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Discussion of Failure at Social Edge

There's a nice little discussion of the relationship of civil society to the taboo of failure over at Social Edge. I've written before about how avoiding revealing or exploring failure is a crippling part of the culture of much of civil society. The Social Edge participants explore some of the dynamics of that, present a few exceptions, and point the finger at the dynamics of giving and fundraising as a key reinforcer of this problem. Posted: 5/27/08; 6:02:23 PM #

Boards of Midsize Nonprofits: Their Needs and Challenges

I have long held that the nonprofit corporate model, with its hierarchies attempting to match those of the for-profit world of shareholders, is a poor match for civil society, in which social service and social change have such rich webs of stakeholders. One bit of evidence for this is the fact that board-staff problems are the rule, not the exception. Great effort is required to make this model work. Nowhere does tis become more evident than in the Urban Institute's recent report on the Boards of Midsize Nonprofits: Their Needs and Challenges. The short summary is that leaders are not happy with their boards. I wonder what we could come up with if we took ten percent of the resources expended on board development and instead invested that in developing new organizational models. Posted: 5/27/08; 5:47:40 PM #

Special Issue of Community Informatics: Wireless Networking for Communities, Citizens and the Public Interest

Have you been following what's happened to municipal wireless projects recently in North America? After using every legal and political pressure they could to prevent cities from getting into the wireless business directly so that they would have to partner with ISPs, now those same ISPs (EarthLink in particular) are abandoning the projects. It's in this context that the Journal of Community Informatics has released a special issue on Wireless Networking for Communities, Citizens and the Public Interest. They don't tackle the ISP issue directly and their focus is not limited to the corporate welfare states in which it's happening, but they have some great topics, including: the iReach Project in Cambodia, whether municipal wireless fulfills digital divide promises, and a paper on community building in Toronto by Hanna Cho that we first published in the Journal of Networks and Civil Society. Posted: 5/27/08; 5:36:07 PM #