Introductions

Tom Munnecke began by welcoming everyone and introducing the first part of “Improbable Pairs,” a film by Paul Andrews, featuring a conversation between an Israeli who has lost a son, and a Palestinian who has lost 5 brothers to violence in the Middle East.

Mark Miller. I object to the subtext of the film that “Israeli Hawks” are for killing or violence. They aren’t, it’s just a disagreement on tactics. In fact the title “Improbable Pairs” itself gives the negative framing that these two men who want peace are anomalies. Most, on both sides, do.

Tom Munnecke. Why don’t we go around the table and build our introductions around the question of What act of generosity had a big impact on your life? (This Appreciative Inquiry question was suggested by Paul Chaffee, and generated amazingly powerful responses)

Inne ten Have. I’m from Holland. My parents gave me a great deal, and one of the most important things they gave me was the knowledge that what we need are the necessities, the rest is just decoration. I studied medicine, and worked in Cambodia designing artificial legs and working on landmine detection. I recognized that I wasn’t doing it for others, but I like good problems. I can’t get awake to think about problems that don’t interest me. I have a small IT company, it’s a game of gaining trust – Gardenship.

Siegfried Woldhek. Also from Holland. I can think of several instances that people have helped me one-to-one, listened & took me seriously. I’ve been CEO of large conservation organizations in Holland. One fundamental problem has continued to haunt me about conservation work: there are more places that have needs than can be done by the present command & control institutions. The other issue is that throughout those years I’ve gotten calls from people wanting to volunteer or contribute in kind. Well, those people are a pain in the ass because here you are saving the world, and these people are asking for your time. So I’ve left the conservation world and am trying to figure out how to tap into that energy. The key is one-to-one.

Paul Chaffee. Director of Interfaith Center of the Presidio. As I look back on my own learning over they years, I see a hunger for self-organizing, the crumbling of command & control institutions. Generosity is a high value we all hold, but somewhat of a cliché – can we practice it at work? I’ve been greatly influenced by David Cooperrider’s work. He asks the question “Why don’t you study what works.” Out of that has come Appreciative Inquiry. It’s much more useful to spend your time on what you value and what you really want than on the problems. What you hold up as a mirror you soon become. It’s an opening of a door to generosity. I called my son and said, “We’ve got to talk – you’ve never told me what you liked best in high school? Who was your Mr. Chips?” We had a fabulous talk, and a whole new dimension opened up in our relationship.

Gavin White. I come from a long family of educators, and carry the banner of shame in my family of being the only non-educator. My family and I have a rebellious desire to know and to create. They tend to learn through mistakes, through change. This is a gift I can never repay. I’m involved in a number of things, all stemming from this rebellious desire for learning and change.

Ginger Richardson. I’ve been with the Santa Fe Institute since the dawn of time – 15 or 16 years. From the professional side I’d like to thank the people here at their institute for their generosity. And also there’s something to be learned from the nature of the institute in itself – a complex adaptive system in which decisions emerge, and when people at the next tier find out about them they aren’t always happy with it. On a personal note, my husband and I are parents of a differently-abled child, and the generosity I’ve experienced from the community of parents we’ve found is one of the greatest gifts of my life.

Jennifer Kirk. My work is involved in global fundraising. Here’s my generosity story. Twelve years ago I moved back to San Francisco, newly-divorced, no job, no plans, and a friend let me camp on her couch for two weeks. When she’d come home from work she’d nourishment with cigarettes, alcohol, and acceptance. No questions, no demands – just that generosity of opening her home and couch to me. It showed the generosity of simply letting someone into your space, and not begrudging it.

Heather Wood Ion. I com e from northern Canada originally. My first job was on a local newspaper at University, chronicling local leaders. This made me acutely sensitive that community is built on acts of generosity, not self-interest. I’ve been blessed with incredible mentors. One act of generosity took place in Calcutta. I was to be leaving for Oxford in two days. The night watchman of the hostel said, Now you’re having dinner here on the grounds. The beggars gave me a feast, to say thank you for becoming a part of our family. It was tremendously moving to me.

