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News for December 2007
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 21 December 2007 |
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| Deliberate Mistakes |
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I have written a lot about how fear of making mistakes cripples innovation in social change, social service, and philanthropy. So, I was delighted to see Asher Bey take this notion a step further, with the idea of making Deliberate Mistakes in the context of teaching.
Posted: 12/21/07; 1:09:51 PM # |
| Legends of the Fall |
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In Legends of the Fall, Burt Webb offers my favorite post so far in the tantalizing miscellanea that is The Nexilist's Notebook. He explores many of the reasons why nostalgia for "better times" is such a powerful story, whether in politics or charity or in tipsy holiday conversation.
Posted: 12/21/07; 1:01:22 PM # |
| Schlock and Awwww: Commercializing Altruism |
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Markets have extraordinary power to commodify everything: to make abundant things scarce, to control access to them, and to profit from it. (Markets have other powers too, but they are not the focus of this post.) I think anyone who wants to see this power in action should watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and read Jon Mooallem article about the show: Schlock and Awwww: Commercializing Altruism. I was utterly slack-jawed.
Posted: 12/21/07; 12:56:56 PM # |
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17 December 2007 |
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| The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting |
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Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison conducted an analysis of 46 studies on telecommuting and published the results in the Journal of Applied Psychology as The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting (18 page PDF). They found that small amounts of telecommuting have small but mainly beneficial effects on perceived autonomy, work-family conflict, job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and role stress, with no detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships.
Posted: 12/17/07; 5:22:12 PM # |
| iPower to the People |
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In iPower to the People, Jessica Clark explores the "peril and promise of point and click politics". It's not a deep piece and it focuses far too much on the presidential debates (which have been fundamentally flawed since the two major parties ripped them out of the hands of the League of Women Voters), but it's a very solid introduction to the difference between engagement and enfranchisement. The Internet can help even more people be shallow entertainers or it can help them take power. Which do you think we're doing?
Posted: 12/17/07; 5:14:53 PM # |
| 2007's Top 10 Rights & Liberties Stories |
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The staff of AlterNet has compiled a list of 2007's Top 10 Rights & Liberties Stories. Counting down, their titles are: (10) Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo, (9) America Gone Wrong: A Slashed Safety Net Turns Libraries into Homeless Shelters, (8) Life in Solitary Confinement: 12,775 Days Alone, (7) The War on Drugs Is Really a War on Minorities, (6) In Violation of Federal Law, Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing, (5) The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment Gives Americans Rights They Don't Know They Have, (4) Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?, (3) Don't We Have a Constitution, Not a King?, (2) The End of America? Naomi Wolf Thinks It Could Happen, (1) The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy.
Posted: 12/17/07; 5:04:54 PM # |
| The Shocking Stories of the Aid Workers Just Released From Gitmo |
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Andy Worthington is an historian based in London whose recent book is The Guantanamo Files. In an excerpt entitled The Shocking Stories of the Aid Workers Just Released From Gitmo, he tells the stories of Adel Hassan Hamad, a hospital administrator who worked for a Saudi charity, and Salim Muhood Adem, who worked with orphans for a Kuwaiti NGO. Although it's easy to make ourselves feel safer by noting the ways in which we're not like these two men, I encourage you to read this without those defenses in place and consider what these actions and others like them mean for anyone who wants to do good work in the world.
Posted: 12/17/07; 4:59:18 PM # |
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10 December 2007 |
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| Liberate Your Space, a YES! Magazine Theme Guide |
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The current issue of Yes! Magazine is just fantastic. The theme is Liberate Your Space, which is a slightly funky way of describing the enormous range of actions possible in the realm of grassroots activism and social change. (The title really alludes to "Do-It-Yourself Liberation".) Titles from this issue include: Compost Toilets & Self-Rule. Don’t Fall in Love With the Guitarist. Be the Guitarist! Pirates on the Open Airwaves. Building Autonomy, One Co-op at a Time. Zen, Busking & Anarchy. Schools Without Teachers. And Fine Art of Raising a Ruckus.
Posted: 12/10/07; 1:15:57 PM # |
| Signs of Stability: Results of the 2007 GuideStar Nonprofit Economic Survey |
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GuideStar has released the results of their 2007 Nonprofit Economic Survey and it includes a retrospective of the preceding years' results for comparison. Their main conclusion, in regard to things like contribution trends and demand for services, is that things have held pretty steady. Some of the self-reporting might produce some funky results, but the 3,587 respondents is an interesting sample size to work with. Take a look at the PDF of more extensive survey results for some regional details and the like.
