Can USAID Reach Escape Velocity?

Can USAID be saved? The aid agency has been on the ropes for the last few years. First it was folded firmly into the State Department, reducing its independence. Then its problems were dissected in great and depressing detail by a former Administrator, Andrew Natsios. In an excellent paper, Natsios shows how a culture of compliance and caution has overwhelmed the agency, making it almost impossible for even the best staff to deliver results.

Few would argue that USAID is on the ropes. But there are some bright spots that offer hope. One of these is LAUNCH, a global initiative formed by NASA, Nike, USAID and the U.S. Department of State to identify and to support innovations that meet the world’s urgent challenges. LAUNCH will announce the winners of its Health Forum on October 30.

The aid field has been dominated by solutions that are top-down and incremental. Instead of trying to simply “procure” the cheapest or the best available solutions from the usual suspects, LAUNCH challenges nearly anyone to come up with breakthrough ideas. Bottom-up solutions alone won’t save USAID anymore than purely top-down ones will. But if the agency can achieve a critical mass of bottom-up initiatives, it just might escape the gravitational pull that threatens to have the agency crash and burn.

Fortunately, LAUNCH is not the only such initiative at USAID. Others, such as Development Innovation Ventures and Global Development Commons, are also pointing in the right direction.

But there is one more thing. USAID and other agencies need to make sure they are addressing the right problems. That, too, will require new approaches since aid workers and experts are not always in touch with what beneficiaries actually care about or need.

Whatever Donor Wants?

But before we rush to the toolkit and assume that better data is all that donors want and need, it’s important to take a step back and remember that while metrics are critical and have their place, they’re only one piece of the puzzle. As studies indicate, there are other equally-important things to consider, among them, personal relationships, family dynamics, social networks, values, and commitment to particular causes or issues.

That is from a nice article by Cynthia Gibson in the Non-Profit Quarterly.  As someone who studied economics and cost-benefits analysis in grad school, I probably appreciate and rely on data more than most.  But at the same time, I also realize that data is not what determines most decisions - even at so-called expert aid agencies and foundations.

For many years, I was annoyed by this and felt that harder arguments and more facts would sway people. But changing human nature, as desirable as that may be, is something rarely achieved.  So perhaps, as I noted earlier, the best approach is to try to work with - rather than reform - human nature to improve decisions about philanthropy and aid.

For marketplaces like GlobalGiving, this does not mean giving up emphasis on data and impact.  To the contrary.  One of the key functions of a good marketplace is to use metrics in the background to drive the average quality of projects higher and higher over time - and to do this while enabling donors to find good projects that resonate with their personal relationships, family dynamics, social networks, values, and favorite causes.

Developing Communities - Not Countries

Guest post by Felipe Cabezas.

"There is no such thing as the Western world and the developing world." – Hans Rosling

The speakers at Monday’s TEDxChange stressed countries’ progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Even though countries have not universally met them, they have made impressive strides in a relatively short period of time – so much so that classical divisions between the “developed” and “developing” worlds are now muddied.

Yet we still refer to developed/developing countries, North/South and First/Third Worlds in our discourse.

But data implies that development functions on a smaller scale rather than on a larger one. When Hans Rosling dissects country bubbles in his visualizations, he illustrates that average information hides vast differences between regions’ development achievements. He argues that, because “there’s such a lot of difference within countries, it’s not relevant to have [average data] on a regional level. We must be much more detailed.” Bill Easterly takes that extra step and, by zooming into New York City, reveals that significant socioeconomic differences exist even in neighborhoods consisting merely of city blocks.

We already know this. So why do we still refer to developed and developing countries?

This linguistic habit blurs details and positions communities in need to disappear from view. Take Bennett County, South Dakota. Life expectancy in the United States is 78.11 years but in Bennett County is 66.6 years – on par with Azerbaijan, considered a developing country in the 2009 Human Development Report. But by using a developing-country framework, funders will invest in health initiatives in Azerbaijan – not in the United States. What about Bennett County? Doesn’t it warrant assistance, too?

This is not to say that organizations do not assist communities. They do. So then let’s reflect that in the way we speak!

