October 2007 Archives
Medical experiments on the poor and disenfranchised have contributed to science at the cost of untold pain.
Giving them experimental tech is a bit less ethically dubious.
Except for the bit where the article mentions that Microsoft tests its developmental products on the poor. Somewhere there are people scarred for life after their experience with the Vista alpha build.
FUNKY EXPERIMENT EXTRA:
The following is a must-see video of an early LSD experiment -- with kids! The kid who talks is wild, but check out the hair on his guy next to him!
I mentioned to my students last week that while I'd like to do cool screencasts (such as the one below) for every last thing I teach in my classes, but the production time is a serious hurdle, especially for me working alone.
Here's a blog post that raises this issue and offers some tips for improving production efficiency. For much more, here's a detailed how-to.
Google Adwords dominates web marketing. Salesforce: Customer Relationship Management.
Here's a screencast from Beth Kanter on how to integrate the two to maximize return:
| Add Beth's Blog: Screencasts to your page |
Another thing I'm up to tonight: a brief overview of donor-advised funds. Particularly after the 2006--cough, choke--reforms, the law in this area offers yet another sterling example of how difficult it's becoming do good without the government getting medieval on your @$$.
What Congress fails to grasp in its ongoing effort to extirpate private interest in charitable giving is that charity is, like any medium, an extension of the self. Rigging up ever more draconian and arcane laws will not only fail to bring about an end to private influence on public action; they'll actually push people to find ways of making their influence stronger.
Google.org is a perfect example--despite the dot-org extension, G.o is not a nonprofit or a charity. It operates within Google's for-profit network. The logic: a little tax is a worthy price to pay for freedom.
Anyway, here are few links worth reading re donor-advised funds. There are a lot of others, of course, but it's late and I'm sleepy.
Council on Foundations post-2006 link roundup
Council on Foundations comments on donor-advised funds reform
NY Times on for-profit charity funds
Tides Foundation donor-advised funds
My top secret plan for tonight's nonprofit organization's law class is to use the Princeton case to provide an overview of prudent (and imprudent) management practices.
The case is a classic example of why you want a lawyer who can sift out the losing claims. The lawsuit reflects a number of legitimate concerns arising from lack of attention to donor intent, but damn, the plaintiffs' lawyers make so many crappy arguments that my neck got worn out from how hard I was shaking my head. They would have done much better to laser in on the strong points (I mean, a 71 page complaint?!?), because the obvious longshots seriously diminish the overall credibility of their clients' case.
The family's lawyers would have also strengthened their case by seeking a less extreme remedy--say, an injunction ordering Princeton to avoid certain practices and to engage in others--instead of the attention-getting but most likely futile bid to get a judge to hand over an 800-million-dollar Ivy League academic center to the original donors' kids.
If you want to read more, check out the opposing websites run by the Robertson family and Princeton.
Want to know all the juicy details in the Oral Roberts University lawsuit?
Illegal campaign activity!
Sexual harassment!
Designer dresses in Oklahoma?
Excessive use of ALL CAPS!
This case has it all!
Click the link below for the University's Scandal Vulnerability Assessment and the full complaint filed in court.
But that's not why he's in the news. Here's why:
According to Bild Zeitung on Thursday, the 77-year-old Eden has filed suit against a 19-year-old Berlin woman for the following reason: Despite a night on the town with Eden, which ended back at his place, she refused to have sex with him, saying he was too old for her.
"That was shattering. No woman has ever said that to me before," Eden told the tabloid. "I was crushed." He has filed charges with the prosecutors' office, he said. "After all, there are laws against discrimination."
Perhaps she should have just said he smells funny? I don't think there's a law against that.
Anyway, it's just another example of how clever SOBs use good laws for bad ends.
Arg.
DISCRIMINATION TRIVIA EXTRA:
Here's another study in unintended consequences, albeit one that has a much better outcome.
Among folks who study civil rights law in the U.S., the story is often told about the real reason the Civil Rights Act includes a prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex. Back when the Act was just a bill, its primary aim was to ban racial discrimination. Some Congress critters opposed that, but their efforts to defeat the bill weren't having much success.
