Opening Pandora's Box

Today in an internal meeting we were discussing how to help people - potential donors - find projects of interest to them. Currently we allow them to search by country and/or theme (e.g., environment). We are in the process of redesigning this to better emulate how people really search.

Jim Krejci, our CFO (who is by his own admission not a design guy), observed: "You know, Pandora has the right idea - you don't have to tell it what kind of music you like, you just tell it examples of songs or artists you like, and it takes it from there. "

I agree. Pandora is one of the few new services that has made it onto "autoload" in my firefox browser. It is a unique cross between iTunes and online radio.

If you have not used Pandora yet, you should check it out.


[GlobalGiving]

A Little History of the World

Sometimes you read a book that changes the way you see the world - and you wish you had read it decades before.

That is my reaction to A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich.

Gombrich is best known for his book The Story of Art, which is widely used in university courses around the world. History was originally written -- for children -- by Gombrich when he was twenty-six years old in 1935. He completed the writing in an astonishing six weeks. He updated it and translated it into English himself in the late 1990s.

This book is a gem, not only for children, but for everyone.

One of my own beefs about history courses in school was that each class usually jumped in deep into a single place in time. For me, it was difficult to place any of this in context.

Gombrich's History does a marvelous job of putting events that span thousands of years into context. It is written simply, but not simplistically, and friends of mine who are PhDs in political science have loved it.

You don't have to agree with his interpretation of all historical events; in fact the book itself provides a platform from which you can later dive deep into any of the periods covered, and draw your own conclusions.

As Booklist notes:

In 40 brief chapters, Gombrich relates the history of humankind from the Stone Age through World War II. In between are historic accounts of such topics as cave people and their inventions (including speech), ancient life along the Nile and in Mesopotamia and Greece, the growth of religion, the Dark Ages, the age of chivalry, the New World, and the Thirty Years' War. Much of this history is told through concise sketches of such figures as Confucius, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Jesus Christ, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and Columbus.

Get this book - it is a delight.

[GlobalGiving]

Bricks and Mortar

The web has changed many business models and enabled us to scale many activities at low cost.

But we need to keep in mind that bricks and mortar are still with us, and that they often work just fine, thank you very much.

Here in Washington DC's U Street neighborhood, where GlobalGiving's offices are located, there is a bar/restaurant called The Saloon. A few years back, the owner took a vacation in several developing countries.

While travelling, he saw the huge needs - and huge opportunities to make a real difference at very low cost. So out of the profits of the restaurant, he started a foundation and started funding a few small development projects each year - a clinic here, a school there, etc.

This year, he decided he would reach out and see if any of his customers wanted to help fund some schools with him. So he started 'selling bricks' for $100 a piece. You pay $100 and he paints your name on a brick. He calls his program "Bricks for Schools."

I walked by there today and noted that about 75 of his customers have taken him up on his offer. Not bad at all.



[GlobalGiving]

Complexity and Simplicity

I am a late convert to Apple computers, having bought my first Mac only about 3 years ago. I thought that Apple users were just design snobs who valued form over function. And I thought that Steve Jobs was just the uber-snob for refusing to let other hardware makers design devices that could use his operating system.

I have changed my mind.

The Mac operating system - and associated software including iTunes - is beautifully intuitive. And what is better is that this intuitive software is so smoothly integrated with the hardware, including the computers and more recently the iPod.

This weekend while trying to watch the World Cup finals, I fumbled with 4 remote controls on my coffee table - one for the TV, one for the cable box, one for the Tivo, and one for the stereo sound system. All of the remotes are different, and the menus on each device are different. Ridiculous.

Recently I caved in and bought a Treo phone because I was tired of lugging both a Blackberry (which is great for email but a lousy phone) and a cell phone (which does not really do email).

Nice try, but the Treo is so clogged with different email programs, chat programs, etc., that it is a real pain to figure out. And that is true even though I have the Palm operating system, not windows.

If Apple were to make a TV system and a Treo-like phone, they would make a fortune. I am sure they are working on it.

This holds lessons for GlobalGiving, too.