Let’s refer to developing communities instead of developing countries.

This may seem like an insignificant change, but it alters the underlying cognitive framework that serves as the basis from which aid organizations operate. Incorporating developing communities into our lexicon portrays the world as a patchwork of variably developed communities that does not conform to national boundaries – a framework that more accurately reflects the reality of development.

Urban Agriculture Challenge: Communities Helping Themselves (With Delicious Results!)

GlobalGiving nurtures bottom-up, community-based solutions to pressing social problems. We believe in the power of small over large, local over centrally planned and grassroots over top-down. This is why we jumped at the chance to partner with Bonterra Vineyards and Growing Power to support urban agriculture.

Urban farms help low-income communities access fresh food, generate employment, enhance food security, and improve quality of life. Rather than relying on fast food chains or large supermarkets, urban residents with access to a local farm can eat fresh fruits and vegetables grown right in their communities.

I grew up in Kentucky. It’s a great state. But parts of Louisville have been labeled “food deserts” due to the lack of accessibility to fresh food. Through its urban farms, Breaking New Grounds not only brings fresh produce to these underserved neighborhoods, but also provides agricultural training to local residents, and creates new, environmentally-friendly jobs.

In Denver, while fresh food is available in summer, winter months often mean relying on food grown and processed thousands of miles away. Feed Denver catalyzes urban farms that can be operated year-round, giving urban dwellers access to high-quality food from January through December.

Until October 7, these urban agriculture programs – and several others - are participating in an online fundraising challenge on GlobalGiving, with the chance to win up to $20,000 in contributions provided by Bonterra Vineyards.

To further highlight the power of communities working towards a common goal, the Bonterra-Growing Power-GlobalGiving challenge features a collective group incentive. If each participant raises at least $2,000 from 25 or more unique donors, all will receive a $1,100 bonus from Bonterra Vineyards. As on a community farm, each participant’s individual effort will contribute to the larger good. I like the taste of that!

Why Peer Review Works in Science, and Why We Need It for Aid

Guest post by Marc Maxson.

"Calls for aid reform assert that better evidence will lead to better policy."

What if this isn’t true?

What if policymakers don’t really care about whether their policies align best with the evidence? Are we screwed?

No. Good systems can still achieve progress and coordination in spite of the people within that system. The example I know best is scientific peer review.

You might think that the peer review process is a system to weed out garbage and improve publications – but that’s a pleasant side effect. The actual “system” is built around these three components:

1) One “cannon” – Scientists within a field implicitly agree that there will be one shared body of knowledge, to which everyone will contribute. This knowledge can be spread across hundreds of journals because (a) all use the same peer review mechanism and (b) specialized search engines (PubMed, Web of Knowledge, and Scopus) index virtually everything – reducing the odds that an important paper will go unnoticed. Grantmakers also consult the one cannon before allocating.

2) Forced confrontations – Scientists must face their critics and respond to them. Most neuroscience papers are submitted at least 3 times, meaning you get to read about your professional inadequacies a hundred times over a typical career. Peer review also alerts your most successful competitors ahead of others, further pressuring you to address the weaknesses in your paper and resubmit. Dialogue results.

3) A reputation system for scientists (see the H-index) – This system fairly reflects your breadth and depth, ignores non-peer-reviewed work, and requires that your work not only pass peer review but also be valuable to others (frequently cited).

Science is simpler than international development. Knowledge is the only measurable output, and the system outlined above reinforces quality. Moreover, the relationship between scientists and grantmakers is driven by the quality of that knowledge, which is determined by one's peers - not the grantmakers. The NIH program officer doesn't need the knowledge he is funding; he wants to know how many people cited it and what the author's cumulative impact (H-index).

What happens when people try to game the system?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that scientists are only concerned with their own reputations. Scientific facts become a means to an end: prestige.

A scientist could try to publish a bunch of “facts” to vault his career, but only peer reviewed “facts” affect his prestige. Four or more quasi publications equal a peer-reviewed one; that's a lot of wasted effort.

A scientist who promotes his “facts” outside of journals won’t get cited and could get “scooped” by a competitor. These non-canonical publications win the media and public but lose in grant competition. The “herd” protects itself because the H-index never lies.

