Introductions. Introductory Remarks from Tom Munnecke. Murray Gell-Mann - On Being a Philanthropiod Ape. Heather Wood Ion - Can What Counts Be Counted?. Duange Elgin - Transformational Philanthropy. Nipun Mehta - Charity Focus. Paul Chafee - Appreciative Inquiry. Siegfried Woldhek - Nabuur Doug Carmichael - Perspectives on History. David Ellerman - Helping People Help Themselves. Jan Hauser - The Scalable Trust Project Stewart Gannes - Digital Vision Fellowship Program. David Brin - Horizons of Inclusion and Investment Dennis Whittle - DevelopmentSpace Update. Mark Miller - The Digital Path. Tony Hoeber - The Dalai Lama Trust Jeffrey Ashe - Women's Empowerment Program Assessment Convergence Discussion. Closing Remarks.

Tom Munnecke began by welcoming everyone and introducing the first part of "Improbable Pairs," a film by Paul Andrews, featuring a conversation between an Israeli who has lost a son, and a Palestinian who has lost 5 brothers to violence in the Middle East.
..
Mark Miller. I object to the subtext of the film that "Israeli Hawks" are for killing or violence. They aren't, it's just a disagreement on tactics. In fact the title "Improbable Pairs" itself gives the negative framing that these two men who want peace are anomalies. Most, on both sides, do.

Tom Munnecke. Why don't we go around the table and build our introductions around the question of What act of generosity had a big impact on your life? (This Appreciative Inquiry question was suggested by Paul Chaffee, and generated amazingly powerful responses)
..
Inne ten Have. I'm from Holland. My parents gave me a great deal, and one of the most important things they gave me was the knowledge that what we need are the necessities, the rest is just decoration. I studied medicine, and worked in Cambodia designing artificial legs and working on landmine detection. I recognized that I wasn't doing it for others, but I like good problems. I can't get awake to think about problems that don't interest me. I have a small IT company, it's a game of gaining trust - Gardenship.
..
Siegfried Woldhek. Also from Holland. I can think of several instances that people have helped me one-to-one, listened & took me seriously. I've been CEO of large conservation organizations in Holland. One fundamental problem has continued to haunt me about conservation work: there are more places that have needs than can be done by the present command & control institutions. The other issue is that throughout those years I've gotten calls from people wanting to volunteer or contribute in kind. Well, those people are a pain in the ass because here you are saving the world, and these people are asking for your time. So I've left the conservation world and am trying to figure out how to tap into that energy. The key is one-to-one.
..
Paul Chaffee. Director of Interfaith Center of the Presidio. As I look back on my own learning over they years, I see a hunger for self-organizing, the crumbling of command & control institutions. Generosity is a high value we all hold, but somewhat of a cliche - can we practice it at work? I've been greatly influenced by David Cooperrider's work. He asks the question "Why don't you study what works." Out of that has come Appreciative Inquiry. It's much more useful to spend your time on what you value and what you really want than on the problems. What you hold up as a mirror you soon become. It's an opening of a door to generosity. I called my son and said, "We've got to talk - you've never told me what you liked best in high school? Who was your Mr. Chips?" We had a fabulous talk, and a whole new dimension opened up in our relationship.
..
Gavin White. I come from a long family of educators, and carry the banner of shame in my family of being the only non-educator. My family and I have a rebellious desire to know and to create. They tend to learn through mistakes, through change. This is a gift I can never repay. I'm involved in a number of things, all stemming from this rebellious desire for learning and change.

Ginger Richardson. I've been with the Santa Fe Institute since the dawn of time - 15 or 16 years. From the professional side I'd like to thank the people here at their institute for their generosity. And also there's something to be learned from the nature of the institute in itself - a complex adaptive system in which decisions emerge, and when people at the next tier find out about them they aren't always happy with it. On a personal note, my husband and I are parents of a differently-abled child, and the generosity I've experienced from the community of parents we've found is one of the greatest gifts of my life.
..
Jennifer Kirk. My work is involved in global f-word. Here's my generosity story. Twelve years ago I moved back to San Francisco, newly-divorced, no job, no plans, and a friend let me camp on her couch for two weeks. When she'd come home from work she'd nourishment with cigarettes, alcohol, and acceptance. No questions, no demands - just that generosity of opening her home and couch to me. It showed the generosity of simply letting someone into your space, and not begrudging it.
..
Heather Wood Ion. I come from northern Canada originally. My first job was on a local newspaper at University, chronicling local leaders. This made me acutely sensitive that community is built on acts of generosity, not self-interest. I've been blessed with incredible mentors. One act of generosity took place in Calcutta. I was to be leaving for Oxford in two days. The night watchman of the hostel said, Now you're having dinner here on the grounds. The beggars gave me a feast, to say thank you for becoming a part of our family. It was tremendously moving to me.
..
Eric Smith. I'm here because I'm interested in the complexity of the ways we relate to each other, formal and informal, evolved and engineered. Why can a group of people all want to do something together, and all not be able to. My mother dropped out of school at 12 to support her siblings and family. It's a two-sided thing. One the one side she's made individuals more strong and secure, on the other side it was based on a strong individual intervening and running their lives.
..
Harold Koenig. Like Gavin I'm a black sheep - the only non-educator in my family. All the time I've learned from others - teachers, patients. I came to understand over the years in my career that if I focused on getting even I would never get ahead. That for me was the message of the film.

