GivingSpace Meeting Notes
Asilomar Conference
Center
Contributed by Suresh Subrahamian
Monday, Sept 16, 2002
General Introductions
- Matt
Hamilton, Omidyar Foundation – what was making
it work was not technology but community.
- Gautam
Patil, Charity
Focus has has 3 focii
– connecting NPOs to networks, Pledge page, and
community ecommerce. How to empower
remote communities to connect artisans to markets and the
transactions. The model is
completely volunteer-based. How to sustain and scale that model.
- Paul
Chafee, United Religions Initiative.
Clergyman with the United Methodist
Church. Interfaith world – started Interfaith
Center of Presidio. …the story of
United Religions that can bring about peace in the world. 200 local circles in 40 countries are each
working on their own agenda. Uses
appreciative inquiry extensively.
- Eugene
Eric Kim – starting Blue Oxen associates.
To understand how communities share knowledge, and community
knowledge practices. Started
writing about Open Source software.
Provide set of community tools in an ASP model to non profits and
communities to do their work better.
Doug Englebart? Work in bootstrap institute and the Open
Software.
- Michael
Gelobter – Redefining Progress. Social and environmental sustainability
think tank. Create tools for communities and organizations. The idea of common assets,
that are owned by the communities.
In the late 1800s there was the process of turning land and assets
into the hands of the corporations.
Now we are doing the same with genetic information, bandwidth, etc.
are being moved into corporations.
So these are commons that are being given to narrow interests. Claiming and connecting are the two
activities that they believe needs to be done to protect common assets and
benefit the most. Community
indicators manual is one of the better selling products?
- Richard
Miles – marketing of innovative educational materials….noticed a shift in
world view from we need science and tech to manage the world to the view
that the world is a great self-organized and managed system and the
problems are from our efforts to manage it….focus became how to change the
perceptions about this – fulcrum concept – is our relationship to the
planet – after a point everything that was cheap becomes expensive – like
air, water etc…so the cost of fixing things is all included in the growth
curve…we don’t have a growing economy, but a false sense of it…managed
“innovative medicine” conferences for 4 years…the primary disfunction in our times is lack of connection and
touch in our lives.
- Siegfried
Woldhek – Nabuur, Netherlands
– Dreamcatcher, drawing.
CEO of World Wildlife Fund in Netherlands
for 8 years, 750k members. There
are folks who want to volunteer, give..how
to get them to the right connections.
They want to give money and knowledge and contacts. Organize things around places. How to build and collect the
self-organizing energy.
- Cliff Figallo – How to repurpose communities and help the
world. From the days of the Well – online community discussion forum…bought
1000 acres in TN, to build a community – built own houses, roads, stores,
midwives, book publishing, vows of poverty, demonstrate to the world that
it is possible to live this way…some of us are more reconstructed than
others…why do people pay attention…markets are conversations…wrote a book
on building online communities and on putting online conversations to
work…
- Inne Ten Have – media viruses, information viruses… helping
artisans and small communities making themselves stronger with an alternative
to money…complementary currency…work in the area of prosthetics for
limbless people…when people talk of big ideas…people laugh at the
absurdity of the ideas…sniffing out land mines by rats…when you say this
is my project but you can help me – people don’t help…but when you say you
can have it…give it away…people work on it…work of Bernard Lietaer and the Future of Money
- Jack Park – story of being contracted by
the govt to build a giant windmill in Mali…found
that there was a French padre who was helping people get scrap metal and
build small windmills..went
on to microprocessors, artificial intelligence…Scholars Companion
software…underlying piece is that humans tell stories…and it is through
stories that things happen…www.nexist.org/wiki…wikipedia.com…
- Steve
Foster – Link Tank or web cabal – social layer of internet protocols –
loci of identity on the web connected to people – created gopher protocol,
and then veronica.. created
the first search engine…index of gopher linkages…
- Jim
Fournier – part of Web Cabal…every
database, website etc…is an island…some boats going back and forth…but no
real bridges…there is a somesoet of quantum jump..to bring all this togther…digital
identity is coming from the commercial space…Earth Charter…created by a
network of organizations…quote from Bernard…gift economy equals
community…another book called eGaia by Gary on
online communities…debt based economics system is what is driving this
crisis of growth growth growth…and
lack of true cost-accounting…you can ignore externalities..
