agenda concept - Social Actions

Message from discussion agenda concept

Philk

More options May 10, 12:54 am

From: Philk <philakl...@gmail.com>

Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 21:54:13 -0700 (PDT)

Local: Sat, May 10 2008 12:54 am

Subject: Re: agenda concept

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Hi Christine, great to meet and read your good words. For the purposes
of the agenda, I think you're suggesting we add these topics to our
agenda. I'll go ahead and work them in or consider this an appendix to
the draft agenda:

Additional agenda topics:

-Feedback -- how can/is feedback incorporated into MP? --model how
feedback does or should work in MP
-Learning -- how is learning integrated into MP, or what is MP's
relationship to learning?
-Context awareness in the giver/givee relationship. how does MP
support social proximity and reciprocity, rather than
-Gentle Actions -- describe this approach, relate it to MP.

Some comments inline. This is a long post, so I think it's more
discussion than intended to be included directly in the agenda.

On May 9, 11:06 am, Christine <Christine.Eg...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Peter, thanks for moving the introduction/conversation into this
> forum.

> Phil, really great to read your agenda and get a sense of how you’re
> approaching the workshop opportunity. The theory/philosophy outline is
> especially helpful in describing the context within which “creating
> conditions and conduits to encourage microphilanthropic activity” take
> place.

> A couple of thoughts on feedback, its purpose, and the challenges/
> opportunity to increase it:

I *think* that by feedback here, you are referring to feedback during
and post a microphilanthropic engagement or interaction, so that it's
quality is tuned and trued by that feedback. I think the terms single
and double-loop learning may be relevant here (
http://www.google.com/search?q=double-loop+learning ), addressing the
need and scope of both the feedback question and feeding into
learning. In the workshop, I think we should explore and try to model
how feedback occurs in a MP context. I suspect there are meaningful MP
actions that don't require sophisticated feedback. For example a
single transaction interaction, indicated as completed, may be
adequate in certain cases, and I think simplicity has advantages as
well as limitations.

> Feedback is very often messy and uncomfortable. It’s not fun to report
> back on a project that hasn’t met its goals, or that met them with
> unintended negative side-effects. Encouraging feedback means re-
> framing success to be something more than (or other than) meeting pre-
> set conditions. One way to think about encouraging this is to re-frame
> every activity, including philanthropic activity, as learning
> experiences first and foremost. Learning requires feedback: by
> definition it involves taking in and being changed by new information.
> I'd very much like to spend some of our time thinking about the role
> of learning, and approaching our work and the conditions/conduits
> we're looking for, as learning opportunities and learning
> organizations.

I'm open and interested in this conversation. I would want to
distinguish between our efforts and those that we want to help
facilitate. IMO, part of the goal is to get out of the way as much as
possible, to lighten the transactional burden on giving, and to
consider that goal of facilitating learning would be a different one
than facilitating MP. Yes, many or most MP projects will be better if
there's learning going on, but that learning may occur in quite
different domains as the giving does, while still being integrated in
hearts and minds of all involved. IE: the communication network may
occur on a different network level (ie: via skype or email) rather
than through MP conduits.

> I’d also like to include a conversation about the words we use when
> describing people’s approach to taking action. The word “changemaker”
> is catchy and sounds good, but it implies that change is only
> happening outside of the person-taking-action – that they’re static
> and that their action or intervention is changing someone else. This
> sets up an inside-outside relationship between philanthropist/giver/
> helper on one hand and beneficiary/receiver/charity case on the other
> that I think is one of the sources of doing-harm-despite-good-
> intentions.

I agree that the word "changemaker" is problematic. I prefer terms
like agent or participant, volunteer, or using project roles.

> This question of the impact of creating inside-outside relationships
> is key, I think, to whether or not we’re really coming up with
> something fundamentally different when we say we’re looking to “search/
> amplify” rather than “plan/execute.” “Identifying a problem and
> planning/executing its solution” and “identifying what’s working and
> planning/executing its enhancement” don’t sound all that different to
> me. A fundamental, paradigmatic shift in our approach to philanthropy
> or development requires something else, and I think part of that
> something else lies in where we make inside/outside, us/them, giver/
> receiver distinctions.

The search/amplify role is played by making known, needed actions
available via existing media channels; hopefully using collaborative
filtering (as in adwords and elsewhere) to link appropriate actions
with related articles or web content.

Basically, what I see us trying to do is to transform people's
attention and intention into sensible, manageable actions that are
within peoples ordinary capabilities. To do so, we will use available
access and information about where people's attention is: ie, online,
reading CNN.com etc, and provide some obvious, sensible things to do
in bite-size chunks so that media consumers can satisfy their need to
do something they feel they want to do; be it to ease suffering, help
provide a needed service, express outrage, pay for a book or medicine.
And taking one of these actions will strengthen their bond with the
media source as well as providing the satisfaction of having done
something. Everyone wins here.