Groups of scientists colluding to publish each others’ papers and move their reputations forward also fail, for a number of reasons I explain in my longer post.

Dialogue

The best part of the system is that scientists are forced to confront the other viewpoint in order to publish and be heard by the larger community. This is something that is badly needed in aid, because it is currently an afterthought, and disorganized. Some discussion questions:

Q: What incentive do aid practitioners have to discuss work with their peers?

Q: How can grantmakers in international development work from a common set of knowledge, as science grantmakers do?

Q: What compels people to consider different viewpoints before acting?

Q: What is the basis of personal reputation in international development?

Q: What happens when we replace "experts" in the peer review model with "crowds" of beneficiaries?

Q: Could a system that guides grantmakers in this way work in international development?

Air-Traffic Controllers' Lesson for Development

Guest post by Felipe Cabezas.

Thinking about the recent buzz about aid transparency on my flight from Milwaukee to Washington, DC, I wonder if we will use more information to improve programs’ effectiveness or to conduct business as usual. Of course, a large part of that depends on how we gather – and display – information.

Perhaps we should turn to air-traffic controllers for guidance.

Air-traffic controllers oversee specific airplanes within a specific flight zone – not the entire air space. When trying to land an airplane, they communicate directly with the pilot and elicit pertinent information. They already know some things (for example, current weather conditions) but rely entirely on the pilot for airplane-specific information (for example, mechanical issues). When assessing information from multiple airplanes, air-traffic controllers discuss among themselves and develop a plan to land all of the airplanes within their flight zone. But this plan continually evolves. At any moment, an unexpected problem could occur which would cause the air-traffic controllers to adjust their initial plan. And because air-traffic controllers are not flying the airplanes, they need to constantly share their updated plans with each pilot to ensure that no airplane lands unsuccessfully – or worse, collides with another. All of this occurs from the moment an airplane enters a flight zone until it reaches its terminal gate.

So, what do air-traffic controllers teach us about aid? Just as Dennis wrote earlier, actionable, transformative information comes from the right sources and is provided to the right people at the right time.

From the Right Sources: We must communicate directly with beneficiaries as well as other stakeholders who have been the primary source of information in the past. Beneficiaries have critical information that experts do not have. But experts also have information – including lessons from experiences elsewhere – that beneficiaries do not have.

To the Right People: Aid agencies and stakeholders must collaborate not only ex-ante but also during implementation. Aid agencies devise programs that are intended to help beneficiaries. Due to unexpected problems, no aid program works perfectly as designed. Stakeholders (especially beneficiaries) must provide feedback, and aid agencies must listen and readjust their programs accordingly.

At the Right Time: A donor-stakeholder feedback loop must exist in real time. Beneficiary feedback is key. An unexpected problem must be identified and corrected immediately to ensure that a program remains on course. If not, then the program may not serve – and may even harm – the beneficiaries.

Air-traffic controllers want their airplanes to land successfully and rely on a robust, real-time feedback loop to prevent a pile-up of airplanes on the tarmac. Errors have catastrophic – and visible – consequences, which is why good feedback systems have been invented.

The costs of failed aid programs are less visible but no less tragic. The good news is that the right kind of transparency can lead to feedback loops that improve program impact significantly. A recent study in a small area of Uganda showed that improving transparency around the performance of health clinics reduced infant mortality by 33 percent, thereby saving an estimated 550 lives – the same number of people that a Boeing 747 holds.

Aid and Aviation

This guest post is by Felipe Cabezas.

When flying, do you want to know this information?

Before I board a plane and while I’m in the air, I don’t care about aviation statistics. They fly (get it?!) out the window. I could not care less about how many planes landed safely worldwide in the past year.

Or this information?

Instead, I worry about my flight. How are the weather conditions? Are there any mechanical issues? Did the pilot have a good night’s rest? These are the factors that will determine if my plane lands safely at Reagan National Airport. Flight so-and-so that landed safely in LaGuardia a week earlier does not factor into the equation – by a long shot.

