White Courtesy Telephone

Nonprofits and the Semantic Web

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Consider this scenario from a previous WCT post:

The year: 2235. Zerbina, a successful interplanetary trader, and her holohusband Zork, are waking up to their first cup of Andromedan coffee. They have their central communications unit tuned to Intergalactic Public Radio, and host Robert Siegel-backslash-12 is relating the top news story of the day. An extended Martian drought has left tens of thousands of poor migrant settler families with diminishing supplies of food and water, he reports. One of their spokesmen urges legislators to pass the Emergency Relocation Bill that has been stalled in the World Senate for weeks.

Zerbina is moved to take action. “Computer,” she says, “Who’s helping the Martian settler families?” Instantly her hyperbrowser searches the iWeb for organizations that are providing relief to the beleaguered families, displaying a list of names and profiles on the smartsurfaces of her apartment. She scrutinizes the list: there are 790 different organizations headquartered on six planets and three moons.

“Which of these organizations has the strongest advocacy record?” Zerbina asks thoughtfully.

Her hyperbrowser once again springs into action, instantly sorting through and interpreting tens of thousands of press releases that have been posted to the iWeb. The Intergalactic Immigration Forum jumps to the top of the list.

Zerbina smiles: she knows this organization well. Responding to a small donation she had made to them a while back, they had been sending her holographic newsletters for several months, keeping her apprised of their work. The Forum had long ago applied for and received iWeb Charity Accreditation, enabling the organization to accept secure subspace money transfers.

“Computer,” she says, “Transfer twenty teracredits to the Intergalactic Immigration Forum. Mark the transfer ‘for support of the Martian migrant families.’”

“Transfer confirmed,” replies the machine in a soothing albeit somewhat metallic voice.

In 1986 Tim Berners-Lee, the actual inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an article for Scientific American Magazine titled “The Semantic Web” heralding a new set of tools for the internet that would enable browsers and other automated agents to more easily understand web content. Items encoded in a semantic web page would provide hints about their meaning, bringing us closer to the day when Zerbina and other donors would consult and interact with the internet as they might with a trusted advisor.

The Semantic Web has yet to be realized as Berners-Lee envisioned it. Web pages are not being marked up with semantic clues in significant numbers. A more transparent web might nevertheless be coming to us from a different direction: web-interpreting agents like Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson are getting better at drawing their own conclusions about the meanings of web pages and their contents.

A striking aspect of these new agents, one that holds substantial promise for e-giving, is the degree to which they might be able to reduce donor “friction”—the many steps and processes that interpose themselves between a donor’s initial desire to give and her consummation of a gift. A donor might be moved to tears by a story about homeless children on NPR, but by the time she switches on her laptop, waits for an internet connection, fires up her browser, finds a worthy charity, fills out an online form, and enters her credit card number, her generosity might have dwindled significantly.

Web-interpreting agents like Siri are most likely optimized to extract information from commercial websites. But nonprofit organizations can maximize their online success by doing much more to accommodate human agents. I’ve visited the websites of many charities and been stumped by enigmatic mission statements written in impenetrable Nonprofitese. I’ve been unable, without many clicks, to determine what, exactly, a nonprofit does, or what an advocacy organization would like me to do. Too few charities feature a “Give Now” button prominently on multiple pages of their websites, and some neglect to provide a snail-mail address altogether.

Rather than worry too much about an inchoate future, we might do better to attend to our woeful disregard for the demands of the present.

Lessons for Nonprofits From the Komen Foundation Controversy

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Does the recent Komen Foundation debacle signal an increasing scrutiny by the giving public of nonprofit activities? Just as we can’t attribute every record-breaking heat wave to global warming, neither can we assume that recent high profile cases (ACORN, NPR) represent anything like a trend.

Recall that many years ago foundation support for the Boy Scouts took a nose dive after it was revealed that the organization was discriminating against gay men. As long as I can remember, our senators and representatives—both at the national and state levels—have attempted to score political points by targeting charities. I would guess that during any session of Congress there will be at least a handful of bills with provisions to curtail the advocacy rights of nonprofit organizations. (The Alliance for Justice can provide all the sordid details.) Consider also the restrictions on legal service providers that receive funding from the Legal Services Corporation—in force since 1996—and the occasional high-profile ACLU case that’s kicked around like a political football.