Regarding inside/outside issues & distinctions, I completely agree
with these and context as overcommon problems in philanthropy. I would
add the question of culture to this (personally, i'd adore a
conversation about how cultural boundaries [of many kinds] affect
social distance in a networked world...but that's another subject ).
IMO, the cleanest way to address inside outside issues is to keep
things really simple. Asks are very specific, manageably deliverable,
and gifts are same. Frankly, many people will give for reasons I think
are silly or wrongheaded, most commonly those based on the noblesse
oblige notion -- and yet, when the context of giving can be limited,
so can the harm.

OTOH, we may not be able to control these aspects of what ends up in
MP channels, and may need to let go of trying to, while also looking
for ways to focus projects via policies or suggestions.

The discipline I’m most familiar with,

> international development, has started to understand that a project’s
> context plays a huge role in the impact it’s going to have (sounds
> intuitive, but “context” is complex and often unmeasureable so there’s
> been plenty of resistance to letting it into the equation of project-
> design). And any time an initiative or project separates itself from
> whatever it is that it wants to have an effect on – whenever it does
> not see itself as residing inside the entire context that also
> includes the intended audience/beneficiaries – it’s creating the very
> dynamic that takes that opportunity to “amplify good that’s going on”
> and puts it squarely in the camp of “planned/executed intervention.”

> So the reason that I’m excited about encouraging feedback with ICT
> applications isn’t because it gets us better at planning and executing
> projects, even though that in itself is exceptionally valuable, and
> there’s so much to be done and learned about where making better
> projects is concerned. But I’m excited because encouraging feedback
> gets us talking about where the feedback comes from, which is by
> definition “out there,” and then we get to talk about what it might
> means to fold “out there” into the initiative itself… How do we
> encourage an approach to feedback that doesn’t frame it as being
> separate from the initiative, where the relationship between feedback
> and initiative is so fluid and iterative that we can flip them around
> (the beneficiary is taking initiative and the donor is providing
> feedback, for example) and still feel like we’re describing an action
> accurately?

> Some personal background to place a context around those ideas: a
> quick summary of the ideas that intrigue me and experiences that
> influence me are on my Ned.com profile (http://www.ned.com/user/
> u300091805/). And the excerpts below help to provide some context,
> too. They're from F. David Peat’s (www.fdavidpeat.com) forthcoming
> book titled “Gentle Action” (pre-publication text, please don’t cite)
> that describe a context-laden approach to “action” and my description
> of microphilanthropy as having the potential to be that kind of
> action.

> “I began to use the term, Gentle Action, several years ago to describe
> the creative sorts of activities and actions that could be taken by
> organizations that are sensitive to the dynamics of their surrounding
> environment. It could be a form of minimal but highly intelligent
> activity that arises out of the very nature of the system under
> investigation.

> “As we have seen in this book, actions and reactions that proceed from
> conventional organizations, plans and policies can often be relatively
> mechanical in nature and are usually directed towards what is
> perceived as "the source of the problem". Moreover, the greater the
> change that is desired, the stronger would be the action that is
> imposed. By contrast, Gentle Action is subtle in nature so that a
> minimal intervention, intelligently made, can result in a major change
> or transformation. The reason is that such action makes use of the
> dynamics of the whole system in question….

> “Microphilanthropy (also called P2P or peer-to-peer philanthropy)
> refers to small, direct interactions between people who are giving and
> receiving philanthropic support, especially where that exchange is
> facilitated by Internet technology. It is based on the definition of
> philanthropy as "the love of humanity" and embraces a wide range of
> activities including donating funds for very specific causes,
> volunteering, emergency response activities and even mentoring. It has
> also given rise to a number of new sites including GiveMeaning.com and
> ModestNeeds.org, and well as to fundraising tools on social networking
> sites such as Facebook.com.

The Gentle Action concept makes sense to me: I'd say that giving that
is more aware of the dynamics between donor and recipient is likely to
be smarter and I think agrees with my provisional, probably temporary,
maybe quirky view of philanthropy, which is that, under the covers, it
really is reciprocal. I don't care if the funders think they're doing
all the giving -- they keep doing it for some benefit they receive,
which is provided by grantees, and I know more that couple grantees
who look down on their donors as much as donors can sometimes appear
to look down on their grant recipients. I'm not saying there aren't
funders who hold inordinate power and wield it at times wrongly -- imo
they do. I think they have a warped or failing capacity for
reciprocity. In any case I think P2P is more respectful than a
foundation asking grantees to look upon them as a wealthy aunt.

> “As Christine Egger puts it, “individually and collectively, these
> direct gestures of caring have the potential to serve as a kind of
> Gentle Action if the field of meaning from which the desire to act is
> our shared humanity. If the field of meaning is more limited than that
> — emphasizing the national, cultural, or economic identity of the
> giver or receiver, for example—then the gesture becomes “action from
> the outside” with the potential to do harm. But so long as the giver
> and receiver both reside inside the action—so long as they’re both
> held in equal measure as co-creators of the desire to act and the act
> itself—then the philanthropic action becomes gentle and positive for
> both the giver and receiver.

> "The Internet provides a tremendous opportunity to reach across
> boundaries and connect with one another as people first, and to engage
> in philanthropy as Gentle Action on a greater scale than ever
> before.”"

> Looking forward to everyone's feedback :) on this and future writings
> as we prepare for the workshop opportunity...

> Christine

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