Now, that’s not to say that aviation statistics aren’t important. They’re good to know when booking a flight and assuring myself that traveling by plane is safer than by car. But the only times when I seriously consider them are before and after my flight . . . when I’m on the ground . . . safe and sound . . .

When I read articles, documents and position papers about international aid and look at accompanying graphs and charts, I wonder if we focus too much on aviation statistics. (Child mortality worldwide has decreased by X percent over the past decade.) That’s good to know, but we’re not on the ground. We’re in the air. Perhaps we should start gathering more information about specific flights and assessing it more closely to gauge how likely we are to land safely.

The Democratization of Aid

Graphic from the World Bank's EVOKE game

This piece on Mari and the inspiration for GlobalGiving is great. It explains accurately and concisely the rationale Mari and I had when contemplating leaving the World Bank to start GlobalGiving.

The article explains, “But Kuraishi had spent years working to change the world with a top-down approach and saw its shortcomings as clearly as its strengths. The idea of top-down is that if you can effect change in governments and economies, then you’ll naturally reduce poverty and improve lives. And while that approach works, Kuraishi decided there was also room for a bottom-up approach—especially in countries with weak or corrupt governments. ”

Indeed, when we left, that was the idea–an alternative model that would grant access to funding and markets to people and communities that were otherwise left out, whether because their government was too corrupt or they weren’t established enough to acquire high-level grants with big institutions like the World Bank or USAID.

That was and is our vision. But, as the article documents, our vision is also expanding with our success.

Tara Swords writes in the article, “Eight years later, the organization has raised US$29 million for grassroots charity projects in more than 100 countries. Perhaps Kuraishi’s former World Bank colleagues should reconsider.”

I won’t lie. I smile every time I wrap my mind around the extent of our growth and success (2,800 projects now funded, in fact). And you might wonder what thoughts cross my mind when I read thoughts like “Perhaps Kuraishi’s former World Bank colleagues should reconsider.”

What runs through my mind is hope.

Because our success indicates that this model is working, and will continue to work.

But what makes me even more hopeful is that as I realize the effectiveness, potential, and power of our model–now tested for eight years–I’m increasingly aware of the possibility that GlobalGiving will not only serve as an add-on to traditional aid structures, but actually can serve as a model on which to base their work.

My hope is grounded in reality.

The World Bank’s Urgent Evoke project, for example, is a brilliant concept that puts development entrepreneurship into the hands of, well, anyone. And next month, they’ll be working with us to launch the funding component where the best, brightest ideas will have a shot at the GlobalGiving marketplace.

But the impetus and the seed money for this huge undertaking came from the World Bank.

This initiative is new, innovative, and smart. Not your standard World Bank funding fodder. I commend them for this type of open-access initiative.

I also admire their documentation of best practices and lessons learned, including what hasn’t worked. That’s brave and serves as powerful learning for the entire development community–exactly how it should work.

There are other hopeful signs out there of a shift in aid–that’s it’s moving, albeit slowly, to recognize that the true potential for change lies within the people and communities who are affected by the world’s problems, and not necessarily the people who write the most effective grant proposals.

So, when I hear others comment on our success, I’m hopeful. We no longer want to just be the guys who left the World Bank. We want to be part of a larger community of people dedicated to the democratization of the aid process. And it’s happening!

Democratizing Development: Hayek, Easterly, and Roberts Edition

Easterly makes two points about the search for solutions or at least things that might help poor people live better lives. One is that solutions are often proposed in isolation and are unlikely to work in isolation. Second, any solution that is going to work is likely to come from the use of local knowledge or at least dispersed knowledge rather than some expert who proposes some solution from the outside without local knowledge. These are both Hayekian insights.

That is from a nice post by Russ Roberts on an entry by Bill Easterly titled "The answer is 42! Why Development is not about solutions, it’s about problem-solving systems."

Taken together, these two posts provide much of the theoretical underpinning of the approach we are pursuing at GlobalGiving, to wit:  There are no universal panaceas, only solutions that work in specific places at specific times.  We want to help lead the formation of a marketplace (in the broadest sense, not just our own online marketplace), that effectively intermediates demand (for solutions) and supply (of money, networks, and expertise).