What’s clearer to me is that as the American culture wars drag on, more and more charities will be caught in the crossfire.

Charities need to attend to three factors in addition to an increasingly nasty civic culture. We’re living in an age of more activist donors (though I wonder if the research would support this view). The advent of the Internet has raised citizen expectations about the accessibility of information. And finally, calls for transparency in private and public institutions have increased.

Charities beware: You can bet that as we get closer to the November elections, every contribution made by a candidate will be scrutinized. Political operatives will attempt to score big points from a public that generally doesn’t understand the nonprofit sector and can be easily whipped into a froth about the work of shadowy foundations.

I have two primary suggestions for charities. The first is for boards to sit down with their staffs and determine what mission-appropriate transparency means for their organizations. However insistent the calls for transparency might be, I would never, for example, unless I were compelled by law, agree to audiotape board meetings and post these recordings on the Internet. I believe this would stymie the free and open exchange of ideas and ultimately compromise our mission. Other organizations might have a different take on this, but it’s critical for each organization to think through the issue of transparency.

Second, and more importantly in my view, your organization needs to determine whether it has a moral center, and if so, get in touch with it. That means understanding your identity and mission. Years back, the Girl Scouts were willing to take a hit for their nondiscrimination policies. The great value of a not-for-profit organization is that it has no shareholders whose pecuniary desires it needs to satisfy. It can afford to be governed by the love of mankind. Sure, the Girl Scouts lost some donors, but we can assume it gained others in the process.

The time for charities to do their soul-searching is now. Once a campaign against your organization goes viral, it’s time for you to step up to the microphones and tell the world who you are and where you stand. Faced with the question, “What are you about?”, in the wake of an unpopular decision, do you have a clear idea what you would say?

Do you exist to maximize donor support, to perpetuate the life of an institution? or do you exist to advance the cause of justice, however unpopular that might be?

 

A Prose Poem for Education

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What is a Pecha Kucha? Created by American architects living in Japan, Pecha Kucha is a presentation style in which the speaker is given a limited amount of time to convey his or her message in a creative way.

I went outside my comfort zone to deliver a three-minute Pecha Kucha at the opening of a Grantmakers for Education conference here in New Orleans.  I wanted to write a mood-setter, something closer to poetry than to prose.  But even though I love poetry, I have no skill for writing it. 

Titled Up From the Depths: A Prose Poem for Education, the production of this hybrid Pecha Kucha was a team effort.  I wrote the text, drawing a parallel between New Orleans’s recovery from the devastation of the waters of Katrina and the renewal of the city’s education system. Local documentary and film company Tungsten Monkey artfully mixed the scenes of water with the schoolchildren at Kingsley House.  Janet Daley did the beautiful voice-over you hear on this web version.  The poem excerpt I recite near the end of the piece is titled "Morning Swim" and was written by Maxine Kumin.  Martha Landrum, Vice President for Communications at the Greater New Orleans Foundation, helped shape the piece you see below.

Raising Awareness of Our Awareness of Darfur

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The Darfurians “don't know the significance of the fact that Matt Damon is worried about them.”

Get ready to hit the mute button when the Dewars commercials come on.  Otherwise enjoy this Washington Week-style satire from our friends at The Onion.  Happy Thanksgiving! ...

Selling Soap, Saving Lives

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Susan Herr’s recent post on Filmanthropy raises some interesting questions in aesthetics: Why is it so difficult to marry art with advocacy?  Why is so much political art shrill or heavy-handed?

Population Communications International, a New York-based nonprofit organization, has, for the past twenty years, pioneered the use of telenovelas in the fight against poverty, AIDS, and other social ills.  The organization has politely rejected every socially conscious script I’ve sent them, including this latest, titled, La Flor Apolonia:

(Apolonia is a beautiful woman with big beauty-parlor hair and long nails.  Her dress makes a small “X” across her chest, barely concealing her breasts.  Marta, her closest friend, wears a white mini-skirt, a bright blue Spandex top, and long, bangly earrings.  She has applied her makeup with unmatched zeal.  The two women speak in quick, unaccented Spanish.)