Mark Miller. I'm working on an open source initiative called E-rights.org. Also Director of the Extropy institute, a crypto-rights organization - using cryptography to help human rights workers. As a child I read a lot of science fiction, which showed futures transformed by technology, whether for good or ill. I developed a sense of an impending fork in the road: depending on what it is we build, the future could go either way. I also had a passion for world-saving which came from the 60s & 70s. I've been involved with the open source community and process for. This is an incredible, decentralized effort of generosity - a passion to see the future come out well by building artifacts that produce improved ways of being, and giving it to the world for free. The passion is to get the technology out there so that people can use it. Networks of cooperation - Hyack.
..
Nipun Mehta. My official title is Founder of Charity Focus. My question is who I really am. I'm a big fan of outer change through inner change. I have benefited from the smiles of many people, there's not much to say about that. At some point as I was pursuing promotions in my career I realized that the point was not accolades but satisfaction and a deep connection with life. For me service is the center of my life. Service doesn't start when you have something to give, it blossoms naturally when you have nothing left to take.
..
Duane Elgin. I grew up on a farm in Idaho, and in addition to silence there was nature there. Just being there. It's difficult to put any labels on that experience, but there was at once an extraordinary need for self-reliance, and the understanding that there was a community of mutual support there when you needed it. In 1970 I was on a White House commission looking at the American Future. I worked for six years at SRI doing long-range studies for the National Science Foundation, EPA, etc. I saw these studies were just gathering dust, so I left and since have been a freelance worker for transformation. It really goes back to those roots in Idaho. I trust that we can do it on a global scale.
..
Jan Hauser. My name is Jan Hauser and I am a recovering engineer. In the 70s I became concerned with what would happen when we have 10 billion people. After putting that concern to the side for a number of years, I started volunteering in the area of sustainability about 5 years ago. I share some optimism with Mark and others that the Internet can cause a different kind of outcome than what you might have expected from radio/TV. Through studying AI in the 80s I became more aware of language, and of the possibilities of re-languaging, of using language in different ways. We can become more sensitive to our use of language. I have an attraction to what is happening here as a grand experiment. My generosity story begins at a time in my life when I was living in Northern California, no friends or family, and decided to go out into the country for a day, upcountry where it was remote and cold. A man began talking to me, and invited me to come to his home to meet his family, and we had a wonderful evening sledding down the hillside, dinner - they opened their home and family to me, a complete stranger.
..
Michael Litz. I'm also the son of two educators. I enrolled in a university in Nigeria, and the day I arrived it was shut down due to riots, and I was escorted to the gates & told to come back in 3-6 months. I was literally out on the street first day in town. I was taken in by a family who shared the one yam they had for dinner that night with me - one half for them, one half for me. That made a lasting impression. I now work for oneworld.org, a distributed, self-organizing network of organizations, and also for the Benton Foundation. Through this I've learned a respect for the innate generosity and sheer inventiveness of people - as opposed to the model of social engineering. The good work is out there whether we know it or not.
..
Liza Kastagnozzi. I work for Interaction, and umbrella organization for disaster relief consisting of many organizations, both secular and religious. I started an ICT working group - Information, Communications, Technology - to educate humanitarian workers in technology. My mother was a single mom with five children, and she would take us to a homeless soup kitchen weekly to help. This was an early transformational experience that helped me understand the importance of volunteering. I've since learned that there is a body of research supporting the generalization that the least fortunate tend to be the most generous.
..
Murray Gell-Mann. I helped to start the Santa Fe Institute in the mid-80s. Before that I worked on elementary particle theory. Here we work on other problems. I've also been involved as a philanthropoid ape, as a Director of the John D. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This has been a glorious adventure that will end next month, after 23 years, when all of my grandfather clauses run out. In response for the demand for an episode of generosity - in 1944, in an act of incredible stupidity, I applied to only one university, Yale, which had exactly one full scholarship. My family had nothing to contribute. By some miracle I got in, and on the same day as the Normandy Invasion I discovered that I had been granted that scholarship. At the end of eight terms, I was told "you can stay for a ninth term, but we want you to write to your unknown benefactor." At that time I was very leftist, and the names associated with the scholarship (McCormick-Mdill?) didn't sit right, so I never completed the letter. 30 years later in Aspen Colorado I was introduced to a marvelous woman named Trini Barnes - Katrina McCormick Barnes - she had inherited the family fortune, and decided to get rid of it - opened an office and methodically began to send out checks. One was to Yale, in the name of her brother. If I had written her the letter, saying thank you very much, but I don't approve of this fortune, she would have loved it - but it took me 30 years to find that out.
..
David Ellerman. I'm a recovering economist and recovering World Banker. I was a child of the 60s, and as such wanted to help, and do what I could towards social justice. While teaching in the hard sciences I was trying to work with non-profits to help people. One of the striking things I learned was that being generous and of real help is difficult. I became disillusioned with many of the efforts of the left. I often think that the slogan of the left should be "If your heart is full, it's OK for your head to be empty."
..
Dennis Whittle. At World Bank 14 years, Asian Development Bank, USAID. 18 months ago my partner, Mari Kuraishi, and I left to start Development Space. The generosity question has been bugging me. I hold it as a great, exalted thing. I've heard 3 categories: 1) People who have encouraged us to do things. 2) People who caught us when we fell. 3) People who put you in a position to learn - not so much actively teach you. I've received all those, but the one about learning struck me the most. Humor is an incredible act of generosity.
..
Suzanne Duhle. I started out my career as a computer programmer in the early 60s - but educated in literature so I've had both approaches in my head. I - like Lisa's mom - was a single mom in Milwaukee with 5 kids! There was a community of street folks who we became a part of their family - I dragged my munchkins there every week. Here at the Institute I've been able to serve as a connector of generosity. It has not been about the grants or fellowships, but the personal connections. That is critical - connecting the people who want to do something with other people who want to do something - not helpers & recipients. Like Heather I had an experience of a going away party that was very moving, given for me by city employees.
..
Juan Valazco. I was born in Bolivia, as a young boy I remember the big revolution of 1952. My family was at the top of the structure and everything was taken away from us - our gold bars, mines, farms, everything. I said to my father, "What are we going to do now?" My father replied, "We are going to educate you. This is the best thing that ever happened to us." There's a saying in Spanish, "From a certain type of wood you can only get a certain type of splinter." I always say if you don't volunteer you won't have lived. I won't be here this afternoon because it's my volunteering day. I've always said, find out what you want to do and go volunteer. Being able to give, at the lowest end, one-on-one.
..
Tom Munnecke. I'm another son of educators. Got to the point in my life a couple of years ago where I had reached most of my "freedom-froms" and began to look for my "freedom-fors". Attracted to this notion of chaotic, adaptive systems evolving with a fitness function. The other influence on my thinking was discovering the Web in the early days - seeing what can happen with small set of simple conditions. I had an experience with generosity in India. How can we take this energy and replicate it? Can we figure out a way to connect and ignite this energy?
..
Summary from Heather. Professional anthropologist's summary. Parents, nature, growth, education themes. One on one, inner to outer journeys was contrasted with intervention. Theme of daily generosity. Discussion of inherent bias of technology, potential of technology to facilitate non-violent interactions. Importance of strangers: generosity from, education with. Expectation of safety related to generosity. Respect for the innate creativity of others. Theme of unknown benefactors. Theme of lightness, humor, sense of play. Overriding themes of mutuality, bringing forth. Unspoken subtext of the loneliness of individualism, the hunger for community.
..
Introductory Remarks from Tom Munnecke

I'd like to briefly re-introduce some of the themes from first conference. One organizational model is top-down formal, power-based. This meeting is not about power. It's about bottoms up, self-organizing nature that can bubble up from below, and amplifying that. Tim Berners-Lee invented URL/HTTP/HTML. Not rocket science. The genius behind it was realizing the potential autocatalytic effect of making these initial conditions available. Making it available on IP, open protocol – didn't go to AOL or Compuserve. Didn't go to the experts & ask permission. Went ahead & did it. Didn't organize it or do a taxonomy. Created a space driven by energy. Sooner or later AOL decided be become compatible w/the Web. Search engines began emerging. Smarter things evolved from simple initial conditions. Ebay & Amazon didn't use up the web space, they made it bigger - this is what autocatalytic means. Distinction between AC space & AC network - AC space creates more empty space to be filled - see Freeman Dyson. Anything that aspires to be transformational must be bottoms up & grass roots. Identity/Connectivity/Relationship – simple initial conditions, constraints, fitness function that grows it.
..
What are the initial conditions, constraints & fitness function we can put together for a Giving Space? My game is to produce the maximum humanitarian uplift w/fewest keystrokes. Notion of trust is central. People being custodians of gifts rather than owners. How do you know what a meaningful opportunity is? What are the entities - individuals, groups, churches, URI cooperation circles, etc.? As this approach grows, the power structures will take note and decide to work with it.
..
The social engineering, problem-solving approach leads to what Peter Senge calls the "general problem addiction loop." You start by focusing on a problem, you fix it, the fix creates new problems, you then proceed on to fixing the quick fix, ad infinitum. Is the activity of fixing the problem chain equivalent to the good thing, the virtue, that is desired? An autonomy solution takes longer. How to flip from the vicious to the virtuous circle? How do you systemically propagate that in the world? What is the activation energy that will lift people out of the quick fix problem addiction mentality into an autonomous loop? The intuition is that the Internet can play here. Power vs. Energy is a key distinction.
..
Current (somewhat cynical) model. Donor pool (1.6M non-profits) – recipients pool. In order to be attractive to a donor you need to be specifically talking about 1 problem & offering concrete results. In a giving space if you are a trustworthy player, you will bubble up in the space as a more fit player, and attract more energy. The organization isn’t the owner of your gift, a trustee in a chain of trust. Reputation mechanism for assessing trust. Providing meaningful opportunities to give. David Ellerman’s terminology is the “helper-doer relationship.”
..
Now Murray Gell-Mann has kindly agreed to share some of his thoughts.
..
Murray Gell-Mann - On Being a Philanthropiod Ape