In such a market, there are rich information flows that go far beyond simple transparency.  Such a market generates information about what local people want (not what experts think they should have), about what approaches can meet those demands, and about whether ongoing initiatives are working - and how they could be improved.  All voices - regular citizens as well as experts - are heard and considered. This market is iterative - needs and solutions change over time based on both learning and shifting conditions.

Such a market subsumes but goes beyond aid itself.  It is part of a larger system of democracy.  It is the Democratization of Development in the fullest sense.  We are far from achieving it, but we are making progress.  As I have written here and here, the question is whether the official aid sector is going to help lead the charge or is going to be left behind, slowly fading to irrelevance.

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• There's an app for that? The needs for a shared platform in development (owen.org)
• The future of development (now on video) (chrisblattman.com)
• Is aid (and World Cup) success in the error term? (chrisblattman.com)
• Essay: Hayek: The Back Story (nytimes.com)

Emotional Transactions

It’s always nice when someone gets you.

Seeing this post by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatch, about our work here at GlobalGiving gave me that sense.

He discusses how GlobalGiving uses the power of an “emotional transaction” to do good in the world—by allowing people not only to provide money to a cause, but to support an idea with which they genuinely connect.

This is the spirit we hope to foster through GlobalGiving: not only should we give to help change the world, but, in doing so, we should be engaging—intellectually and emotionally—with the people, ideas, and approaches that resonate with us and mean the most.

It is among those ideas—particularly when selected from among a vast marketplace—that we’ll find the most powerful ones (the “levers,” as Bill points out) to genuinely shift people and communities towards positive social change.

That’s what GlobalGiving is all about. Thanks, Kevin, for really getting us.

Related articles by Zemanta

• GlobalGiving.org's Mari Kuraishi on personalized philanthropy driven by natural disasters (boingboing.net)
• Is aid stuck using IBM punch cards? (aidwatchers.com)
• The Androids are coming, is aid ready? (aidwatchers.com)
• June 18 bangalore #3 Succeeding on GlobalGiving (slideshare.net)
• Dennis Whittle: Crowd (fill in the blank) is Good for Giving (huffingtonpost.com)
• Dennis Whittle: Iterate and Adapt - Now Repeat (huffingtonpost.com)

I wish I were as smart as Steve Jobs

I wish I were as smart as Steve Jobs. His innovations at Apple are extraordinary in terms of both the products and the marketing. If you want to see a master at work, watch Jobs' most recent talk announcing the new iPhone.

I am probably going to break down and get an iPhone; even the luddite Steve Pearlstein says he is going to do the same.

Alas, I am not as smart as Steve Jobs.

But you know what? It does not matter, because I am surrounded by a lot of people who know a lot more than I do about a lot of different things. And those people are responsible for the fact that GlobalGiving grew by over 500% in the first five months of 2008. (This amidst reports that philanthropy overall will be flat or even down this year.)

Who are these people that more than make up for my mediocrity?

First and foremost are the amazing people and groups who run the projects listed on GlobalGiving. If you want to learn something about innovation, these are the among the most creative people in the world. They achieve extraordinary results with extremely limited resources.

Then come the donors and partners on GlobalGiving who generate more ideas than I could ever even dream of. If you want to know how we stay ahead of the curve, you should read the results of our surveys.

And last but not least are the exceptional people we have here at GlobalGiving. The challenges of creating a whole new way to connect people around the world are huge. Not only do we have to keep the operation running smoothly and efficiently every day, we also constantly have to invent new things - or more often respond to the ideas proposed by our users. This requires great skill, imagination, and coordination among our supply, marketing, BD, finance, and tech teams, who are truly awesome.

These are the heroes of GlobalGiving. And, fortunately, they free me from the burden of worrying about being as smart as Steve Jobs.


[GlobalGiving]

It's not about the mileage...

"Oh, it's not really about the gas mileage, it's about the power. This thing has 340 horsepower, and will do zero to sixty in under six seconds, and I can still feel good about it." - new owner of a Lexus hybrid.

When we started GlobalGiving a few years back, there was much fanfare about the concept of social return on investment. The idea was that philanthropic donations are analogous to financial investments, except that the return is social in nature (# of children educated, workers trained, etc) rather than financial.