Eric Smith. I’m here because I’m interested in the complexity of the ways we relate to each other, formal and informal, evolved and engineered. Why can a group of people all want to do something together, and all not be able to. My mother dropped out of school at 12 to support her siblings and family. It’s a two-sided thing. One the one side she’s made individuals more strong and secure, on the other side it was based on a strong individual intervening and running their lives.

Harold Koenig. Like Gavin I’m a black sheep – the only non-educator in my family. All the time I’ve learned from others – teachers, patients. I came to understand over the years in my career that if I focused on getting even I would never get ahead. That for me was the message of the film.

Mark Miller. I’m working on an open source initiative called E-rights.org. Also Director of the Extropy institute, a crypto-rights organization – using cryptography to help human rights workers. As a child I read a lot of science fiction, which showed futures transformed by technology, whether for good or ill. I developed a sense of an impending fork in the road: depending on what it is we build, the future could go either way. I also had a passion for world-saving which came from the 60s & 70s. I’ve been involved with the open source community and process for. This is an incredible, decentralized effort of generosity – a passion to see the future come out well by building artifacts that produce improved ways of being, and giving it to the world for free. The passion is to get the technology out there so that people can use it. Networks of cooperation – Hyack.

Nipun Mehta. My official title is Founder of Charity Focus. My question is who I really am. I’m a big fan of outer change through inner change. I have benefited from the smiles of many people, there’s not much to say about that. At some point as I was pursuing promotions in my career I realized that the point was not accolades but satisfaction and a deep connection with life. For me service is the center of my life. Service doesn’t start when you have something to give, it blossoms naturally when you have nothing left to take.

Duane Elgin. I grew up on a farm in Idaho, and in addition to silence there was nature there. Just being there. It’s difficult to put any labels on that experience, but there was at once an extraordinary need for self-reliance, and the understanding that there was a community of mutual support there when you needed it. In 1970 I was on a White House commission looking at the American Future. I worked for six years at SRI doing long-range studies for the National Science Foundation, EPA, etc. I saw these studies were just gathering dust, so I left and since have been a freelance worker for transformation. It really goes back to those roots in Idaho. I trust that we can do it on a global scale.

Jan Hauser. My name is Jan Hauser and I am a recovering engineer. In the 70s I became concerned with what would happen when we have 10 billion people. After putting that concern to the side for a number of years, I started volunteering in the area of sustainability about 5 years ago. I share some optimism with Mark and others that the Internet can cause a different kind of outcome than what you might have expected from radio/TV. Through studying AI in the 80s I became more aware of language, and of the possibilities of re-languaging, of using language in different ways. We can become more sensitive to our use of language. I have an attraction to what is happening here as a grand experiment. My generosity story begins at a time in my life when I was living in Northern California, no friends or family, and decided to go out into the country for a day, upcountry where it was remote and cold. A man began talking to me, and invited me to come to his home to meet his family, and we had a wonderful evening sledding down the hillside, dinner – they opened their home and family to me, a complete stranger.

Michael Litz. I’m also the son of two educators. I enrolled in a university in Nigeria, and the day I arrived it was shut down due to riots, and I was escorted to the gates & told to come back in 3-6 months. I was literally out on the street first day in town. I was taken in by a family who shared the one yam they had for dinner that night with me – one half for them, one half for me. That made a lasting impression. I now work for oneworld.org, a distributed, self-organizing network of organizations, and also for the Benton Foundation. Through this I’ve learned a respect for the innate generosity and sheer inventiveness of people – as opposed to the model of social engineering. The good work is out there whether we know it or not.