I’ll give you my angle on being an philanthropoid ape after 23 years at the MacArthur foundation. The early days were very exciting. Very hands on. It became clear that a number of us had some perspectives in common – one being to talk about positives. That became a hallmark of our work. I didn’t want to follow the crowd, with cookie-cutter mainstream projects. We thought it was important to be a little bit different. It became clear very early that one thing that is extremely cost-effective is research, policy studies, strategic thinking. Being leveraged, it can affect how huge amounts of money are spent later on. I tried to emphasize that it was very worth subsidizing the bringing together of different disciplines to look at problems – “the crude look at the whole.” It’s hard to conserve nature in the midst of a huge war. All the areas are strongly linked. Yet we know it is easier to study large areas by breaking it into parts. But when you put the studies together you don’t get an accurate study of the whole system. Yet we don’t practice the crude look at the whole very much. The technical discussion of a part is treated with great respect at conferences, discussion of the whole is relegated to the cocktail party. Tom Friedman has commented on this in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
..
A bit about institution building. I was associated with the founding of the World Resources Institute. Besides thought leading to action (policy studies) there is also action. We can think of examples of new practices that spread. I don’t think it’s necessary to be only self-organizing. Examples include debt-for-nature swaps and micro-lending. We didn’t invent these, but we helped promote them. One that I played a role in inventing is rapid-assessment programs. The usual practice was to spend a long time with teams of scientists making the assessment of biological/ecological value. But this took too long – the places were destroyed while being studied. Ted Parker and I invented a new approach in which teams of naturalists who had expertise in quickly, roughly identifying what was there. Ted Parker was the most knowledgeable ornithologist of the Neotropics, and could identify 4,000 birds by sound. Teams are made of people like Ted. Alto Madidi Park was first successful project. Parks on a border are a great way to dispose of a problem border between two countries.
..
In sciences bearing on mental health we set up interdisciplinary research networks. One of our early successful efforts was in the area of affective disorders, such as depression. We discovered that much of what was already known was not being disseminated to the care-givers.
..
I’ve been interested in the study of simplicity, complexity, and complex adaptive systems. Evaluation is very difficult, especially if one requires rigorous numerical results. The engineering mentality is not particularly useful in this work – recovering engineers, maybe. Better to ask practitioners in the field.
..
The model is gardening rather than engineering. This is true of so many things.

Putting water and fertilizer where and when they may be beneficial.

A couple of final lessons. One is in connection with engineering. It is extremely important to take into account the possibilities opened up by new technology. Foundations often don’t do this. I begged the MacArthur Foundation to look at new technologies, and they finally did, after 10 years. The other is the importance of human resources. Finding in developing countries leaders or potential leaders in human rights, women’s rights, education, conservation, etc., and giving them training – it doesn’t matter where. This really pays off. Not only leadership, but also technical capabilities. For example, we used local team members for rapid assessment teams, para-naturalists, local people familiar with local forests.
..
George Cowan joins the room. First President of Santa Fe Institute.

Q: Gavin White. Gardening is like targeted intervention. Do you have any guidelines in rapid assessment model on this?

A: Murray Gell-Mann. The idea in rapid assessment was to make the assessment of whether a place was worthy of protection. Then the job is to find funding. In gardening you do intervene of course, but you intervene to help something to grow. There’s a natural process of growth that you are encouraging or discouraging. Without that it’s manufacturing. There must be decisions, otherwise it’s not philanthropy, it’s just accident.
..
Harold Koenig. One area that we’ve had success is in the ivory trade. Somehow we achieved this transformation at a large scale.

Murray Gell-Mann. This has been studied, and there is a great deal of controversy: should it be a complete ban, or a controlled trade to help support conservation efforts.

Ginger Richardson. How to apply the rapid assessment idea at the global level?
..
Murray Gell-Mann. Project 2050. Try to imagine what paths we might follow that would lead to more sustainable futures. Multi-disciplinary teams. Ideological, military, economic, scientific. Very underfunded: $3M from MacArthur, we estimated we needed $8M - $15M. Other foundations wouldn’t contribute; it was very asymmetrical. The MacArthur Foundation were mavericks in the Foundation landscape. Which World: Scenarios for the 21st Century is a book that came out of that. It is extremely difficult to get even the most brilliant people to get beyond incremental thinking. They weren’t able to imagine a completely different world beyond 5 years in the future, e.g. from growth in quantity to growth in quality.
..
Paul Chaffee. Doesn’t that have to do with our obsession with analytic thinking, in favor of synthetic?

Murray Gell-Mann. Schiller’s distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian. Here we try to combine the two types of thinking.

Siegfried Woldhek. Weeds are interesting. I’m interested in the discussion of what the plants want.
..
Murray Gell-Mann. Well, it’s important to make distinctions. The definition of a weed is a hardy plant that I don’t want. Very important to involve local experts.

Siegfried Woldhek. I learned from my experience with the WWF that if we managed to find a key expert in an area, in a task he or she defined for himself, extraordinary things would happen, but it was outside the organization the organization doesn’t see it.
..
Murray Gell-Mann. What do you mean?

Siegfried Woldhek. The organization doesn’t see it.

Murray Gell-Mann. I don’t think this happens at Wildlife Conservation International. I have the impression that the WWF became a little bit bureaucratic.
..
Siegfried Woldhek. Even CI has the possibility of dealing with millions of people that is not being actualized at present. We’re talking about liberating the energies of millions of people.

Murray Gell-Mann. Would it be useful to have a meeting on this topic?
..
David Ellerman. The reason why the gardening metaphor works is you have a sense that there’s a process beyond the engineering one - we have metaphors that express this, lead a horse to water, pull on a string, etc. As you’ve seen over the years complex adaptive systems evolve, do you see a tension between reducing organic processes to engineering terms, or can complex adaptive theory really begin to treat the organic processes?
..
Murray Gell-Mann. I’ve written about CAP with humans in the loop. Expert systems can’t evolve, but you can assess how well they work, and as a result improve them – this is a CAP w with humans in the loop. Big Blue is an example of this – they brought humans into the loop to teach it chess strategy. Another thing you can do is put the adaptation/assessments in the automatic loop. David Ellerman. Can we shine a light on darkness to see what darkness looks like? Problems like that are not amenable to engineering solutions. How can we know when the engineering approach is self-defeating?
..
Murray Gell-Mann. Sometimes you can’t know rigorously, so you try the adaptive approach. Also a lot of things involve co-adaptation, and these are probably not rigorously solvable – e.g. two people searching for each other.