- Harold
Koenig– 32 years in the Navy…medicine…health care in the US is the finest
in the world…it is the health care financing that is broken…at
Johannesburg 60k people appealing to the governments…the real power is
actually in the communities…the real power is by giving…how can we get
beyond the thinking that only big organizations can do big things…we need
the institutions for specific reasons so it is not the focus that we
destroy these institutions…
- Tom
Munnecke – started with health care system at the VA…visiting scholar at
the Stanford Digital Visions program….Alvin Toffler saying that community
is in short supply in today’s world…noted that all participants spoke of
community in their introduction.
Monday Afternoon Session
Tom Munnecke:
.
- Rather
than fighting problems let us create solutions..discover where virtue is afoot. Discover and replicate success
- Opportunities
– appreciating appreciation, on-line communities, network effects of
transformational energy, micro philanthropy. Smaller and smaller contributions that
can be scaled and transmitted.
Organizations succeed by showing rather than telling. The paper by the two Japanese
writers….appreciative inquiry…Online communities are defined by their
purpose…link communities to transformational activities…augmenting
collective IQ…Transformational Energy…Joy of Giving…attention is
energy…bidirectional…personal/community based…philanthropy means love of
humanity…law of increasing returns…based on intrinsics of generosity,
mutuality, community, trust…community happens…global
connectivity…Complementary Currency…if you create a currency that is tied
to community and trust…then we could continue to grow and build something
that keeps growing…The Future of Money…why not a complementary currency for
philanthropy? Money as enabler not
motivator…Micro philanthropy…one gift of a million dollars versus a
million gifts of a $1…more philanthropists…more transformational
energy…more greater potential for community and trust…much greater
potential for “network effects”…how to reduce friction…working assets
long distance…
- Trust
– comes from repeated interaction – has to be established in different
contexts…3 contexts – idealogical, bureaucracy,
free market…
- Paul
Chaffee: What is Appreciative Inquiry
- How
does community work when it works.
- To
study what you appreciate and love and hone in on what works and magnify
that. It is trying to find the
sliver of light in the dark and magnify it instead of trying to
obliterating darkness.
- Everything
depends on the first question. It
sets the trend for the whole conversation. A few things – the first one tries to
relate the person to the context.
Keep asking what works here?
What do you like about the place?
The second question is what would you like more of
? What do you like about
this village, what would you like more of ? what will it look in 10 years if it were the best
village? What would you do next
week to reach that 10 year goal.
- Trust
has to do with connecting at the heart.
You become like the images you look at. If you look at the success, you become
that. Talk about what is
working.
- Eugene
Eric Kim: Discussion of work of Doug Englebart
- The
concept of bootstrapping. Org have
goal call it A activity. Orgs want to improve
their ability to do what they do B.
C activity is improving our ability to improve. Focus on C then it makes a compound
return on B and A. Where are the
metrics for bootstrapping ideas outcome?
Open Hyperdocument system.
- What
does Englebard means to this group? Propose an Englebard-Nelson
prize for people developing systems for the kind of things being talked
about here.
- Cliff Figallo – transformational energy is governed to a
great extent by how much they have a hand in creating the entity. The communities are not all about everybody
being aligned. Conflict is
important, you want disagreement. If conflict is less than 15% or greater
than 40% of the total of the interaction in an online community it is
problematic.
- Policies
are important for a self-sustaining community. The community must be involved in
creating the policies.
- Cluetrain manifesto.
Most businesses are clueless about using the web. Have missed the point that consumers
can talk to each other, that company folks can
talk to each other and to customers.
So they wrote a manifesto.
The conversation is going to happen whether you join in or
not. Organizations shouldn’t worry
that negative opinions are going to be expressed.