So one of them came up with a sure-fire strategy: amend the bill to include a ban on discrimination against women--a notion so preposterous, so outlandish, so downright absurd that it would be impossible for Congress to vote the bill into law.
Instead . . .
We tend to have short memories when it comes to revolutionary technology. The telegraph, radio, black-and-white TV--these may not seem revolutionary now, but back in their day they were arguably more revolutionary than the internet or web.
Why?
Because folks had never seen the like before.
Below, an old magazine ad that presages Marshall McLuhan's observation that the electronic era ushered in an age of all-at-onceness:
Below: key excerpts from an article on his work in today's WWD Green supplement.
Being socially responsible was equally important to the designer. "After Argentina's economic crisis, there were many workshops with skilled craftsmen that had no work," he said. Carga, which is now carried by eight U.S. retailers, including Takashimaya in New York, and the Edition stores in Japan, has been able to help sustain a family-run workshop in Buenos Aires that might have otherwise shut down.
"I don't believe in thinking about 'green' as an added value," said Bianucci, who is currently working on two all-leather Carga designs. "A few years back, everybody was talking about ergonomics in design. But now, there's no need to talk about an 'ergonomic chair,' because it's a given. It would be great if in a few years we didn't have to talk about 'green,' because it would be the default."
Case in point: the scandal now erupting in Europe over a charity purportedly working to rescue orphaned child refugees from Darfur. The government of Chad has arrested nine French charity workers amid accusations of paedophilia and human trafficking. The charity, L'Arche de Zoe ("Zoe's Ark"), defends its personnel as true humanitarians caught up in political maneuvering.
What's really going on here? My own sense is that this isn't a paedophile ring. Rather, it reflects a deep resentment toward some in Chad would view as neocolonial appropriation of its children. Even without the deep-rooted historical tensions, this kind of response is not unique. For example, in Russia, American charity workers have been branded as spies, while nationalist resentment of Americans adopting Russian children recently led the Russian government to ban foreign adoptions.
Below: a classic poster from 1937 that brings together plumbing and electricity, two industries often associated with social enterprise in disadvantaged regions and private enterprise in more developed areas.
I was plunking around the web for the latest on the Yankees' manager search when I came across the following message board thread:
Don't you hate it when you go to a drive-thru and they ask if you want to donate a dollar to some cause in exchange for a coupon book?
I hate it. Here's why. I like to choose the charities I give to. I don't need some restaurant drive-thru deciding for me. Also, they really put people on the spot. They know that they are putting you on the spot in public. They know that people will feel cheap and selfish by the time they pull around to the second window.
Today I finally felt the need to explain..I pulled up to the second window [why does that first one exist? All it ever has is a stack of buns in it] I said look i'm really not a jerk, I give to charity, I just like to choose which ones I give to.
One of these days I'm gonna pull up to the second window and ask if they'd like to donate to the drive-thru relief fund and pay for my meal.
You've probably encountered similar donation requests at a drive-thru or grocery store checkout. From the grocery store's perspective, they win by associating themselves with charity and touting their charitable contributions without having to donate a penny themselves. The charities win because they get money.
But the customers? The feeling of coercion is real, and it can alter their perception of charity itself . . .
it's a shakedown operation bro. I have no problem telling these people no fuggin way, they always want toadd a couple dollars on my charge card at the check out or assualt me when I am leaving the store. I give because I want to give, not due to coercion.
Skinny girl: We should volunteer at an eating disorder clinic.Sigh.
Friend: Yeah, that would be fun. And we'd be, like, helping people.
Skinny girl: But wait -- if we volunteer there, what if we get influenced and change our beliefs about food and think that not being skinny is sexy?
Friend: No, that wouldn't happen... It would be motivation, because you would think, 'Wow, she's skinner than me.'
Springwise has a feature on the kidpreneur movement. Its focus: a New Delhi bank run by street kids, co-sponsored by HSBC and Comic Relief.