Mark Miller. Why did the Americans come close to exterminating the buffalo, but not the cows? Economist Magazine’s answer is that it was the commons vs. privatizing the commons.
..
Murray Gell-Mann. Privatization is one way of avoiding the tragedy of the commons, but not the only way. All over the world there are societies that have devised means for protecting the commons other than privatization. I think a lot of damage has been done by the spread of the belief that the only solution to the tragedy of the commons is privatization. Sometimes bringing modern ideas of privatization can disrupt traditional systems that are working quite well. The idea of biosphere reserves – park surrounded by penumbra with less rigid protection, surrounded by an area in which conservation practices are recommended.
..
Tom Munnecke. Thank you Murray. Here’s some homework for the group: Come up with a name, that can be used as both verb and noun, for positive transformational links. E.g. Zip, zipping.

…...LUNCH……

Tom. I see that Doug Carmichael has joined us – Doug, could you introduce yourself?
..
Doug Carmichael. I just came from a conference in Canada on Media That Matters.

How philanthropy & receivers can be in direct contact with each other.

Interesting that I’m sitting in Murray’s seat, because as a young kid at Caltech I was so fascinated by Murray and Feynman that I became a psychoanalyst.

Studied with Eric Fromm. Consulted for corporations on leadership and change, worked with World Bank. When you put money into a system you disturb the system, often with undesirable results. It’s really important to create good models for new philanthropy. When we get into trouble we tend to use philanthropy for conservative results. What you guys are trying to do is impossible in principle, but you have such good heart and willingness to try that I’m delighted to be here.
..
Siegfried. I’d like to see someone identify the critical questions we are here to address.
..
Heather Wood Ion - Can What Counts Be Counted?

[Note - the notes below are sparse, as this paper is available in written form.]

Dancing Measures Transformation. Deming estimates that 95% of the activity in organizations is spent measuring/counting. Statistics of material inequality. Jonas Salk’s question: “Are we being good ancestors?” Indicators of quality are derived from negative interactions. Women’s Empowerment Program: women become givers. Break down narrow definition of donors. Giving crosses all dimensions of legal, moral, esthetic, social, political dimensions. We limit it by thinking of it in material terms. All of us are givers. Focus on providing a forum for sharing stories. Harold Koenig. The key word is sustainability. Murray Gell-Mann’s statement that the 21st century will be decisive.
..
Duange Elgin - Transformational Philanthropy

[Note – the notes below are sparse, as this paper is available in written form.]

This effort came out of the State of The World Forum in SF in 1999. The approach we have developed is as follows. Build a trusted network of philanthropists. Have trusted people like Paul Hawkins, Amory Lovins, and ask them each quarter to nominate projects they know about, and present them in a frictionless way on the Internet. The missing piece in this is how to interface the trusted human network we’ve been cultivating with the Internet.
..
Inne. One question I would pose is “Why is there a need for philanthropy?”

Another quote is “If you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”

Jan Hauser. Trust is an emergent, contextual property – one person or group may be trusted by one person/group and distrusted by others.

Siegfried. Dee Hock’s work. Command & control institutions can only handle a certain amount of complexity. People love to talk to other people about things that are dear to them. If somehow we can connect this it would be complementary to what present day institutions do. We should be thinking of something that allows tens of thousands of people to connect – we need to be thinking in bigger terms than the famous trusted people.
..
Jennifer. One of the things I’ve been going through recently is to begin thinking of myself as a philanthropist. If you open up & democratize the sense of philanthropy so it is accessible to each one of us, you open it up to where you can get thousands of individual transactions handled quickly.

Doug. One of the things that can give us a lot of hope is that globalization is self-limiting. At some point people will begin to find that opportunities are local, and systems don’t need to be commensurate to each other at large differences.
..
Jan. One of my mentors was one of the captains of Silicon Valley. He was running a spreadsheet to where he would open up his new factory, factoring in the local wage rates, inflation, etc. There’s much to be said for the optimism Doug expresses, but doesn’t that assume everything has reached some level end point, where there’s no where else to run to?

Doug. The real wildcard here is how China plays into this. They can out-compete anything you could do elsewhere for a long time. There is some fascinating literature on this, including John Pocock’s book The Machiavellian Moment. The founding fathers read the literature that predicted that there would be problems for the U.S. when the frontier was closed.
..
Mark. The thing that drives international trade is simply differences – differences of wages are only one type of difference. The notion that globalization is driven by the search for cheap labor is too narrow. Differences of all sorts create advantages. Peaceful global cooperation w/world integrated markets is what we’re looking for.

David. The Transformational Philanthropy Project is one of the leading attempts to rethink philanthropy. Money is not the question nor is it the answer. If you lead with money, and define the industry in monetary terms it will fail. The big institutions are caught in a deep vicious circle because they define their businesses and success in self-defeating terms. The World Bank is far too much an engineering institution, and the current Secretary of the Treasury,
..
Paul O’Neill, is pushing it further in that direction. Jeff Sachs recently gave a speech at the World Bank, widely attended, and his analysis was blind to everything we have learned. It assumed that people are disempowered by their climate, geography, colonial heritage, we just have to go in there and get more money out of the rich countries into the poor, making people into victims in the process. The speech was enormously well-received, because all the frustrated social engineers were relieved to hear that they didn’t have to think about the tough problems of sustainability.
..
Tom. Regarding Transformational Philanthropy, the model of influential people and projects is one scale…I can see a whole continuum of scales, so the welfare mother can be a philanthropist as well. Let all scales flourish, and that which is most transformational replicate. Part of my frustration is that there isn’t enough real reflective conversation, it’s all about fundraising. Even to have this discussion is a real service.

Duane. This is a distributed network of intelligence. Fluid and vague. This community can bring wonderful insights – for example the perspective of scale and scalability.
..
Michael. We have to be careful with our critique of philanthropy. There is a fair amount of self-reflection going on in the halls of traditional philanthropy. We have to be careful that our critique is not crude, that we don’t dismiss potential allies that are there. Also, there is a lot of energy today in community foundations, they are setting a trend for local giving.

They’re at the listening end, rather than the engineering end.
..
Jan. Inspired audaciousness. The audacious idea is that we can do something of scale. Not how can I make something small big, but how can I make something so crummy I can get a 2 cent vitamin A tablet to someone.