[GlobalGiving]

Fun, Fast, and Free

Our goal at GlobalGiving is to enable donors to support any bona fide, quality project in the world - and, conversely, to enable any bona fide project in the world to seek funding from the global community.

Most projects on GlobalGiving are currently vetted by one of our project partners - a group of 40+ leading organizations with operations in 100 countries around the world.

We are now piloting a community-based vetting process, whereby the GlobalGiving community itself will be able to select new projects to be listed in the GlobalGiving marketplace. This initiative is called the GlobalGiving Open.

Voting in the GlobalGiving Open is fun, free, and fast. Plus you can even win an iPod if you predict the winners better than anyone else. Check it out and let me know what you think.



[GlobalGiving]

You don't have to be Warren Buffett

This blog is usually not about fundraising for a specific initiative. But given the situation in Indonesia, where the May 27 earthquake has faded from the headlines, I am going to bend that rule.

The good news is that there are some absolutely outstanding groups working at the village level to help people recover. The bad news is that not enough money has been getting to them.

As you may know:

• Over 360,000 homes were damaged; at least half of these were destroyed completely.
• As many as 1.5 million people are living in tents and shelters made from debris.
• The health system is under enormous strain.

You don't have to be Warren Buffett or Bill Gates to make a big difference in a situation like this. $25 can buy a school kit to help get a kid back in school, $100 can help re-stock the books in the school library, and $250 can provide emergency shelter to 5 families. If you are in a position to do more personally or raise more in a group, then $4,750 will provide tools for 45 families to clean and rebuild their houses.

One of the most valuable members of the GlobalGiving community has come forward to say she will match the first $5,000 that come through in the next few days.

To give or to see what the options are, go here.


[GlobalGiving]

Warren Buffett Gives Money to Bill Gates

Bloomberg Radio called me today to ask what I thought about Warren Buffett's gift of over $30 billion, in annual increments of about $1.5 billion over the next few years, to the Gates Foundation (see article in Fortune).

I told them that it should be good news, but it could also have some downsides if not managed effectively.

This gift is smart because Buffett did not feel the need to establish his own new bureaucracy to give away his money. He partnered with someone. This is a rare and welcome thing in the philanthropy space.

The gift is also admirable because Buffett is requiring each annual increment to be given away in full each year. This means that the money has the potential for having impact more rapidly than otherwise.

The gift will be good news if it spurs even more high net worth families to become philanthropists during their lifetimes, rather than waiting until they die.

It will be good news if it marks the tipping point toward what Peter Drucker called the new economy of "meaning." Drucker noted that we are entering a period when the binding constraint for many people is not wealth or material goods, but meaning.

Buffett maintained for many years that he was going to give his money away when he died, but not before. Apparently, he changed his mind after watching how much meaning - call it enjoyment, fulfillment, or satsifaction - that his friend Bill Gates was getting from his work with the Gates Foundation.

But the gift could be less than good news if it leads the already huge Gates Foundation to become ponderous, bureaucratic, and top-down. Large organizations and companies face major hurdles in retaining their nimbleness and creativity as they grow.

For many years, I worked for the World Bank, which faced many of the same problems. The Bank grew rapidly in the 1970s. When I joined in the mid-1980s, it was filled with exceptionally smart people. But it had an increasingly sclerotic bureaucracy whose momentum kept it from innovating, and whose size and dominance in the sector led to arrogance and isolation from the real world in many cases.

Some of the larger, older foundations in this country have suffered from the same syndrome.

Let's hope that the Gates Foundation can find a way to avoid the same fate by leveraging the power of partner networks and bottom-up initiatives. That would enable it to be an energetic engine of innovation rather than a increasingly conservative force in the years ahead.

[GlobalGiving]

REAL international giving

The US is by far the largest source of philanthropic giving in the world, and most donors to projects listed on GlobalGiving come from the US.

But over the past year we have seen a steady stream of donors from other countries, not only in Europe but also India, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Australia, and Canada. This trend has accelerated recently, with almost twenty percent of all donors last week coming from outside the US.

Some of this increase is due to innovative companies like the Gap, which are now providing matching funds for their employees who live outside the US for specific GlobalGiving-listed initiatives focused on Indonesia Earthquake Recovery.