Liza Kastagnozzi. I work for Interaction, and umbrella organization for disaster relief consisting of many organizations, both secular and religious. I started an ICT working group – Information, Communications, Technology – to educate humanitarian workers in technology. My mother was a single mom with five children, and she would take us to a homeless soup kitchen weekly to help. This was an early transformational experience that helped me understand the importance of volunteering. I’ve since learned that there is a body of research supporting the generalization that the least fortunate tend to be the most generous.

Murray Gell-Mann. I helped to start the Santa Fe Institute in the mid-80s. Before that I worked on elementary particle theory. Here we work on other problems. I’ve also been involved as a philanthropoid ape, as a Director of the John D. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This has been a glorious adventure that will end next month, after 23 years, when all of my grandfather clauses run out. In response for the demand for an episode of generosity…in 1944, in an act of incredible stupidity, I applied to only one university, Yale, which had exactly one full scholarship. My family had nothing to contribute. By some miracle I got in, and on the same day as the Normandy Invasion I discovered that I had been granted that scholarship. At the end of eight terms, I was told “you can stay for a ninth term, but we want you to write to your unknown benefactor.” At that time I was very leftist, and the names associated with the scholarship (McCormick-Mdill?) didn’t sit right, so I never completed the letter. 30 years later in Aspen Colorado I was introduced to a marvelous woman named Trini Barnes – Katrina McCormick Barnes – she had inherited the family fortune, and decided to get rid of it – opened an office and methodically began to send out checks. One was to Yale, in the name of her brother. If I had written her the letter, saying thank you very much, but I don’t approve of this fortune, she would have loved it – but it took me 30 years to find that out.

David Ellerman. I’m a recovering economist and recovering World Banker. I was a child of the 60s, and as such wanted to help, and do what I could towards social justice. While teaching in the hard sciences I was trying to work with non-profits to help people. One of the striking things I learned was that being generous and of real help is difficult. I became disillusioned with many of the efforts of the left. I often think that the slogan of the left should be “If your heart is full, it’s OK for your head to be empty.”

Dennis Whittle. At World Bank 14 years, Asian Development Bank, USAID. 18 months ago my partner, Mari Kuraishi, and I left to start Development Space. The generosity question has been bugging me. I hold it as a great, exalted thing. I’ve heard 3 categories: 1) People who have encouraged us to do things. 2) People who caught us when we fell. 3) People who put you in a position to learn – not so much actively teach you. I’ve received all those, but the one about learning struck me the most. Humor is an incredible act of generosity.

Suzanne Duhle. I started out my career as a computer programmer in the early 60s – but educated in literature so I’ve had both approaches in my head. I – like Lisa’s mom – was a single mom in Milwaukee with 5 kids! There was a community of street folks who we became a part of their family – I dragged my munchkins there every week. Here at the Institute I’ve been able to serve as a connector of generosity. It has not been about the grants or fellowships, but the personal connections. That is critical – connecting the people who want to do something with other people who want to do something – not helpers & recipients. Like Heather I had an experience of a going away party that was very moving, given for me by city employees.

Juan Valazco. I was born in Bolivia, as a young boy I remember the big revolution of 1952. My family was at the top of the structure and everything was taken away from us – our gold bars, mines, farms, everything. I said to my father, “What are we going to do now?” My father replied, “We are going to educate you. This is the best thing that ever happened to us.” There’s a saying in Spanish, “From a certain type of wood you can only get a certain type of splinter.” I always say if you don’t volunteer you won’t have lived. I won’t be here this afternoon because it’s my volunteering day. I’ve always said, find out what you want to do and go volunteer. Being able to give, at the lowest end, one-on-one.

Tom Munnecke. I’m another son of educators. Got to the point in my life a couple of years ago where I had reached most of my “freedom-froms” and began to look for my “freedom-fors”. Attracted to this notion of chaotic, adaptive systems evolving with a fitness function. The other influence on my thinking was discovering the Web in the early days – seeing what can happen with small set of simple conditions. I had an experience with generosity in India. How can we take this energy and replicate it? Can we figure out a way to connect and ignite this energy?