Inne. Kevin Kelley’s book Out of Control in which biology emerges from complexity – need to think more like a gardener than an engineer. I like to think about rules – how can we make rules that will produce a better world. What rules do we need to produce the kind of world we want? Bernard Lietaer’s book The Future of Money is also relevant. Our money has a character behind it. We have to think about things at that level if we have such a high goal as to make the world a better place.
..
Tony. I think Duane’s approach of leveraging both existing trust networks of philanthropy-minded individuals, and at the same time exploring the new possibilities afforded by the Internet for new kinds of trust networks is important. With respect to the elites, I would argue that power is not inherently bad, and anyway it is inescapable. Humans play games of social identity. In addition to building systems that provide affordance to encourage transformational giving, let’s use powerful, positive identities – i.e. leaders and well-known, well-intentioned people, to attract and organize energies.
..
Nipun Mehta - Charity Focus

Story of the monkey & the fish. The monkey sees the suffering fish, wants to help, brings it to land. Do you really know how to help effectively? The seven principles of S.E.R.V.I.C.E: · Selflessness: napster of compassionate action. Letting go of the fruits. Billions of web pages, only top 50 are commercial – what does that tell you? People love to share. CF infrastructure is fully decentralized, virtual. · Experience: Outer change through inner change. Everyone is a disciple of their own experience. No theories, no talk, just action. Are you willing to put your time where your mouth is? All volunteers – you can’t boss them, you have to be the change. Openness – I’m just recommending giving – you try it, & see how it feels. Process for new projects signup – could have a third person match people up, instead we allow people to sign up for whatever they want, whatever resonates with them.
..
· Ripple effect: Your life is your message. Pay it Forward. Whatever we do today sends out ripples throughout the world. Since we work with so many non-profits we get to see tons of transformational tales. Story of the woman from Reuter’s, a photographer, who goes to Guatemala and teaches kids in a shanty town how to take pictures. Looking at their pictures the next day, she realized she was looking at the world through the eyes of these children – she wrote a book, donated the profits to build a school in that community.
..
· Versatile: Be like water. Mould to shape of any container yet move mountains. Rachel’s life lesson from a blind man. Someone taps her on the back while she’s on the phone, she turns around in a rage, to see it was a blind man. Story of 16 year old volunteer, handicapped volunteer.

· Inter-connected: in-visible matrix of inspiration. Can you see the cloud in the paper? Are we in touch with that interdependence. No snowflake in an avalanche thinks it contributes. In CharityFocus everyone is level as far as status hierarchy goes. When you work in this way it is a good antidote for arrogance – you realize you’re not the hot stuff.
..
· Content in the Moment: Journey is the joy. Example – let’s profile everyday heroes. What if no one reads them? Doesn’t matter – it was meaningful to the writer. When do we feel like “I have arrived”? Service doesn’t start when you have something to give. It blossoms naturally when there’s nothing left to take. Lesson from Gandhi’s shoe. No fundraising at all; why is philanthropy needed? No fundraising takes the pressure off – if volunteers cease to give, the organization goes away; it’s carefree. I’ve got nothing to lose. · Effortless: Compassion is contagious. That is the fundamental principle. Try it – you’ll like it. Walking on the ground vs. 100 foot ledge. Rose gives its scent because that is it’s nature – doesn’t discriminate. CF’s marketing plan: none required. It will continue until the purity is no longer there, then it will die – which is as it should be. Tale of two fish. Young fish says to the wise fish “where is this water I’ve heard about?” Wise fish, “It’s all around you. Compassion is all around us – can you see it. Struggle is not inherent in philanthropy, if you do it right.
..
CF Process:

1. Accept Request. Process based on filtering questions. Need to filter out scammers, to preserve meaningfulness of volunteer experience. Why not have 40 people giving 5 hours a week? Decentralized process, only possible because of the Web. 2. Gather Content. Project lead works w/nonprofit to organize & develop Website content. 3. Build Website. 4. Tech Lube & Wrap Up. Yes, there is a method to our madness. Just like a corporate structure but connected with the glue of service-hearted folks. CF has no leaders, no followers, its strength comes from its emptiness and its beauty resides in the hearts of its volunteers. Org chart: Tigers – tigers about giving, fearless about staring down your selfishness Projects: coordinators, writers, graphics Volunteer: CF clubs, local events, buddies Tech: reviewers, pledgepage, CF site Helpers: reachout, finance, operations Bears – like Board of Directors
..
Last month CF took over a dot com – PledgePage. Incredible testimonial to the strength of service.

Three pillars:

· Inspiration: Cultivate the change · Action: Be the change · Support: Invest in the change
..
“Don’t ask so much what the world needs. Go out and do what makes you come alive because what the world needs most are the people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
..
Paul Chafee – Appreciative Inquiry

David Cooperider got a call from someone working with a fortune 500 corporation to address the problem of sexism in the corporation. They did everything they could to address the problem, and after 2 years by every measure it had gotten worse. David asks them, What do you really want? They answer, To make a huge dent in an awful problem. Is that all you want? Well, what we really want is excellent cross-gender leadership across teams. David said OK, let’s go after that. This led to a transformation across the organization. Avon went from having an awful reputation for sexism to winning an award in the field. A paper by Cooperider’s mentor 20 years ago really upended field of Organizational Development. I got on the AI list two years ago when there were 400, now there are 800. It’s a new culture, which asks us to look not at problems but at opportunities. Some premises:
..
· The locus of learning is not the individual, rather in dialog, in relationship

· Inclusive – enlarge the circle of dialog – invite the banker and the janitor

· Everyone has a voice. Everyone becomes a leader, a giver.
..
· Self-organizing. Looks at the community as a living system. At the end of AI there is always action – self-organizing.

· Asks us to inquire into what we appreciate or value. This is not positive thinking. Rather, taking whatever the problem is, looking at the problem and seeing it as an opportunity. There may be only a sliver of light in the problem, but the way to deal with it is to find that sliver and support it.
..
Five principles:

1. Social agency with a model providing motivation w/conditional aid, the doer implementing model.

2. Enabling helping agency fostering local experiments and catalyzing linkages.

Two knowledge strategies. Technological diffusion literature. Center-periphery model vs. decentralized social learning model. Stop teaching, foster self-learning. "If you teach a man anything he will never learn it." - GB Shaw. "He who wants to teach a truth should place us in a position to learn it ourself." - Ortega y Gassett.
..
For more "Left-Brain" stuff:

Click on the left brain for my work, the right brain for my son Derrick's stuff.
..
Paul: David, how do the people at the World Bank feel about your work?

David: Well, I'm leaving in two weeks... they love the rhetoric, but there's a complete disconnect between the talk and the walk.

Doug. You can think of the bank as an amazing intellectual exercise in the capacity to adapt to new language without changing. "Participatory development" meant asking people where they want the hospital. The language of impact assessment has gotten very sophisticated - you have to go out & see how things really work in the field to cut through the rhetoric.
..
David. Right - the language of community-driven, demand-driven, bottom-up is there, but not the reality.

Eric: A third role for philanthropy may be trying to neutralize a negative influence that's already there - e.g. diamond economy stabilizing state of war in Zimbabwe.

David: Yes, there are situations where an outsider can intervene, do something good like vaccinating children, then pull out. So the conversation around unhelpful help is subtle. But people delude themselves that all aid is of this form.
..
Jan Hauser - The Scalable Trust Project

Scale of giving calls for a range of trust. Many different forms of trust:

• Close knit - person-to-person. Culture matters. In the West casual introductions are common, in Asia they are rare – by the time an introduction is made a great deal of social capital has already been invested.
  ..
  