Apolonia:  Enrique told me that his parents had disowned him.  I pitied him, Marta—you’ve seen those big brown eyes of his!  (Apolonia juts out her chin defiantly.)  The barbarian repaid my kindness by forcing himself on me.  (The orchestra swells, heavy on the strings, as Apolonia clenches her teeth.)  Now I’m pregnant with Enrique’s baby and I’m afraid I might have AIDS!  (Music sting.)

Marta:  You were clearly born to suffer, Apolonia!  Listen, I know a woman who works at the local health collective.  Just the other day she was telling me how they had convened diverse community stakeholders around issues relating to the sourcing of positive health outcomes for economically-challenged persons of female.  Let’s go see her …

What’s the secret of seamlessly integrating the preachy earnestness of poverty-fighting messages, say, into melodramas starring sexy Latinas and hunky vaqueros?  Apart from being one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, what made Bertolt Brecht so good at using theatre as a forum for political ideas?

Spa-Level Sedation Dentistry

While the nonprofit world gets bogged down in debates about the merits of social entrepreneurship, the for-profit world leaps ahead with offers of Spa-Level Sedation Dentistry.

 

Possible Worlds: The Beguilement of Juxtaposition

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Some scientists use possible worlds to explain the physical features of our universe.  More accessible, perhaps, are the possible world theories that philosophers of language use to model concepts like possibility and necessity.

Closer to home, the October issue of The Atlantic, dubbed the “values issue” by the editors, provides an extended meditation on a possible world that might be familiar to many of us.  The magazine takes articles on the “reinvention of philanthropy” and socially responsible investing, and puts them together with ads from car companies and Ralph Lauren.

In the possible world suggested by the editors, unchecked consumption coexists peacefully with a feeling for self-sacrifice.  We can, without the slightest pang of conscience, drive to that Sierra Club fundraiser in an SUV; we can discuss our love of animals over a steak dinner with our friends.  Not only is this world possible, the Atlantic editors seem to tell us, it’s the world we currently inhabit.

Providing a materialist grounding for this view, the issue includes an article by Olivia Judson on the evolutionary basis of altruism.  Kindness and cruelty spring from the same source—the human genome—and we are born to save the planet even as we destroy it.

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Image source: One of the panels from the cover of Roz Chast’s Parallel Universes.

Blogethics Schmethics: An Object Lesson for the Third Sector

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Via Mother Jones

K. Daniel Glover, editor of National Journal’s Technology Daily and the author of its Beltway Blogroll, was criticized by prominent citizens of the Blogosphere this past December after he wrote a New York Times op-ed describing the cozy relationship between some A-list bloggers and various presidential campaigns.  Some of these bloggers, he noted, disclosed their campaign connections only after being outed.  Mr. Glover was surprised at the bloggers’ “thin-skinned” reaction to his op-ed.

Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD, lays part of the blame for this strong response on journalists who insist—strangely—that the ethical standards of their profession should also apply to bloggers.  Armstrong was himself strongly criticized two years ago when he suggested that

the campus blogethicists don’t understand … that we are at war out here every day on the front lines as partisan Democratic activist bloggers against a Republican machine that uses whatever means it takes to win. So, if it’s not against the law, I don’t want to hear about it, because in the political arena, the first thing that matters in elections and campaigns is winning …

Is this an example of that “muscular liberalism” I’ve heard so much about?  If so, a-rrrrr.  Vigorous suspensions of the ethical get my jing-jang all wibbly-wobbly, especially when they invoke military metaphors.

Front-line-alicious!

It’s no doubt a burden for Mr. Armstrong to absolve himself—for all our sakes—of moral responsibility.  We need to honor his sacrifice by applying the same principles to the execution of the War on Terror.  Let’s defeat the enemy first, and later, at a more convenient time, as we dig up the mass graves and convene some Senate panels, we can indulge our feeling for ethics.

Hey, you chicken-hearted liberals: Not one more word about your moral scruples until Johnny comes marching home, dig?