Like any other bank, CDB pays interest on the deposits that New Delhi’s street children make. That interest can be a vital incentive to kids who might otherwise spend their daily earnings on cigarettes, candy or other items—or worse, have their meager profits stolen. Money for the interest comes from the repayment of micro loans made to kids 15 years and older. But interest on income is only part of the picture. While adults stand at the ready to help, CDB is managed by children, helping them gain valuable work skills.
No question this is doing good for the kids running the bank--hooray for them. But let's take a closer look.
The bank rewards savings by paying interest, yes. But the interest comes from microloans, which are increasingly coming under fire for being offered at less than optimal terms: exorbitant interest over a short period of time, with a principal too small to facilitate a sustainable business.
While the microloan movement garnered last year's Nobel Peace, it's long-term viability may not be so great. Witness Natalie Portman's recent plea for microcredit loan forgiveness and the trickle of research papers questioning the loans' low success rate.
Kid bank co-sponsor HSBC is already under fire over the collapse of its subprime-mortgage loans and high-interest credit-card business. At what point will microcredit go from being seen as the future of philanthropy to a gateway drug for exploitive lending?
Look carefully at the ways people do to feel good about themselves and to make others feel good about them, and you'll see a few things again and again.
Perhaps the most prominent: children.
Protecting kids is hardwired in our genes. They're vulnerable little critters, and their cute soft burbling li'l selves trigger self-sacrificing protective behaviors that go way, way back, apparently from before we were human.
Dogs picked up on this long ago, which is one big reason they evolved from nasty bitey S(andD)OBs into adorable puppies whose lives are little more than a prolonged pre-adolesence. To see the benefit of this, we need only look back to the Ellen dog adoption dust-up from earlier this week, which highlights how we have come to equate dogs with kids.
Like dogs, people have evolved their own adaptive strategies leveraging children for their own personal advantage. The charitable strippers controversy is a Russian nesting doll in this regard: puppeteers cast themselves as a children's charity and hold their annual fundraiser at a middle school, and a strip club tries to rehabilitate its own image by sending its employees to serve as volunteers. We see a similar dynamic in the viral spread of blogger support for DonorsChoose, a charity that connects donors to unmet needs in schools.
And here's another one. The BitTorrent community has come under a lot of fire for turning a blind eye to illegal file sharing. A popular counter-strategy has been to highlight the instances in which copyright enforcers file suit against children, but now, as the ever informative TorrentFreak reports, the community is raising the stakes:
Together with p2pnet, TorrentFreak adopted 29 little children who are in desperate need for food, clothing and a decent place to sleep. The Child Orphanage is for kids in Nepal whose parents were killed by Maoists demanding the abolition of the country’s monarchy.
Banning torrents hurts orphans. Now that's a powerful argument!
For more info, check out p2pkids.org.
Student journalist Carla Babb's videos didn't get much attention . . . until presidential candidate John Edwards tried to get her to take one down. Here it is:
In my web design class this week I talked about what social enterprise can learn by examining the traits of videos that go viral on Youtube. A few things we discussed: time play, coordinated action, DIY, mashups, instructables and parody.
I'll leave the ponderous yet oh-so-astute academic commentary for another day. For now, enjoy the videos!
Microsoft logos and sounds
Crank dat Soulja Boy
Soulja Boy instructable
Soulja Boy Spongebob & Barney
Soulja Boy lyrics (a literary parody)
The history of dance
LonelyGirl15
(Students in my nonprofit law class will definitely want to read this, since we'll be talking about it on Wednesday.)
For example, here's a blog post from Counterfeit Chic about Major League Baseball's practice of sending fake goods seized here to charity overseas, particularly in Africa. If piracy is truly evil, is it right for charities to be one of the continent's leading importers of counterfeit clothes?
Sorry, beg to differ.
While the social enterprise establishment has been celebrating American Apparel for its commitment to the public good, folks in business and advertising--you know, the soulless corporate drones that nonprofiteers want to save--have for years highlighted American Apparel's reckless and blatant degradation of women.