We have gotten emails from donors outside the US who are thrilled to have the opportunity to join others in supporting specific projects. These emails make me feel like we are making some progress toward our vision of GlobalGiving as a world-wide community of people working together to make our planet a better place.

[GlobalGiving]

Democracies and Dictators

It has been interesting to watch the widely divergent approaches of two web sites launched by the founder of eBay (Pierre Omidyar) and eBay's first president (Jeff Skoll) via their foundations.

Omidyar.net has puzzled many people since its creation. If you go to www.omidyar.net, for example, you can't figure out how to enter into the community. (Someone - presumably an existing community member - has to tell you to go to http://www.Omidyar.net/home). Further, especially at the beginning, no one was sure exactly what the community was FOR.

All the landing page says is:

We believe every individual has the power to make a difference.
We exist for one single purpose:
So that more and more people discover their own
power to make good things happen.

Once you log in, you can start a discussion about anything. But there is no real moderator or guiding hand. There is a rating system for members and posts similar to Slashdot, with the front page content determined by users' preferences and ratings. It is all very emergent.

By contrast, the Skoll Foundation's Social Edge is much more structured. Its tag line is "By Social Entrepreneurs. For Social Entrepreneurs." The site has a wide variety of news stories, blogs, indexes, interviews, polls, discussion groups, etc. Although SocialEdge depends heavily on users for content, it also clearly has an editor who sets the agenda and decides what goes on the homepage.

Last week, the editor of SocialEdge, Victor D'Allant, was in town for a series of presentations and discussions. When asked the difference between the two sites, he said it is like the difference between a benevolent dictatorship (with himself as the dictator!) and a pure democracy. Both have pros and cons - in fact they serve different purposes. In my experience, Omidyar.net is more about relationships and personalities, while SocialEdge is more about concepts and viewpoints.

The interesting thing - and a point made by Victor - is that it takes a while for communities to gain critical mass and a "personality." I joined both when they were lauched a couple of years ago, but I used them only occasionally at the beginning. Suddenly in the past few months they have both reached some sort of tipping point of usefulness, and I find myself visiting both much more often.

What is this Underdog thing?

Why is this blog called "Pulling for the Underdog?"

Because I like helping people realize their potential - especially those who have not gotten a fair shot so far.

This does not mean everyone will succeed. It means they should have a fair shot.

There are some open and performance-based systems in the world. But in many cases people don't have access to "show their stuff." And so even if their "stuff" is good, it does not get recognized and rewarded.

This holds true within organizations and companies as well as political systems.

One of the pre-cursors of GlobalGiving was the Innovation Marketplace. This was a physical event in the atrium of the World Bank in 1998. It allowed any Bank staff member, without exception or regard to rank, to pitch an idea for funding. At the end of that day, there was a grown man - a senior economist - crying, because he had never had his idea heard by the bureaucracy. If a senior economist at the World Bank was having trouble getting his idea heard, we realized how much harder it must be for most people in the world.

So we decided to do the Development Marketplace in, except this time we allowed almost anyone in the world to participate. This time we had 339 extraordinary finalists from around the world, ranging from supreme court justices from Latin America to NASA scientists to women from Uganda who had never been outside of their home provinces. None of these people had access to the World Bank system. When the Ugandan women asked me whether it was true that the World Bank president was going to hear their idea, I pretty much broke down.

At the end of the Development Marketplace, a woman from South Africa came up to us and said "I didn't win." "Well it's a competition," I replied, "Not everyone can win." "Well when does the secondary market start," she demanded to know, and continued: "Just because the World Bank didn't fund my idea doesn't mean that there are not others out there who will support it."

She was right, and that is how GlobalGiving was born. My co-founder and I resigned from the World Bank about six months later to start GlobalGiving.

GlobalGiving is about not only enabling your idea to be heard by the World Bank president. It is about enabling your idea to be heard - and potentially supported - by anyone in the world.

That is why I call it Pulling for the Underdog.

PS: The Ugandan women beat out the NASA scientist for funding.
PPS: I welcome your comments. Please provide your name and email.