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The Point: General Purpose Critical Mass Organizing

I am considering experimenting with The Point, a critical mass oriented organizing tool that can be used for much more than just fundraising. As with other such tools, the idea is that you recruit people to help, but their commitment only kicks in when there is a critical mass of support reached. For example, it can be used to organize boycotts, which are largely ignored when practiced piecemeal, but can have remarkable impact when done in a critical mass. Posted: 11/12/07; 10:08:25 PM #

World Community Grid

Distributed computing projects are rarely mentioned when people are writing about large scale volunteer efforts, but I think they deserve much more attention than botnets, their involuntary evil counterparts. For example, the World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. You can volunteer your unused computing cycles (which is most of them) to projects related to climate, cancer research, AIDS, and many others. Posted: 11/12/07; 10:05:07 PM #

Charities Trying Mergers to Improve Bottom Line

In an article whose title bothers me slightly - Charities Trying Mergers to Improve Bottom Line - Stephanie Strom of the New York Times writes about some recent high profile nonprofit mergers. She acknowledges that experts are not predicting a rash of mergers, despite occasional pressures in that direction, and goes on to describe collaborations that go a long way toward addressing some of those same pressures. Posted: 11/12/07; 9:58:19 PM #

A Typology of Fairness

Over at The Nexilist's Notebook, Burt Webb describes Sandi Greer's typology of fairness. We concern ourselves a great deal with this notion in social change and social service organizations alike. In the former, we want to make things fair and in the latter we want to help those whom we feel life has treated unfairly. But as Burt points out, there are many different notions of fairness. Do we mean equality? Mercy? Justice? How does the context change the meaning? It makes me wonder how often we ask ourselves what we really mean when we say something is fair or unfair. If we pulled at the meanings, would it change how we feel? Would we focus our work at a deeper level? Posted: 11/12/07; 9:54:11 PM #