Most notoriously, in the name of a maintaining a libertarian workplace culture American Apparel's infamous founder, Dov Charney, flouts his penchant for sleeping with American Apparel's female employees and models. The result has been a play-to-get-paid workplace culture that belies Charney's assertion that it's OK because the women consent. As I emphasize in my law classes, rewarding a woman for consenting to sex is as much a violation of sexual harassment law as firing her for refusing. Both scenarios create an environment in which employment is contingent on sex. From the Business Week article linked above:
But BusinessWeek spoke with seven former workers who say they were offended by what they called a highly sexual atmosphere at American Apparel. They told stories of senior managers who pursued sexual relationships with less senior colleagues and rewarded their favorites with promotions, company cars, and apartments. "It was a company built on lechery," says a former stock person. "I thought it was a male contemporary perspective on feminism, but it turns out to be just a gimmick," says another ex-employee. And another: "I made sure to stay away from the store when I knew [Charney] was coming into town. It's not one person -- he's aiming for all women."Does American Apparel get sued for sexual harassment? Sure, by the women courageous enough to risk their careers to file. But prosecuting a lawsuit is painful and expensive, and American Apparel has the money to shut down the cases with settlement payouts.
As for the ads, click here for how one New York hipster neighborhood--which American Apparel portends to represent--is responding to the company's signature imagery of women as playthings.
Why do I harp on this subject? One reason is to call attention to how good actions can blind us to behavior we would otherwise condemn. You might think that nonprofits and social enterprise are less likely to indulge bad behavior. Perhaps, sometimes. But all too often the reverse is true. We conflate the virtue of the mission with the individuals who further it, to the point where we can't see their flaws. Or worse, we strategically calculate that we must protect the mission's reputation at all costs, even if it means some people must suffer in silence.
Another reason is rooted in social enterprise itself. The turn to the market has naturally led the movement to gravitate toward promotional practices that maximize immediate return on investment, and explicit references to sex are an easy way to get attention fast. Bit by bit our culture is changing--sexually charged ads, indulgence of high-impact executives, hiring on the basis of flirtatious sex-appeal.
The longer we pretend it's not a problem, the more likely we'll become what we set out to stop.
One of the problems with current notions of social enterprise is that they perpetuate the split between mundane business and business with a social value. The division is untenable. Mainstream business is shot through with social value, and social enterprise is riddled with the mundane--what we are witnessing now is a collapse into one.
The video below is from the season finale of Mad Men. While it may seem off point, watch carefully--it illustrates how the best consumer marketing flows from the sublime.
I've been spending a bit of time this semester thinking about web video and why charity videos . . . um, how to put this politely . . . aren't exactly compelling. As an experiment (and trying not to tip my hand too much) I asked a couple students in my nonprofit web design class to give their assessment of Youtube's new nonprofit program.
They were . . . polite, but also refreshingly honest--which I know can be a risky thing for students, especially in a Lake Wobegon field such as social enterprise where Every Venture Is Above Average. Their main points: it seems to work OK as an archive, but why would anyone watch these things? And the donation button is nice and all, but what's there to motivate people to give?
Excellent questions, methinks. As my students noticed, except for spikes during PR moments (e.g., Clinton Initiative press conferences; Oprah), charity vids tend to wither on the vine. Same thing with educational videos, another thing I've been tinkering with a bit over the past few months. Occasionally there's a breakout hit, but they're the exceptions that proves the rule. For example, the KSU web 2.0 vids are nifty to look at and provide a basic introduction to what folks are saying about the social networks . . .
but when it comes to adding new insight, well, they're more self-congratulatory rah-rah than analysis with any value-added [not unlike most nonprofit scholarship!]. Then there's the tongue-in-cheek web philologist Hot for Words . . .
HfW is actually more Web 2.0 than the KSU vids--note how her videos incorporate questions from previous commenters--but I'm pretty sure that subjecting students to videos of me in revealing underwear would violate international law.
So what's a charity-minded educator to do?
Not sure yet, actually. I've been playing with podcasts and vids of my own that basically put my lectures in web form, but following the reciprocity principle--do unto others--I can't bring myself to require students to listen to or watch things that I personally don't find engaging. A classroom is not the web, and vice versa--they are radically different media environments, as evidenced by reports that online courses are flatlining once again.