Summary from Heather. Professional anthropologist’s summary. Parents, nature, growth, education themes. One on one, inner to outer journeys was contrasted with intervention. Theme of daily generosity. Discussion of inherent bias of technology, potential of technology to facilitate non-violent interactions. Importance of strangers: generosity from, education with. Expectation of safety related to generosity. Respect for the innate creativity of others. Theme of unknown benefactors. Theme of lightness, humor, sense of play. Overriding themes of mutuality, bringing forth. Unspoken subtext of the loneliness of individualism, the hunger for community.

Introductory Remarks from Tom Munnecke

I’d like to briefly re-introduce some of the themes from first conference. One organizational model is top-down formal, power-based. This meeting is not about power. It’s about bottoms up, self-organizing nature that can bubble up from below, and amplifying that. Tim Berners-Lee invented URL/HTTP/HTML. Not rocket science. The genius behind it was realizing the potential autocatalytic effect of making these initial conditions available. Making it available on IP, open protocol – didn’t go to AOL or Compuserve. Didn’t go to the experts & ask permission. Went ahead & did it. Didn’t organize it or do a taxonomy. Created a space driven by energy. Sooner or later AOL decided be become compatible w/the Web. Search engines began emerging. Smarter things evolved from simple initial conditions. Ebay & Amazon didn’t use up the web space, they made it bigger – this is what autocatalytic means. Distinction between AC space & AC network – AC space creates more empty space to be filled – see Freeman Dyson. Anything that aspires to be transformational must be bottoms up & grass roots. Identity/Connectivity/Relationship – simple initial conditions, constraints, fitness function that grows it.

What are the initial conditions, constraints & fitness function we can put together for a Giving Space? My game is to produce the maximum humanitarian uplift w/fewest keystrokes. Notion of trust is central. People being custodians of gifts rather than owners. How do you know what a meaningful opportunity is? What are the entities – individuals, groups, churches, URI cooperation circles, etc.? As this approach grows, the power structures will take note and decide to work with it.

The social engineering, problem-solving approach leads to what Peter Senge calls the “general problem addiction loop.” You start by focusing on a problem, you fix it, the fix creates new problems, you then proceed on to fixing the quick fix, ad infinitum. Is the activity of fixing the problem chain equivalent to the good thing, the virtue, that is desired? An autonomy solution takes longer. How to flip from the vicious to the virtuous circle? How do you systemically propagate that in the world? What is the activation energy that will lift people out of the quick fix problem addiction mentality into an autonomous loop? The intuition is that the Internet can play here. Power vs. Energy is a key distinction.

Current (somewhat cynical) model. Donor pool (1.6M non-profits) – recipients pool. In order to be attractive to a donor you need to be specifically talking about 1 problem & offering concrete results. In a giving space if you are a trustworthy player, you will bubble up in the space as a more fit player, and attract more energy. The organization isn’t the owner of your gift, a trustee in a chain of trust. Reputation mechanism for assessing trust. Providing meaningful opportunities to give. David Ellerman’s terminology is the “helper-doer relationship.”

Now Murray Gell-Mann has kindly agreed to share some of his thoughts.

Murray Gell-Mann – On Being a Philanthropiod Ape

I’ll give you my angle on being an philanthropoid ape after 23 years at the MacArthur foundation. The early days were very exciting. Very hands on. It became clear that a number of us had some perspectives in common – one being to talk about positives. That became a hallmark of our work. I didn’t want to follow the crowd, with cookie-cutter mainstream projects. We thought it was important to be a little bit different. It became clear very early that one thing that is extremely cost-effective is research, policy studies, strategic thinking. Being leveraged, it can affect how huge amounts of money are spent later on. I tried to emphasize that it was very worth subsidizing the bringing together of different disciplines to look at problems – “the crude look at the whole.” It’s hard to conserve nature in the midst of a huge war. All the areas are strongly linked. Yet we know it is easier to study large areas by breaking it into parts. But when you put the studies together you don’t get an accurate study of the whole system. Yet we don’t practice the crude look at the whole very much. The technical discussion of a part is treated with great respect at conferences, discussion of the whole is relegated to the cocktail party. Tom Friedman has commented on this in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