- Tom’s
reflection that if we tip the conversation to a win-win the space
changes. Anonymity tips it the
other way.
- The
Siegfried story about the Rhine – farmers with flooded lands – dykes –
environmentalists – dyke homes.
And the solution with the brick manufacturers who wanted
clay. One observation – the common
purpose came from outside, not from the group.
- Harold’s
reflection that conflict is good as long as people are civil, there is
transparency and there is no hidden agenda. Cynthia’s response that we need a
mechanism to ferret out the devious people.
Tuesday, Sept. 17
- Call
with Dan Connolly, World Wide Web Consortium
- Three
revolutions - HTML revolution – culture of open exchange – I want my data
back…then the XML revolution…the semantic web revolution…grounding terms
in the web…take the terms that define the space and link them to urls that articulate their meanings on the web…and
connect them in a way that machines can understand it…there are better
ways of setting up the web, i.e. the web could have been set up in a
different way, but HTML was good enough and viral and it took off..and now has 2 billion
pages.
- Siegfried
- There
exists a huge global demand for working on problems…and a huge global
supply of people wishing to share money, skills, resources etc.
- This
phenomenon is at a huge scale
- Existing
institutions cannot connect these two.
They can go up to a few thousand connections at best. So no institutional answer to it as
yet.
- The
ought to be is that this connection exists
- How
do you even talk about it when the word for this does not exist.
- The
internet has made it thinkable to talk about it.
- This
is not in competition with existing organizations or a criticism.
- Analogy
is Visa – was not set up as a competition to existing banks but as
something the banks could add on.
- The
scale is so great that no one institution can do it.
- We
need to look for a self organizing phenomenon. The one that comes to mind is
communities, neighbors. There is a
certain amount of self interest there but it is primarily a self-organizing
phenomenon. Why does it
work…because neighbors know one another and someone who may have a
solution, the solution is weighed by the neighbors, and then they
actually go do it.
- Trust
is essential but not as big an issue in proximal neighborhoods. We need to worry about it but not all
that much.
- Nabuur – the idea that there are virtual neighbors
around the world.
- The
starting point is a problem, a common purpose. Need to keep the villages in command.
- The
drive and skills to make this work are present.
- People
love to talk.
- Check
nabuur.nl. Ready to launch on Sept
25th. This year 30
neighborhoods. 100 neighborhoods
next year. Two years to get the self organization done, 2 years to get
the self-financing done.
- What
about problems that span more than one location?
- How
do you get credible local agendas?
- Should
you be looking at communities or problems. A community may join/access the network
when faced with a problem, but would not like to continue a relationship
where they are the recipients all the time.
- Are
the people who are currently in this work going to view this as
competition and feel threatened.
- Matt Hamilton
– Omidyar Foundation
- The Omidyar Foundation is a family foundation.
- Matt’s
role is technology, at least part of it.
- They
have a view of the world they are going to test…there is work going on
where people are trying to help…how do you get
them to the next level. Inform,
Inspire, Engage.
The key to networking in their view is that at the point of
connection diversity plays a key role.
- The
idea of effective communities.
Where people can feel a sense of trust, feel they can speak up, a
forum for meeting, where creativity can be expressed, collaborations
happen.
- Two
key overarching concepts – self organizing. They are not about any particular
problem but about communities.
Enabling environment…tools like XML, resources like a community
center.
- The
idea of community is beyond proximal.
Could be virtual.
- Should
they use the word “enabling”. How about evocation?
- Jack
Park
- If
you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.
- Topic
Maps – are like the index of a book…they are outside of the book looking
in an provide a very little bit of connection
between the topics in the book.
- A
topic is a container that includes names, occurrences, and roles played
by associations.
- Topic
maps – Siegfried was really talking about building a giant topic map of
all the things.
- Associations
are typed – an instanceof, they are pointers to
members
- Occurences point to specific objects in information
resources.
- How
do Topic Maps relate to Douglas Englebart
- Englebart’s ABC Context. A is core activity – work in the
village. B is what is above that
that allows you to do that. C is
above that allows B to happen.