• Open review & rating by group. Electronic medium requires special effort. eBay - review & rating by group.

• By Institutional Boundary. System of checks & balances inside a bank where we can construct a trusted institution out of untrusted people.

• Iterated Transactions. Strangers meet, talk, get to know each other, over time trust is developed, without institutions or introductions. eBay recommends this – have discussions before & after you do a trade.
  ..
  
• Contract w/"Informal group". What they discovered in the Grameen Bank model. In terms of loan repayment single man, single women, group of men aren't very good; a group of women tends to be pretty good.

• Authentication. Email is OK, but can be spoofed by moderate skill. VeriSign is better, but leads to centralization of power & authority, SmartCard, Biometrics etc. are better.
  ..
  
• Reputation. Various factors. Authentication of those that provide the rating…rating may reflect integrity, competence, other factors.

• Accountability. Delegation can compensate for insufficient authentication and/or reputation, e.g. E-Escrow used for larger purchases on Ebay - if there is fraud FedEx is accountable.

..

• Visa. The parties don’t trust each other, but can trust Visa.

• Applied sustainability. One person's pollution is another person's raw materials. Businesses normally are secretive about their process, but need to disclose to collaborate. Applied Sustainability brokers the process of initiating the communication & collaboration, then leaves as the companies work directly together.
  ..
  
• Grameen Bank.

• Women's Empowerment Program. Rather than micro-debt it's micro equity - an important distinction in terms of autonomy.

  
  

..

• Tutorial on Trust in an Electronic Medium

• Recommended Practice Guide. Use of delegation, etc.

• Creation or aggregation of standards

• Creation of working groups

Jan. Right – you have to think not like a technologist but like an economist, always balancing risk and utility. This is abstract, and only has relevance in the context of a project.
..
Tom. Volunteers for a working group?

Jan. I'm finishing a survey just now of what's out there - it may be that what we want has already been built.

Paul. I’m struck by the similarity of concerns in my work with interfaith groups, and faith groups, to your work in technology. There may be parallel learnings there.
..
Eric. Work that Sam Bowles & others have done at SFI, that give indications of how this problem might be broken down into different parts.

Jan. One of the problems with the world trust is trust in what - an institution, my neighbors, a lock box, etc.

..
Stewart Gannes - Digital Vision Fellowship Program

[By phone.] The Digital Vision Fellowship Program is sponsored by Stanford University and Reuters. Applicants submit a project proposal (due this week!) involving an application of communication technology that would benefit a humanitarian cause in the developing world. Fellows come to Stanford and work for a year, with access to the resources of Stanford, plus the loosely-coupled support network of Silicon Valley. Reuters recruited 5 fellows for Fall 2001, I started as Director in January. The current group of fellows doesn't exhaust full range of what could happen with the program. Examples of current fellows:

..

• One fellow focused on agricultural information.

• Another is a telecommunications specialist who brings equipment w/earliest relief workers into refugee areas that have zero infrastructure.

• Working in Brazil on computer training & jobnet.

We're talking about a lot of things – PDAs, wireless connectivity, technology policy issues of privacy, security and regulations, cultural implications of user interfaces, industrial design.

As we go forward one of the things we’re starting to learn is that this program has an appeal that goes beyond the original vision that Reuters had, which was to address the concerns of technologists within large companies. I’m looking at applications this week from people all over the world. Reuters takes responsibility for all the academic costs of the program – fellows are considered part of the campus community in that they can audit courses. In addition we are working to identify people who can sponsor fellows, to help overcome the issue of the high cost of living in Silicon Valley.
..
I've encouraged Tom to consider using our fellowship as a platform for some of the ideas that giving space is talking about.

I went to a lecture with Tom Friedman last night, in which he made an interesting mention of Al Caida's abililty to use technology such as email and buddy lists.

..
David Brin - Horizons of Inclusion and Investment

[By phone.] Augmenting and Divvying the Philanthropic "Pie". We need to apply a 21st century imagination to this domain. I look at the 20th century as a time of transferring our faith from kings, wizards and priests to ideologies. We reached the pit of that at mid-century. Now we need a very practical, non-ideological approach. I'm an amateur in this field, but I can offer a metaphor.

..

• Pyramid. Aristocracy at the top, masses at the base. The Golden age of Athens briefly expanded the ruling class from 1% to 7%.

• Diamond. Our social structure is the first in history in which the well-off outnumber the poor. Some may argue with this [head nodding in room]. There is a consensus that this is a better social structure, and that social class shouldn't be inherited. My view is fundamentally pragmatic, doesn't fit neatly into either Left or Right ideologies.

I make a distinction between triage altruism and investment altruism. Traditionally what we’ve had is triage altruism. We're in a position where we can do investment altruism, so that our grandchildren can have even lower threat horizons and in turn invest even more. New philanthropists want a sense of fun, of boldness, that would make their names, like the Medici's. Eye of the Needle foundation: 100 projects that millionaires can fund. [see http://www.kithrup.com/brin/eon1.html
..
Eric. From what I've read, the literature on income levels doesn't support the diamond model.

David. By any way of looking at it, in America & Europe today there are fewer poor people than people who own homes. We need to distinguish between absolute and relative numbers of the poor. Yes there are more poor people today in absolute terms, but not in relative terms.
..
Tony. We need to bear in mind the question of what constitutes happiness, what is the phenomenon to be optimized? Perhaps it is meaning, not material wealth. We need to somehow bring together the discourses of economics and discourses such as psychology and spirituality that deal with meaning. Whenever we speak solely in the traditional terms of material development we lose something – something fundamental.

David. Yes - in this conversation we're dancing around Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
..
David. The contradiction between proportion and absolute numbers of poor and oppressed people. I want to recognize and honor the tools we have from the last century. We should always remain appalled by the pyramids in other countries, and the bottom of the diamond.
..
Dennis Whittle - DevelopmentSpace Update

Thanks to Tom for doing such a great job of Cat Herding!

Inne. I would like to present this fine product of the Netherlands to Tom.

[Inne presents Dutch wine to Tom.]
..
Nipun. In the spirit of celebration, it's Siegfried's birthday.

[Applause...]

The roots of DevelopmentSpace lie in two projects we did at the World Bank:

· 1998 Innovation Marketplace. Anything goes, 110 teams of World Bank staff, 11 experiments funded, 5-6 became major strategic initiatives for the Bank. · 2000 Development Marketplace. 1130 proposals, 82 countries, 1000 organizations, 339 finalists in D.C., 44 funded. At the meeting of the finalists, we had Ugandan women who had never been out of their country before standing next to supreme court justices. This was the most transformative experience in my life. The challenge and opportunity lies in the 4B people left out of the World economy. Can look at this as a problem or an opportunity. The problems are solvable – not simplistically, but they are solvable. Lots of money is flowing to these 4B, but ineffectively: · Private Finance: $160B · Official Finance: $50B · U.S.: $12-$16B · US Individuals $170B · Foundations $30+B · Only 10-17B goes to developing countries
..
Coming increase in charitable bequests. Massive transfer of wealth coming:

· $2-3 trillion in next 20 years · $5-25 T in next 50 years

Important to note that: · Individuals give away 6 times more than foundations. · The growth in global philanthropy in coming years will be found outside the U.S. DevelopmentSpace grew out of an imagination experiment. A global marketplace in which ideas, talent, money & passion come together. The eBay of International Aid. Bring together Social Entrepreneurs, Social Investors, Service Providers. Instead of being at the bottom, in the metaphor of money flowing downward, in DevelopmentSpace the Social Engineers (SE’s) are at the top and initiate the projects. Changing the way the market works: from top down to bottom up, etc.
..
Project Flow:

1. Initiate a Plan. SE states a project idea that will benefit her community. 2. Create a Plan – includes authentication. 3. Refine a Plan. Extreme rigor in this step. SE uses tools on site to develop a business plan. 4. Make the Deal. SE pitches idea to Social Investor. SE &SI sign contracts. 5. Implement. Leads to Evaluation, rating, reputation. The Ugandan Women can begin to build a brand. Automatic report mechanisms – both facts & figures plus stories & pictures.
..
What’s different about DevelopmentSpace:

· Open access · Bottom-up · Direct connections between SI’s & SE’s. · Community helps design /evaluate projects. Everyone can see all the business plans in DevelopmentSpace. Some aspects in DealSpace are opaque. Beta Launch Feb 2002. As of May:
..
· 800 registered users · 120 projects listed · 44 countries · First project financed in 2 weeks · 6 projects partially financed · India Govt. Providing $2-6M match for school construction Challenges: · Reputation, Trust, Community · Attracting & retaining Social Investors · Quality Projects · Language & Country Context · Highly experienced mentors · Internet Access
..
Jennifer. It’s important to trumpet the stories of funding from developing world. This combats the current idea that funding only goes North to South. Jan. The whole notion of the flow of money, looking out into the future, can be changed if you operate in a digital media. Doug. Isn’t the net flow of money actually going from South to North – i.e. interest payments are greater than new loans? Dennis. Not sure on that one.

..
Mark Miller - The Digital Path

What I'm going to talk about is early stage. Anyone trying to use technology to help the world now should probably not use this: it's for risk-taking early adopters.

First my worldview: I see the world as a complex layering of games. Emergence comes from interplay among diversity of interests, with both cooperative and competitive aspects. If we have a sense of what emergent effects we want to take place, we can try to reason back to what rules would lead to them. The Web has moved free speech from legal right to technological fact. This process has its costs, e.g. destruction of copyright.
..
Thinkers on trust include:

• Granoveter. Topological view of social relationships

• Fukyama. Cultural analysis of different proclivities toward trust

• DeSoto. Accounts for differences in trust levels in societies by presence or absence of various intermediate institutions.

The "Low-trust tragedy" is not that there is no trust, rather that there are no trust hubs. High trust relationships exist, but there is a lack of coupling between them. This leads to a lack of extended markets.
..
Hope diagram. The kind of help that would not be unhelpful. If we can enable a transaction to be mediated between two individuals - who themselves don't have the benefit of a context of domestic hubs of trust - by going through a title registry in a 1st world institution facilitated via the Internet, we can do what I call remote trust bootstrapping.

Diagram. Alice knows Carol & Bob. Alice says something to Bob, which conveys both contents of the utterance, and access/designation access to Carol. This diagram applies across many disciplines.
..
Capability security. Only connectivity begets connectivity. This is a micro-theory for building up trustworthy electronics systems.

Elanguage is a secure language we’ve built that’s in use at 5 companies. Secure messages between objects on multiple machines, in a decentralized way that can scale - no central coordination points.

Zooko's Triangle & PNML. Three properties: decentralized/global, secure/non-political, human memorizable. A name can't have all three properties, but can have any pairwise properties.

..
Tony Hoeber - The Dalai Lama Trust

I'll mention briefly what the Dalai Lama Trust is, but first, in the spirit of beginning to converge on actionable things, I’d like to put out something that Nipun and I have been talking about, which might be called the Transformational Technology Project.
..
First let me say a little bit about the software space. In software you’ve got different levels:

• Principles - this is the level of elucidating the principles on which powerful systems can be built - that's what Jan and Mark are doing with their Trust project. You can put standard protocols such as IP, HTTP, HTML and XML here.
  ..
  
• System software - this is what the Open Source movement began, and where most of it's work to date has been done. This is a large mass of software classified as operating system, middle ware, etc.

• Application software. This is software that does a particular, domain-specific job.

There are lot's of possible applications - membership management, newsletters, email, discussion groups, Local Heroes, Global Heroes, I-Journeys, donations, many varieties of transformational spaces. Technology for story telling, trust building, healing exchanges, giving exchanges, connecting. Some of this is easy – you don’t need any particular software application to simply post stories on the Web. But some isn't - e.g. to make it easy to embed the "transformational links" envisioned by the News Tagging project, complete with a calls to transformational action, ability to assess trust, etc. will take quite a bit of application-level work.
..
What I'm excited about is the prospect of doing this once, and making it available to all.

Mike. There's lots of activity on application-level open source software for non-profits. E-base, customer management tool for non-profits.

Tony. That's great - I'd like to learn about this & help promote it.
..
I'll say just a word about the Dalai Lama Trust. This is a newly-forming organization, of friends and students of the Dalai Lama who are coming together to support the ideals he has worked for over the years - peace and peacemaking, ethics, religious dialog, and human rights and humanitarian work. The GivingSpace conversation - how to promote altruism and transformational giving on a large scale – is absolutely central to our mission.

The capability exists to mobilize a lot of energy under the umbrella of trust afforded by the Dalai Lama's social identity. The challenge is in the how. What would success look like - another Ford Foundation? Or something much different, more like the URI Cooperation Circles around the world.
..
Just as China was able to skip a generation of communication technology and go directly to cell phones, maybe the Dalai Lama Trust can forgo building a centralized, Ford Foundation structure, in favor of an autocatalytic network. So I'm very appreciative to have found this conversation - I think what we have here is a case of just-in-time intervention in organizational design.
..
Jeffrey Ashe - Women's Empowerment Program Assessment

[By phone.] Planting seeds for a new foundation for philanthropy. We’ve just finished a comprehensive evaluation process on Women’s Empowerment Program in Nepal. We’re trying to figure out this autocatalytic process. How is it possible that this program which has a field staff of 85 people could reach out to 6,500 groups – in 60 days? Behind this is not setting up an institution for delivering services but being a facilitator, a catalyst. The key is working through existing groups rather than creating new ones. The institute we are starting is based on finding a whole range of strategies to help rebuild communities.
..
Dennis. Do you have a summary of the principles that are emerging that you could send out?

Tom. I've asked Duane to summarize the morning session...

