spark with a gob full of management gobbledegook tries to take ownership and control of other people's unpaid voluntary activity in order to make money out of it, and goes right back to those same grant-awarding foundations to do it. This isn't about unleasing creativity, it's about reining it in. I'm not saying that social entrepreneurship can never work; just that there are inherent flaws or risks in the idea which seem to be manifest in practice.

dstoker on "Philanthropy on the commons"

dstoker — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:54:12 +0000

I'm currently an intern at Ashoka and they have been promoting an idea that incorporates aspects of "open source philanthropy" which they call building a "citizen base" of support. (citizenbase.org) Away from the funding model of grants and foundations towards a model of participatory/engaged citizens. Obviously the internet lends itself to open-source collaboration but I think there are some examples on their website that show what such a system might look like on the ground.

I agree that Edwards is working off some faulty assumptions. I think the change towards social entrepreneurship is a change towards empowering citizens and unleashing the creativity of private civil society to tackle social problems that government, due to the very nature of politics and elected representatives, has been slow and/or unable to solve.

srheywood on "Philanthropy on the commons"

srheywood — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:54:16 +0000

as I've said elsewhere, non-zero-sum works only as long as there is no conflict of interest. Can we trust Wikipedia to take an objective view of its funders, or would they pull the funding if there was too much embarrassing info on it? Who owns the copyright on the "commons" material on Facebook?