Posted: 12/10/07; 1:13:09 PM # |
| Osocio, Social Advertising and Non-profit Campaigns |
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If you like examples of punchy, visual social action campaigns, I recommend Osocio, a blog written by a stellar group of international social marketing professionals. In essence, it's an advertising blog, but with an exclusive focus on social advertising.
Posted: 12/10/07; 1:05:08 PM # |
| How to Run Useful, Inexpensive Focus Groups |
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I'm impressed with the Fieldstone Alliance's recent guide on How to Run Useful, Inexpensive Focus Groups. It's an excerpt from a book (by Judith Sharken Simon), of course, but it's a great little guide on its own. (Unlike those innumerable fluffy "articles" I end up reading, written by the staff of various nonprofit tech vendors.) They lay out a ten step process: (1) Define the Purpose, (2) Establish a Timeline, (3) Identify and Invite the Participants, (4) Generate the Questions to Be Asked, (5) Develop a Script, (6) Select a Facilitator, (7) Choose the Location, (8) Conduct the Focus Group, (9) Interpret and Report the Results, and (10) Translate the Results into Action. Some of the steps are a little lightweight, but the links to additional resources serve to flesh some of them out. The only glaring omission is the subject of how to use the Internet to conduct some or all of these steps.
Posted: 12/10/07; 12:58:58 PM # |
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6 December 2007 |
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| Email Contacts, the Natural Social Network |
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I'll admit that I'm not really into so-called social networking sites, whose distinguishing factor is the collection of "friends" and some access by others to the resulting social graph. Don't get me wrong, the social graph is an important tool, but I don't think we have found the sweet spot for this yet. And yes, these sites have discussion groups and the like, but those have been around for years in one form or another. One of the main issues I have is that our relationships are a reflection of interaction, not the result of claiming we have a relationship. So, it's probably pretty predicatable that I agree with Don Dodge when he says that email contacts are the natural social network.
Posted: 12/6/07; 11:13:28 AM # |
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5 December 2007 |
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| Website Reinvention & Improvement Seminar on January 18 & 25, 2008 |
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Our hands-on, two-part online seminars have proven to be a popular and effective format for enabling participants to make meaningful changes in a specific work area. Obviously, one of the most popular is Website Reinvention & Improvement, which will be offered next on January 18th & 25th, 2008. As we are starting to do with all our seminars, it will be offered in both live and on-demand packages, each of which have their own benefits.
Posted: 12/5/07; 6:04:19 PM # |
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3 December 2007 |
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| How Technology Almost Lost the War |
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The writing on "network centric warfare" has had a surprising amount of influence on some of the best thinking in the field of networks and civil society. Thus it is with great interest that I read Noah Shachtman's article on How Technology Almost Lost the War in Iraq. It's a stinging indictment of how easy it is to focus on technology, rather than people and communication. As it turns out, the critical networks are social, not electronic. This is some sort of big surprise? It seems that in addition to all the other horrific ways to describe the Iraq War, it's also quite possibly the largest and most expensive example of technocentric planning in history.
Posted: 12/3/07; 11:06:37 AM # |
| The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act: A Tutorial in Orwellian Newspeak |
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With what looks like the invevitable passage of the "Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act" it might be time for you to check to see whether your organization has any views that are "extremist" according to the vague language of the bill and it's likely pattern of enforcement by the Bush administration. Does your organization in any way advocate nonviolent civil disobendience? Does it support policies that are in any way out of the narrow corporate mainstream? You might want to worry. And you might want to read Robert Weitzel A Tutorial in Orwellian Newspeak.
Posted: 12/3/07; 11:00:52 AM # |
| Information Society Project: Reputation Economies Symposium |
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As regular readers will know, I have an interest in economic systems that don't allocate economic power based on ownership. This is one of my many reasons for being interested in the role of networks in civil society. So, I wish I were able to attend the Information Society Project's Reputation Economies Symposium, coming up at Yale Law School on December 8, 2007. There are four panel discussions planned: Making Your Name Online, Privacy and Reputational Protection, Reputational Quality and Information Quality, and Ownership of Cyber-Reputation.
Posted: 12/3/07; 10:46:38 AM # |
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