What I want to do is stuff like String Ducky . . .
but here's the thing, the tragic choice: time is a scarce resource. In the time it would take me (or most professors) to prep a stylish and contentful 2-5 minute vid, I could prep and deliver 2-5 real-world lectures stuffed with playful yakkity-yak and whiteboarding. (Yes, I've tried online whiteboard voiceover, but unfortunately I haven't gotten skilled enough with my Graphire to produce more than rudimentary scrawl. Sigh.)
Over the next week or so I hope to start posting my own experiments with audio and video, but I have no illusions that they'll be as cool as Wallstrip.
Someday when I have a production team and quality video equipment . . .
A Park Slope middle school has cancelled a fundraising event after strippers from Scores volunteered to man staff do something non-double-entendre-y at a candy (!) booth. And it's hardly the first group to have trouble with a donation because of qualms about the source.
NTen, one of the world's leading organizations specializing in social enterprise, has added its voice to the outcry against Comcast's now confirmed practice of throttling BitTorrent seeders. NTen comes down on the side of the Net Neutrality movement, which is citing Comcast's actions as a sign of things to come should broadband providers be allowed to discriminate in favor (and against) various nodes on the web.
The movement faces substantial (and well-moneyed) opposition, but that's not the only challenge it has to overcome. The elephant in the room is the nature of the practices that the movement seeks to protect. The calls for action focus on blogging and benign torrenting, such as open-source software distributions. In fact, the Comcast torrent controversy hit the mainstream news when reporters testing rumors of the Comcast throttling tried to torrent the King James Bible, which in the U.S. (but not in England!) is in public domain.
Sounds inspirational, but are telecom companies truly hunkering down to squelch bloggers and Linux distros? Or are they more concerned with the massive bandwidth consumed by the illegal sharing of music, movies, software and porn?
Pretending that the latter isn't an issue renders the arguments made in favor of net neutrality far less compelling than they seem within the movement. Case in point: the question raised at the end of the NTen post:
While it's most likely that Comcast has instituted the measures as a means of controlling traffic and server load, it raises a fine point: Why are movie downloads from iTunes ok, but not file sharing via BitTorrent?
You don't have to be a Yale-trained lawyer to guess that the answer lies somewhere in the fact the iTunes downloads are legal and can factor bandwidth costs into the price.
Would the Net Neutrality movement be more credible if it also called for file-sharing communities--many of which are nonprofit in practice if not formally under the law--to crack down on illegal file-sharing--including bootleg Bibles in Britain?
Both the state and federal government like to regulate charitable fundraising. Of course, there's one rule they'll never institute, but should: a ban on workplace fundraising. Penelope Trunk makes the argument here.
Two high-profile charity news stories from the past couple weeks:
- Bill Clinton's book, Giving, and
- The charity auction of the Senate letter condemning Rush Limbaugh
may benefit some good causes, but they also echo the kind of actions that, in the 1960s, gave rise to today's complex rules governing private foundations and public charities.
Back then, a number of politicians were upset by how certain wealthy charities supported causes and politicians they (the politicians) didn't like. It was a rather motley alliance of constituencies that saw themselves as disenfranchised: white southerners opposed to the civil rights movement (which major foundations were funding), Western politicians who saw the major foundations giving grants to power brokers from the Northeast and industrial states; Christians upset that money was going to fund charities supported by candidates who were . . . can you believe it, I mean, here in All-American New York City? . . . Jewish!!!
While the complaints and political alignments may seem odd today, the laws they produced live on, and there's a real possibility that high-profile politicized charity could prompt another round of so-called reforms. Imagine--
Conservatives upset by Bill Clinton using charity to build support for his wife . . .
Liberals upset that a family charity could pay 2.1 million dollars in an eBay auction that also serves to promote the Rush Limbaugh show . . .
Who knows what could happen if these wacky kids get together?
Stranger things have happened in charity law--just another reason why it's said that politics makes strange bedfellows.