A bit about institution building. I was associated with the founding of the World Resources Institute. Besides thought leading to action (policy studies) there is also action. We can think of examples of new practices that spread. I don’t think it’s necessary to be only self-organizing. Examples include debt-for-nature swaps and micro-lending. We didn’t invent these, but we helped promote them. One that I played a role in inventing is rapid-assessment programs. The usual practice was to spend a long time with teams of scientists making the assessment of biological/ecological value. But this took too long – the places were destroyed while being studied. Ted Parker and I invented a new approach in which teams of naturalists who had expertise in quickly, roughly identifying what was there. Ted Parker was the most knowledgeable ornithologist of the Neotropics, and could identify 4,000 birds by sound. Teams are made of people like Ted. Alto Madidi Park was first successful project. Parks on a border are a great way to dispose of a problem border between two countries.

In sciences bearing on mental health we set up interdisciplinary research networks. One of our early successful efforts was in the area of affective disorders, such as depression. We discovered that much of what was already known was not being disseminated to the care-givers.

I’ve been interested in the study of simplicity, complexity, and complex adaptive systems. Evaluation is very difficult, especially if one requires rigorous numerical results. The engineering mentality is not particularly useful in this work – recovering engineers, maybe. Better to ask practitioners in the field.

The model is gardening rather than engineering. This is true of so many things. Putting water and fertilizer where and when they may be beneficial.

A couple of final lessons. One is in connection with engineering. It is extremely important to take into account the possibilities opened up by new technology. Foundations often don’t do this. I begged the MacArthur Foundation to look at new technologies, and they finally did, after 10 years. The other is the importance of human resources. Finding in developing countries leaders or potential leaders in human rights, women’s rights, education, conservation, etc., and giving them training – it doesn’t matter where. This really pays off. Not only leadership, but also technical capabilities. For example, we used local team members for rapid assessment teams, para-naturalists, local people familiar with local forests.

George Cowan joins the room. First President of Santa Fe Institute.

Q: Gavin White. Gardening is like targeted intervention. Do you have any guidelines in rapid assessment model on this?

A: Murray Gell-Mann. The idea in rapid assessment was to make the assessment of whether a place was worthy of protection. Then the job is to find funding. In gardening you do intervene of course, but you intervene to help something to grow. There’s a natural process of growth that you are encouraging or discouraging. Without that it’s manufacturing. There must be decisions, otherwise it’s not philanthropy, it’s just accident.

Harold Koenig. One area that we’ve had success is in the ivory trade. Somehow we achieved this transformation at a large scale.

Murray Gell-Mann. This has been studied, and there is a great deal of controversy: should it be a complete ban, or a controlled trade to help support conservation efforts.

Ginger Richardson. How to apply the rapid assessment idea at the global level?

Murray Gell-Mann. Project 2050. Try to imagine what paths we might follow that would lead to more sustainable futures. Multi-disciplinary teams. Ideological, military, economic, scientific. Very underfunded: $3M from MacArthur, we estimated we needed $8M - $15M. Other foundations wouldn’t contribute; it was very asymmetrical. The MacArthur Foundation were mavericks in the Foundation landscape. Which World: Scenarios for the 21^st Century is a book that came out of that. It is extremely difficult to get even the most brilliant people to get beyond incremental thinking. They weren’t able to imagine a completely different world beyond 5 years in the future, e.g. from growth in quantity to growth in quality.

Paul Chaffee. Doesn’t that have to do with our obsession with analytic thinking, in favor of synthetic?

Murray Gell-Mann. Schiller’s distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian. Here we try to combine the two types of thinking.