But I soon realized that most people do not use an "investment" mentality to make decisions about their philanthropy. Instead, I found, philanthropy is much more like consumption than like investment. People derive immediate gratification from the act of donating and supporting a group. Often a donation is much more about the donor than the donee.

Katherine Fulton of the Monitor Institute agrees that philanthropy is not like investment. A couple of years ago, she defined philanthropy as "an expression of values" by the donor. I thought this was right on, and I started using her definition instead of my own.

But lately I have started thinking that maybe we are saying the same thing. Consumption often is an expression of values, not simply a calculated act of getting the most for your money.

One of best known examples of this is the popularity of the Toyota Prius. By most analyses, it takes many years of driving to recoup the extra cost of the the hybrid engine, despite the much higher miles per gallon. When you ask people why they buy the car despite the long pay back period, they will often say "Oh, well I bought this thing just to show I care about the environment."

Here is another example. I recently bought a Subaru Outback. It is a very popular car among people who care about the environment, and I have been amazed at the "brand" that this car has built among environmental activists. I like this car for performance reasons (it will go anywhere, winter or summer), and I like being a card-carrying member of the enviro-community. But here is a paradox: My Subaru gets lower gas mileage than many BMWs.

And last weekend while at the Solar Decathlon on the mall in Washington, DC, Mari and I ran into a friend. She told us she was going to install solar panels on her roof. I told her that we had considered that but that the payback period was so long it did not seem feasible. "Oh, I am not doing it for the pay back, I am doing it because I like the idea of solar power."

So consumption is often "an expression of values," too, just like philanthropy.

[GlobalGiving]

Uh oh...time to stay home

I am sick and tired of flying. I fly so much - back and forth to the west coast all the time, up and down the east coast occasionally, and then overseas a couple of times a year. I can't stand the airport, the waiting lounges, the crowded planes, the long waits, the jet lag and the arriving in Oakland at midnight and having to drive 45 minutes to get to my hotel in Palo Alto.

It turns out the earth can't stand me flying so much either.

Today, I took an eBay-sponsored carbon footprint test here at the PopTech conference. The average American has a carbon footprint of about 9.5 tons per year, it tells me.

The good news is that I walk to work instead of commuting each day, so I don't burn any fossil fuels on my commute. I feel pretty smug about that. On the other hand, I drive out to West Virginia most weekends to get away from the city. Overall, I feel like an average emitter, and that's what the test tells me.

UNTIL...I take into account my flying. All of my flying adds another 33 tons per year of carbon emissions. This makes my carbon emissions FOUR TIMES the national average.

I had heard that flying was one of the biggest culprits in carbon emissions by individuals, but I had not fully grokked that until I took the test.

Boy, now I really *have* to get serious about flying less.

[GlobalGiving]

How it works

In case you have been wondering:




[GlobalGiving]

The DALY show

Did you know?

- Thanks to investments in global health futures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is likely to overtake Microsoft in earnings next year.

-In a dramatic move, KBR (formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton) is repurposing all dedicated military support operations, betting future earnings on investments in clean water and basic health infrastructure.

If you had been reading the blog over at the Center for Global Development, you would know know these things.

[GlobalGiving]

A Pickup Truck Full of Giraffes

Yesterday I went to a CGD seminar by Gregory Clark, author of the new and highly acclaimed A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Clark presented many provocative slides that upset conventional wisdom about the dynamics of economic growth, social welfare, and happiness. But he spoke so fast that it was often hard to grasp the logic or even the points he was making. And then at the end he summed it all up into one big theory and sat down.

It being a (friendly) academic setting, the panelists immediately went at Clark with an aggressive slate of questions and doubts. I have to admit I was sympathetic with the questioners. His thesis seemed rickety, even though the individual points were very interesting.In the first few rounds, Clark handled the questions well and good naturedly.

And then he did something highly unusual and candid.

He said, "Listen, this book took me twelve years to write, and it was murder. Many times I did not think I would finish it. I had all of these novel facts and insights but could not come up with a way to pull them all together.