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Image source: Right Wing News

Lies My T.V. Told Me: A Plea for Media Literacy

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Everything communicates.  Learning what this means is one of the keys to good citizenship and good philanthropy.

I’ll state the case more strongly: The health of our society depends critically on the ability of each citizen to read, listen, and observe deeply; to interpret thickly; and to understand the promises and beguilements of media, both old and new.  Because most of us lack these skills, or worse, fail to exercise them, we’re in danger of throwing away our democracy.  We leave ourselves at the mercy of those who can exploit our ignorance to advance narrow interests.

Recent history has shown us, in a very dramatic way, how manipulation of the media can take a powerful nation into an immoral, disastrous war against an imagined threat.

The vast majority of Americans simply sleepwalk through the news.  We consistently fail to detect propaganda, bias, and censorship in the media we consume.

Just as young people learn about the three branches of government in their civics classes, they should learn to identify lead-ins, angles, and talking points—and think critically about them.  When they see an image, they should ask, “What’s missing from it?  How was it manipulated? Why was this chosen by the editors from among all possible images?”  Instead of passively watching television, they should pay close attention to the carefully constructed juxtapositions of images and sounds; they should make note of who’s given the last word in a discussion; they should challenge the narrow frame of a debate.  And they should always make a point of asking, “Who pays for the news?”

I don’t think it’s an accident that in our hemisphere only Canada has mandated media literacy in its school curricula.  In Europe, it was the Nordic socialist democracies that led the way.

Unfortunately, staying well informed and immunizing ourselves against manipulation by the media is only one battle in the larger war of ideas currently being fought on home turf.  Once we know the truth, how will we be motivated to act?  And what are the values that will animate us or fail to animate us?

_____

Favorite media literacy links:

Center for Media Literacy

Adbusters

Action Coalition for Media Education

Media Awareness Network

Media Literacy Clearinghouse

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Source of images: Media Literacy Clearinghouse

FOX News on Radical Internet Assassins

Tom DeLay: “It just seems that the Left are never held accountable.”

Communications Strategies: Coopting Deviance

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As I watch the video, I wonder if it might be the projectionist’s labor of love.  Did he cobble it together with his art school friends?  If so, it’s very well done.

There’s a whiff of subversion in it.

In a world that is bland, colorless, and cold
Where banality grows like a fungus or a mold
There live the boring Sheeple who look just like each other …

My mind conjures the usual suspects.  I think of the American polity (myself included), passively bleating while we join the family of nations that commit torture.  I think of how disconnected we are from the political process at all levels, where candidates are transformed by polls and big donors into nicely wrapped products we purchase at election time.  I think also of the market’s homogenizing influence, of the failure of our schools to produce engaged citizens equipped to think critically ...

Finally I realize what a jackass I am for reading so much into just another car ad …

In a process that’s familiar to historians, philosophers, and others, the outside becomes the inside.  Deviance here is identified with the purchasing of a trendy product, and the idea that “this is not your father’s Oldsmobile” is given a violent new spin for these darker, more nefarious times.  Ultimately, subversion is subverted.

Is nothing sacred?

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Image source: Tropist

Why We Love Phil Cubeta

Because he writes like this:

I have an image so private, I hesitate to share it, but often when I hear someone talk to me about what they learned the prior evening on Fox News, what comes to mind is Berlin bombed flat, with a few old women moving about the rubble. That is what a propagandized population will endure, to the end, for its delusions and those of its leaders. Some will follow our leadership all the way. Others of us will dissent. How that plays out will be the existential crisis that will mark the meaning of our lives. Then the philanthropist and patriot will be one in sacrifice. Art or artfulness has never in my lifetime been more needful. Now we will relearn to read works of literature written in dark times, not as illuminating texts, but as models to imitate as best we can as we face crises no less daunting than those of a satirist, say, in Imperial Rome, or Augustan England, or as Loyal Subject of the Crown in Boston, circa 1775. We must learn to write better and read better if we are to hold the mirror up to nature, and remain free as writers, citizens, and a people. God Bless America.

God bless America.

Great Communications Disasters of Our Time: Like, Dude, That Wasn't Weed

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I was in a movie theater recently to watch a summer blockbuster when this public service ad appeared.  It was prepared for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a program of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.  It elicited snickering and hooting from the mostly young crowd.