Siegfried Woldhek. Weeds are interesting. I’m interested in the discussion of what the plants want.

Murray Gell-Mann. Well, it’s important to make distinctions. The definition of a weed is a hardy plant that I don’t want. Very important to involve local experts.

Siegfried Woldhek. I learned from my experience with the WWF that if we managed to find a key expert in an area, in a task he or she defined for himself, extraordinary things would happen, but it was outside the organization the organization doesn’t see it.

Murray Gell-Mann. What do you mean?

Siegfried Woldhek. The organization doesn’t see it.

Murray Gell-Mann. I don’t think this happens at Wildlife Conservation International. I have the impression that the WWF became a little bit bureaucratic.

Siegfried Woldhek. Even CI has the possibility of dealing with millions of people that is not being actualized at present. We’re talking about liberating the energies of millions of people.

Murray Gell-Mann. Would it be useful to have a meeting on this topic?

David Ellerman. The reason why the gardening metaphor works is you have a sense that there’s a process beyond the engineering one – we have metaphors that express this, lead a horse to water, pull on a string, etc. As you’ve seen over the years complex adaptive systems evolve, do you see a tension between reducing organic processes to engineering terms, or can complex adaptive theory really begin to treat the organic processes?

Murray Gell-Mann. I’ve written about CAP with humans in the loop. Expert systems can’t evolve, but you can assess how well they work, and as a result improve them – this is a CAP w with humans in the loop. Big Blue is an example of this – they brought humans into the loop to teach it chess strategy. Another thing you can do is put the adaptation/assessments in the automatic loop.

David Ellerman. Can we shine a light on darkness to see what darkness looks like? Problems like that are not amenable to engineering solutions. How can we know when the engineering approach is self-defeating?

Murray Gell-Mann. Sometimes you can’t know rigorously, so you try the adaptive approach. Also a lot of things involve co-adaptation, and these are probably not rigorously solvable – e.g. two people searching for each other.

Mark Miller. Why did the Americans come close to exterminating the buffalo, but not the cows? Economist Magazine’s answer is that it was the commons vs. privatizing the commons.

Murray Gell-Mann. Privatization is one way of avoiding the tragedy of the commons, but not the only way. All over the world there are societies that have devised means for protecting the commons other than privatization. I think a lot of damage has been done by the spread of the belief that the only solution to the tragedy of the commons is privatization. Sometimes bringing modern ideas of privatization can disrupt traditional systems that are working quite well. The idea of biosphere reserves – park surrounded by penumbra with less rigid protection, surrounded by an area in which conservation practices are recommended.

Tom Munnecke. Thank you Murray. Here’s some homework for the group: Come up with a name, that can be used as both verb and noun, for positive transformational links. E.g. Zip, zipping.

…...LUNCH……

Tom. I see that Doug Carmichael has joined us – Doug, could you introduce yourself?

Doug Carmichael. I just came from a conference in Canada on Media That Matters. How philanthropy & receivers can be in direct contact with each other. Interesting that I’m sitting in Murray’s seat, because as a young kid at Caltech I was so fascinated by Murray and Feynman that I became a psychoanalyst. Studied with Eric Fromm. Consulted for corporations on leadership and change, worked with World Bank. When you put money into a system you disturb the system, often with undesirable results. It’s really important to create good models for new philanthropy. When we get into trouble we tend to use philanthropy for conservative results. What you guys are trying to do is impossible in principle, but you have such good heart and willingness to try that I’m delighted to be here.

Siegfried. I’d like to see someone identify the critical questions we are here to address.

Heather Wood Ion – Can What Counts Be Counted?

[Note – the notes below are sparse, as this paper is available in written form.]

