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Top Ten Civil Society Reports of 2006
By Michael C. Gilbert, April 19, 2007
At Nonprofit Online News, we try to include a rich mix of easily digestible tidbits, gateways to varied resources and solid research. The latter often takes the form of freely available reports that, while they might be read in one sitting, may require further study in order to extract full value. This reflects our general belief that, in the context of interruptions and quick fixes that dominates online communication, occasional deep and focused thinking is a good thing for civil society leaders.
It is with a sense of that agenda that we continue our ongoing series of "top ten" articles in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Gilbert Center and Nonprofit Online News with the ten reports from last year that we think are most worth your time. A couple of them are from us, and the rest are from a wide variety of international organizations. All of them have broad implications.
The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy has published a robust Year in Review for 2005. Available as a free PDF, the document includes: The Best and Worst of Public Policy, The State of the States, The DMI 2005 Injustice Index, Eye on the Right, The Year in the Blogosphere, The 2005 Reading List, and How 2005 Changed America. This is solid reading for a sense of how we enter the new year in US civil society and politics.
I was pleased to see the release (Mid Feb. 2006) of a benchmarks study sponsored by a number of major commercial technology providers to the sector, supported by two foundations, and administered by a couple of very respectable organizations. I'm giving this one a careful review, but at first glance I would say it is an important milestone. Some of its conclusions are a little obvious, such as if you spend more money on technology you tend to produce more results. Others are speculative, such as when the authors try to guess what is causing declining open rates. But if you want to know many of the key numbers for some of the largest nonprofit online efforts, you have to read this study.
The UK Power Commission report on the future of democracy has been published. Entitled Power to the People (175 page PDF), it is the result of the work of a politically diverse commission tasked with questions such as: How can democracy survive when we feel politicians don?t listen? How can politics be revived when fewer and fewer of us support political parties? How can voting be encouraged if millions see elections as a charade? The conclusion: The problem is not apathy. Widespread participation in civil society organizations proves otherwise. The problem is the political system and the commission proposed serious reforms.
In my never-ending quest for concepts, strategies, and metrics that will bring civil society organizations into closer cooperation, I have always had a certain fascination with apparent irrelevance of many economic indicators to the work of organizations. A new report (March 2006) from the OECD on Alternative Measures of Well Being (58 page PDF) collects and critiques other social indicators to measure the happiness of the people of the world, its nations, and communities.
One of my concerns about nonprofit technology funding and many nonprofit tech projects is how they fail to take a systems approach to nurturing innovation and leveraging resources. Thinking about nonprofits and nonprofit technology in ecosystem terms can be a very powerful alternative to winner-take-all vanity projects. A strong example of that kind of thinking is provided in the Berkman Center's Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems (45 page PDF). For example, the Openness Maturity Model promulgated in this report is a particularly valuable approach to judging nonprofit tech projects.
The British Government has framed some of their core development and social justice work under the rubric of "social exclusion". I just finished a report on Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies (83 page PDF). Some of the important ICT opportunities include: person-centred government services (rather than agency centred), building community connections, and strategic sharing of information. There is some well targeted thinking in here. I would love to know how the person-centred approach will go over with agencies.
Every now and then, some bit of research really touches on a core cause of social problems, rather than just the symptoms. The recent report on Social Isolation in America (23 page PDF) is one such bit of research. The trends are alarming and revealing. Social networks have shrunk. Segregation by level of education has increased. Does anyone know: Are there major organizations working on this, or are we all just focused on the symptoms? Maybe we need to work our way back even further to identify the causes of isolation. Some of the factors that contribute to isolation that come to my mind include: oil and automobile subsidies, land use regulations, and labor and environmental policies.
In August 2006, we completed a survey of our readers and of the members of a couple of other organizations involved in broad civil society work. We're sharing some of the results of that survey today in a new feature article entitled Toward Network-Centric Philanthropy: Some Insights from the RSS Grants Survey.
The dotOrganize project has released the results of its nine month study of social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders: Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy. (The report is available in a thoughtfully presented web format, as well a 33 page PDF.) It should come as no surprise to any of my readers that lack of data integration and interoperability emerged as a major impediment to effective organizing. The report actually focuses on a rich set of recommendations, including: (1) Define Best Practices for Online Organizing. (2) Enhance Strategic Support and Information Resources. (3) Provide Robust, Flexible, Documented, and Sustainable Software for Social Change. (4) Support Adoption of On-Demand Software. (5) Prioritize Documentation, Ongoing Support, and Training. (6) Aggregate and Share Information on Technology Costs. (7) Increase Offerings to the Full Spectrum of Social Change Groups. Although I'm not sure that any of them will successfully address the data integration issue that they raise as a key issue, I think they have compiled a fantastic set of high level capacity building ideas here.
I had the pleasure (in Dec. 2006) of finishing my first look at the 2006 Blogging Survey that we just completed and the result is Readers as Resources. It compiles the basic results of the three core questions about blogging, social bookmarking, and informal sharing, and wraps up with a few fairly obvious, but very actionable insights for organizations and their stakeholders.
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