Were these ads tested on focus groups?  If so, were they on drugs?

Lindsay: “Like, oh wow, a talking dog.”

Second-Lifer Issues Fatwa on First-Lifer

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Some moll goes by the handle “Glitteractica_Cookie” put a contract on my good friend Albert’s bona fides, calling him “a voice of the anti-SL backlash” for his post on Second Life, that virtual world everyone’s talking about.

All right, all right, he brought this pile of bricks on himself.  Last time he went virtual, he was run out of the eleventh dimension for claiming a duck with wax lips was more whimsical than a goose in a bonnet. People who share personal reflections on their experiences in Second Life and are “very critical” deserve to get sapped, I say. Suck it up.

But I owe Albert a debt: he once gave my mudder a picture of Valentino in the altogether.  She died last year—very, very happy.  Mama mia!

If you wanna write Albert, he’s laying low.  Last I heard, he was in the Sims’ Virtual Witness Protection Program. 

Smoky Joe, Scruggs, you out there?

If FOX News Had Been There ...

Those whacky subversives at Kontraband have served up another delicious FOX News satire, very much in the spirit of an earlier offering by our colleagues at Last Days of a Great City.  And yet, is it fair to have a laugh at the expense of a news product® so perfectly suited to our times?  It’s been years since the French theorists successfully deconstructed the pabulum/non-pabulum binary.   We’d be ungrateful if we didn’t admit we felt lighter on our feet, much better able to tolerate hours of shopping.

As Nasty As You Wanna Be?

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Case 1

During a discussion of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, shock-jock Don Imus refers to members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.”

His weekday morning radio show, Imus in the Morning, is canceled on April 12, 2007, following significant public outcry.

Case 2

Responding to increasing violence in London’s black communities, British Prime Minister Tony Blair says the following during an April 11, 2007, lecture delivered in Cardiff:

Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that, but I don’t think it’s the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation. … I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them. … We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong—it has not—but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need specific measures to be brought back into the fold.

Interpreting Blair’s comments, the April 12 Guardian reports that “Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture.”  This interpretation is picked up by Carl Bloice in a thoughtful post at The Black Commentator.

Case 3

The Chicago Tribune reports that Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, is “arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.”

There’s some speculation that Allen Lee wrote the essay as a prank, responding to his English teacher’s request that students express their emotions through their writing.

*                 *                 *

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

— Mark Twain

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A tip of the hat to Bruce Trachtenberg, executive director of The Communications Network, for forwarding the Allen Lee story.

The Problem With The Internet, Part 1: The Story of Joe Sector

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Joe Sector, an environmental activist, wants to develop an advocacy strategy for the upcoming presidential election season. He longs to engage other activists in an extended discussion of the candidates and their views; tactics for engaging the media; and other election season issues. Unfortunately, the next conference for environmental activists is months away.

Joe goes online to his favorite blogs, listservs, message boards, and networking sites in search of wisdom, but the results are less than satisfactory. Here are just some of the challenges he faces:

1. Light’s on but nobody’s home   Joe submits a question to a listserv here, a message board there, but can’t depend on getting a timely answer (or any answer at all). Sometimes it takes days to get a response. In any event, Joe wants something that feels more like a real discussion.

2. The wrong people at the right time   Joe has to contend with the usual trolls, flamers, and ninnies who throw discussions off-topic. He visits various chat rooms and networking sites for activists, but, as is often the case, few people are present and contributing, and the best minds and moderators are absent.

3. Drive-by commenting   Joe finds a few warm bodies willing to engage in a discussion of the upcoming election, but they keep straying off-topic. Because nobody really “owns” the discussion, it gets sidetracked easily.

4. A million vases for a thousand flowers   Nancy, a communications wizard, likes to hang out at Omidyar.net, but Mary, a master strategist, would never darken Omidyar’s cyber-door. She much prefers Change.org. And so it goes. Joe has to visit twenty sites to have a prayer of finding the best wisdom on the upcoming election.

What’s a wired, networked, discussion-starved social activist to do?

Coming up: The problem with the Internet, part 2