Dancing Measures Transformation. Deming estimates that 95% of the activity in organizations is spent measuring/counting. Statistics of material inequality. Jonas Salk’s question: “Are we being good ancestors?” Indicators of quality are derived from negative interactions. Women’s Empowerment Program: women become givers. Break down narrow definition of donors. Giving crosses all dimensions of legal, moral, esthetic, social, political dimensions. We limit it by thinking of it in material terms. All of us are givers. Focus on providing a forum for sharing stories.

Harold Koenig. The key word is sustainability. Murray Gell-Mann’s statement that the 21^st century will be decisive.

Duange Elgin – Transformational Philanthropy

[Note – the notes below are sparse, as this paper is available in written form.]

This effort came out of the State of The World Forum in SF in 1999. The approach we have developed is as follows. Build a trusted network of philanthropists. Have trusted people like Paul Hawkins, Amory Lovins, and ask them each quarter to nominate projects they know about, and present them in a frictionless way on the Internet. The missing piece in this is how to interface the trusted human network we’ve been cultivating with the Internet.

Inne. One question I would pose is “Why is there a need for philanthropy?” Another quote is “If you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”

Jan Hauser. Trust is an emergent, contextual property – one person or group may be trusted by one person/group and distrusted by others.

Siegfried. Dee Hock’s work. Command & control institutions can only handle a certain amount of complexity. People love to talk to other people about things that are dear to them. If somehow we can connect this it would be complementary to what present day institutions do. We should be thinking of something that allows tens of thousands of people to connect – we need to be thinking in bigger terms than the famous trusted people.

Jennifer. One of the things I’ve been going through recently is to begin thinking of myself as a philanthropist. If you open up & democratize the sense of philanthropy so it is accessible to each one of us, you open it up to where you can get thousands of individual transactions handled quickly.

Doug. One of the things that can give us a lot of hope is that globalization is self-limiting. At some point people will begin to find that opportunities are local, and systems don’t need to be commensurate to each other at large differences.

Jan. One of my mentors was one of the captains of Silicon Valley. He was running a spreadsheet to where he would open up his new factory, factoring in the local wage rates, inflation, etc. There’s much to be said for the optimism Doug expresses, but doesn’t that assume everything has reached some level end point, where there’s no where else to run to?

Doug. The real wildcard here is how China plays into this. They can out-compete anything you could do elsewhere for a long time. There is some fascinating literature on this, including John Pocock’s book The Machiavellian Moment. The founding fathers read the literature that predicted that there would be problems for the U.S. when the frontier was closed.

Mark. The thing that drives international trade is simply differences – differences of wages are only one type of difference. The notion that globalization is driven by the search for cheap labor is too narrow. Differences of all sorts create advantages. Peaceful global cooperation w/world integrated markets is what we’re looking for.

David. The Transformational Philanthropy Project is one of the leading attempts to rethink philanthropy. Money is not the question nor is it the answer. If you lead with money, and define the industry in monetary terms it will fail. The big institutions are caught in a deep vicious circle because they define their businesses and success in self-defeating terms. The World Bank is far too much an engineering institution, and the current Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, is pushing it further in that direction. Jeff Sachs recently gave a speech at the World Bank, widely attended, and his analysis was blind to everything we have learned. It assumed that people are disempowered by their climate, geography, colonial heritage, we just have to go in there and get more money out of the rich countries into the poor, making people into victims in the process. The speech was enormously well-received, because all the frustrated social engineers were relieved to hear that they didn’t have to think about the tough problems of sustainability.

Tom. Regarding Transformational Philanthropy, the model of influential people and projects is one scale…I can see a whole continuum of scales, so the welfare mother can be a philanthropist as well. Let all scales flourish, and that which is most transformational replicate. Part of my frustration is that there isn’t enough real reflective conversation, it’s all about fundraising. Even to have this discussion is a real service.

Duane. This is a distributed network of intelligence. Fluid and vague. This community can bring wonderful insights – for example the perspective of scale and scalability.

Michael. We have to be careful with our critique of philanthropy. There is a fair amount of self-reflection going on in the halls of traditional