The Future of Foundations

The Open Social Foundation is a new : “non-profit entity jointly proposed by Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google. The goal of the OpenSocial Foundation is to ensure the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property.” You can read the proposal for the foundation here and read liveblogging coverage of the announcement [...]

Questions, not answers, on open source philanthropy

I wrote a book chapter about open source philanthropy. It is in The World We Want, edited by Peter Karoff and Jane Maddox and includes an interview with me called, “Open Sesame: Networks of Cooperation and Open Source Solutions.” It presented seven building blocks for bringing open source principles to philanthropy. Here they are: … [...]

Solving complex problems

(Photo: www.mit.edu. Design by Suzana Lisanti) Solving complex problems is what some foundations claim to be doing. Many more wish they had the guts to stake this claim, but are perhaps more realistic about what they can do. I’ve written a lot about crowd sourcing as a possible strategy for philanthropic ideas and insights – [...]

Open Educational Resources

The Hewlett Foundation Education Program has been a big supporter of work on Open Educational Resources. They’ve launched a blog, called OERderves (I hate puns but that’s a pretty good one) with great links and resources. The site points to other resources on Open Education, Open Course Ware, K-12 and higher education policy. Full disclosure: [...]

Community-based, collaborative decision making

Ashoka’s Changemakers program has announced its Entrepreneuring Peace grant winners. Judges chose 11 finalists from the original 158 applications and then voters from around the world picked the 3 winners. Here they are: Learning Circles: education for displaced children in Colombia Participatory Theatre for Conflict Resolution, Democratic Republic of Congo Palestinian-Israeli Private Sector Dialogue A [...]

Open Research for Giving (ORG)

I posted here about leveraged philanthropy and the many forms in which it comes. Think about all the different ways people share information and make decisions – and all the ways transparency is being re-deployed thanks to the Internet. BioMed Central – an independent publisher of science journals – is a wonderful example of what [...]

Wiser Earth

Paul Hawken and the Natural Capital Institute are setting out to apply good old fashioned crowd-sourced and open-sourced technologies to bring together what he calls the largest movement ever on earth – the sustainability movement. This will happen through WiserEarth. The lead technologist on the project (Oz Basarir) will be speaking in San Francisco on [...]

Open Philanthropy – Building Blocks #3 and #4

This post picks up where I left off in January, excerpting my article on “Open Philanthropy” that appears in The World We Want. Think of the these seven building blocks as guiding principles to open philanthropy. The full list of seven is: 1. Facilitate adaptation, don’t hinder it2. Design for interoperability, local specificity will follow3. [...]