- IF
lots of communities are doing ABC activities, there are ABC activities
going on and they can have conversations at the different levels.
- Networked
improved community.
- Knowledge
Augmentation
- How
to augment storytelling. The skill of writing is to create a context in
which other people can think.
- Story
telling rocks.
- If
we wish to create an augmented story space, a software system with which
users will write stories..
- Then
how do we structure that story space to serve as context in which other
people can think…
- The
link from the Nabuur and Topic Maps on trying
to build a space for sharing learnings and best
practices…
- Cynthia
Typaldos
- Lots
of education and fame.
- David
Reed’s law for the power of web communities
- Web
Sites that have put all the pieces together – the best out there is Amazon. Ebay is actually very primitive.
- Communication
Tools – discussion boards, IM, chat, shared photos
- Community
application portals like Epinions, Evite, Ryze
- The
12 principles of Civilizations – Communities always form around a common
purpose. Purpose, Identity and
Reputation, Governance, and communication and groups and environmental, boundaries and
trust and exchange and expression and history.
- Identity
and Reputation. Reputation is
contextual. Once good reputation
is achieved it creates stickiness.
Peer pressure to achieve status and be recognized. Identity makes members a part of the
community and allows members to be recognizable when encountered again.
- Environments,
interactions need a context.
- Governance
– ranging from democracy to dictatorship.
The ability to form sub-groups.
- Identity
and Reputation are the place to start.
- Has done
a lot of thinking about wireless communities.
- How
to turn theory into software – need user integration and producer
integration. Users can see
applications, identity, reputation, groups, communications. Producers can benefit from consistent
setting of business rules, all applications controlled from one place,
consistent management and consistent monitoring of activity. It does not scale if people have to
manage the community…it is best left to the community to manage it.
- There
needs to be a common purpose and an application around that to have a
real discussion board.
- www.typaldos.com/events/htm
- Is
there anything happening in terms of open file forms or protocols out
there that will allow people who share a common purpose to connect.
- What
do people naturally do today that we can harvest or augment
- Gautam
Patil – Community e-Commerce and introduction to Charity Focus
- Jan
Hauser – CTO of GivingSpace
- Scaleable
Trust Project
- PML
is a way to express the needs of the doers
- Helpers
and doers connected by a chain of trust
- Many
forms of trust. Close knit, Open review and ratingby
group, by Institutional Boundary, Repeated transactions, contract with
informal group
- For
the purpose of beginning – Authentication, Reputation, Accountability
- Scale
of trust and security is a factor of all three
- Authentication
in electronic medium – email, Verisign,
Smartcard, phone call to references is plenty
- Reputation
– authentication of those that provide rating, ratings may reflect
integrity and competence
- Accountability
can compensate for insufficient authentication and/or reputation. E-Escrow, and some rule of law usually
present.
- Techies
often misunderstand that trust is emergent property, technology is useful
but not sufficient, trusted third party quickly becomes essential.
- Emergent
– can come and go, can wax and wane.
- Initial
design proposal – create a space for trusteeship…individuals,
organizations or informal groups.
Totally voluntary
- Must
allow for context. Linkage to
Philanthropy Markup Language.
Spaces for explicit context of trusteeship
- Identity,
reputation, and accountability all mixed together in our real world.
- All
this might lead to new ways of “finding” trust and greater transparency.
- Siegfried
- Came
from far, but we do it out of self-interest.
- Keep
the group abreast of what is happening and solicit feedback and comments.
- Inne ten Have
- Would
have liked to see more happen after the Santa Fe
meeting.
- Personally
would like to help create something practical, an innovation perhaps.
- Tom –
What’s Next?
- HTML
was a grassroots effort…in a rich environment of exchanging documents. It
was not that there were 5 or 6 people created something out of nothing.
- One
of the things that made the web take off was not http and html but the
availability of a multi-protocol browser.
- There
is a great deal of energy built up so something will happen, not
necessarily the best thing to happen.