"Sometimes I would get two insights connected to each other, but they would be contradicted by a third. And then I would get the first and third insights in harmony, but the second one would not fit. "

And then:

"It was like having a pickup truck full of giraffes and trying to get them all to duck at the same time when you're driving under a bridge."

This image brought a wide smile to my face and was so endearing I will definitely buy his book.

[GlobalGiving]

Real Facebook

While pondering the Facebook.com phenomenon, I realize that many younger users have never seen a real facebook. For their edification, here is the back cover of mine from 1978-79.

You had to buy a facebook back then. Mine cost $2.50, which equals about $7.75 in today's dollars.

By contrast, Facebook.com is free (not counting lost productivity at work for users).

My how far we have come (or gone)...




[GlobalGiving]

Ordinary Bills

A few months back, NPR featured GlobalGiving on a podcast titled "Ordinary Oprahs." The host, Michel Martin, wanted her listeners to know that they did not have to be Oprah or Bill Gates to be philanthropists. GlobalGiving enables them to have a significant impact in countries around the world for $10 or $100.

Bill Clinton's Global Initiative meetings start today in New York, and I can attest from personal experience that they are quite the jamboree for heads of state and large philanthropists. Clinton has done an extraordinary thing by bringing together so many powerful people to focus on international giving.

Of course, not everyone can be in New York those meetings this week. But not to worry. GlobalGiving allows us all to be "Ordinary Bills."

[GlobalGiving]

Ning hits 100,000 networks

In his book At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman creates a framework for predicting whether autocatalysis will occur. Autocatalysis is a form of emergence whereby molecules or other agents catalyze the creation of other molecules or agents in a manner that builds on itself. Stuart uses this framework to construct a theory of the emergence of life. His approach builds on complexity theory and is related to the "New Kind of Science" tools developed by Stephen Wolfram.

Stuart posits 3 main conditions for autocatalysis, as I recall. There must be (i) a large enough number of agents; (ii) enough diversity among agents; and (iii) the right number of connections between agents (too many connections between agents is as bad as too few). His model provides actual coefficients for these variables for certain types of systems. I have always thought that it might be possible to apply the same theory to fields such as economics and the emergence of cities.

The Ning platform has now reached what may be a critical mass in terms of number of agents. Ning's founder, Marc Andreesen, says in a recent post that people have now created over 100,000 social networks on Ning. He also says that there is huge diversity in the nature of the networks being formed: some are small networks of friends formed around an event - say a birthday party. Others are larger networks formed around an affinity - say for a particular sports team.

The interesting question is the optimal number of connections *between* networks on Ning. Marc argues that the social networks themselves are starting to interact. If Ning can surpass critical mass in terms of numbers and diversity, and settle on the right number of links among networks, it could potentially become as big or bigger than Facebook.

Just like Stuart's theory, the jury is still out. But it is worth keeping an eye on Ning.

[GlobalGiving]

"I guess we should have let you know"

"We are sorry - that item was on backorder from our vendor. I guess we should have contacted you to let you know that it would be late."

I hate shopping, so I do most of it online, and use Amazon for the majority of my purchases.

But this email was not from Amazon. In this case, I had decided to give another company my business, since as much as I like Amazon, I don't want them to become the Walmart of cyberspace.

Here is the story: I had purchased some wildflower seeds. Because of my travel schedule, I had a window of opportunity to plant them last weekend. Unfortunately, even though I ordered the seeds over a week in advance - and agreed to pay a $13 shipping charge - the seeds took over two weeks to arrive, and I missed my chance to plant. I was mad, and complained to the company.

The seed company's response was pathetic. Maybe ten years ago it would have been acceptable, but no more. What's worse is that this is the second time this happened to me in the last six weeks. I ordered a life jacket so that my god-daughter would be able to swim safely in the Shenandoah. It did not arrive in time, and when I emailed customer service I got the same exact response...

When I order things from Amazon, I get a good price and free shipping. Amazon promises two-day delivery, but many times I actually receive the item in one day. Amazon's exceptional service has created new expectations that other companies either must live up to or die.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what this implies for customer service in the philanthropy business.

[GlobalGiving]