Duane. David Ellerman spoke about autonomy-respecting help, two types that are unhelpful - overriding & undercutting. Three dos – start where the doers are, see the world through the doers eyes, and respect the autonomy of the doers. Stuart Gannes phoned in with an update of the Digital Vision program at Stanford. Jan Hauser talking about the scale of trust, trust as an emergent property depending on authentication, reputation, accountability. David Brin talked about moving from pyramid structures to diamond structures with respect to the distribution of wealth, and moving beyond triage altruism into investment altruism. Dennis Whittle gave us an update on DevelopmentSpace.
..
Convergence Discussion

Duane. I've been working on the human side w/trusted networks of people. I'm interested in exploring the technology around trust. I want to stay in touch to get the different players in the trust discussion in the conversation.
..
Dennis. I'm struck by the incredible diversity that's here, and what a value that is. It's extraordinary how many different places are coming from and where they're going. What's so nice about this group is the diversity of those visions. Both/And thinking is good, but only if supported by discipline. How many times have we been involved with great open ended discussions that don't go anywhere, or that don't meet David's "full-head + full-heart" test. I would hope that GivingSpace itself will serve as a laboratory for a number of these initiatives that are heavily research-oriented and public domain, that will serve all of us.
..
Doug. In the day & a half I've been here I've totally reframed how I view philanthropy, and I'm totally shocked by that. I wonder about others?

Heather. Doug's point relates to an underlying process of redefining that we're all engaged in.
..
Tom. Let me take a stab at listing the candidates for actionable ideas that have emerged:

1. Scalable trust.
2. Organization. Online conversational support, Giving Circles, etc.
3. Storytelling archive.
4. PML.
5. News Tagging Project.
6. Open software for transformation.

Lisa. What's the difference between this and IDML? News Tagging.

Mike. Oneworld is an aggregation/syndication site, taxonomy, 7 languages, 1200 partner sites, code content by topic, location, language, originating NPO, type of content – text/audio/video. Introducing oneworldTV, which allows people to record their own 2-minute clip, become your own documentary maker.
..
Paul. I'm interested in making explicit the rules for our own discourse, and methodology to focus/funnel our energy, give it opportunity in small groups. What are the best questions to get us to a GivingSPace in full bloom?
..
Siegfried. Can we put some words on the kind of thing we're trying to be? Can we identify some keywords to guide us?

Eric. In a world of global communication its hard for someone to be special - nostalgia for community. Is it worth talking about building communities of givers, which have methods of accumulating history and accreting identity in the context of philanthropy. Community-building, where and by what means.
..
Paul. That won't get anywhere until we spend some time on the purpose of GivingSpace. Until you develop that ground to stand on you can’t move forward.

Heather. Some workgroups can get started immediately, some require initial reflection – e.g. the questions that Paul and Siegfried raise.

Nipun. GivingSpace itself is a model for Cooperation Circles – let’s first work through the process with this group.
..
Siegfried. For many of the discussions it’s too early, and let’s recognize that. Before we celebrate our diversity too much let’s look around the table – most of the people here are white, with money, from the SF Bay Area. Before we structure ourselves let’s bring the other voices in, and that can be done in various ways.

Heather. One of the initial opportunities for giving that we could be create would be the opportunity for projects like the WEP to tell our stories.
..
Tony. Let’s build an application for entering/displaying/searching stories & make the technology available.

Mike. To put a GivingSpace value and interpretation on these stories would be a different take.

Heather. When Tom asked the director of WEP the reply was "What I'd like is the opportunity to tell our story."
..
Suzanne. If you put these stories on the web you're going to miss all the people who aren't on the web.

Heather. Yes, we need to use multiple channels.
..
Siegfried. One of the points that has been re-enforced for me over & over the past couple of days is that things work when you connect one person w/another person, one person telling another about what is dear to them is the fundamental building block I’d like us to focus on.

Paul. Yes, your point leads to the point that you’ve got to honor the integrity of the story – not prostitute it as an ad.
..
Tom. Not an f-word story, but a story of transformation.

Mark. David, do you have anything to say about the process of telling stories that can prevent the stories being misused?

David. The answer is in what Paul mentioned – integrity. You have to make your own assessment of the integrity of the story.
..
Jennifer. It’s the process to telling the story that makes the difference. When we talk about collecting these stories, if we’re just trying to collect positive stories what’s the point, if we realize what’s important about stories, why don’t we encourage that in our local communities & families.

Lisa. It’s important to realize that stories from voices that aren’t normally heard are more likely to be heard in developing countries via the net – to my mind GivingSpace is more at this point about promoting the giving from north to south.
..
Juan. I don’t have a cell phone, cable TV, or a laptop. There’s a reason why I’m here. You have to bear in mind who is going to be the recipient. It’s not a he, it’s a she. Accion International today lends more money in South America than the World Bank, and their customers are women and minorities. It’s wonderful that this meeting took here where the technology is, but let’s have the next meeting at Delancy St. & Embarcadero in San Francisco, and invite the women who will be the recipients of loans and such.
..
Inne. We in high tech mustn’t think in terms of tools, but in terms of the ideas behind the tools. I fell in love with the Net because the ideas of openness & access are so nice. We can use those concepts to get it down to the essentials. For me Internet was newsgroups – but you don’t need the Internet to have newsgroups. Radio can be used for conversations.
..
Harold. You know what I think GivingSpace is? It’s what’s going on right here. I don’t think there’s a product. This is it. We may be diverse in some ways and not diverse in other ways. The question is how do we keep this momentum going, do we need a defined structure for this to occur. One thing hit the nail on the head for me – we need to meet again, and the next time we need some other kinds of people in the room. If there’s something that GivingSpace needs to do, it needs to be something really exceptional. It’s gatherings like this. I’d hate to see this organization stumble because it tries to do something someone else is already going to do.
..
Suzanne. A place to come together, exchange ideas, come together, listen to other voices, and go back & do our things. We talk about giving, but we also receive.

Jennifer. Here’s a challenge for all of us: if we have another meeting, we each make a commitment to have some of that diversity here - i.e. pay people's way.
..
Harold. There are poor people right here in Santa Fe.

Paul. Story about healing wounds between religions at the Presidio. The pogroms were terrible, taking our land was terrible, but you know what the worst thing was? You didn’t listen to us. You assumed we didn’t have anything to say.

Heather. As we've been meeting over the past two days, in a poor school not too far from here, they are holding a mock U.N. meeting, with children, around the question “How can we reduce fear.” That effort came about because I told a friend of mine about GivingSpace.
..
David. We need to learn to get institutions to stop screwing the disempowered person. I think that's the way people of this level of education can make the most impact.

Siegfried. Building on that, the best thing we can do, is rather than attack the institutions that are set up to work in those ways, rather to find ways to liberate the energy of the millions of people outside those institutions. One of the functions of GivingSpace is to re-examine the assumptions of philanthropy and aid, particular as it relates to electronic media.
..
Tom. I want to go back to our title, which is "planting the seeds." Transformational energy is the thing that has leapt out to me. Video is so much more powerful than print.

Harold. Guess what - the story of WEP got told - what if every one of us goes out & tells this story - if you forgot the details, doesn't matter, its posted on the website. One of the things that really aggrevates me is I've watched lots of young kids in the military be seduced & ripped off by the banking/finance industry - we need to go back to them & say You're doing wrong.
..
Eric. John Franscois from World Bank, 20 Problems 20 Years – you can order it on eBay now, deliver in June.

…….Break………

..
Tom. I've asked David to give us some closing words.

David. The last 50 years of aid and philanthropy have certainly failed in fostering the social transformation of the poor. In GivingSpace people each with their own projects come together to facilitate some kind of rethinking, particularly around technology. So I'm less concerned with specific projects that GivingSpace might initiate than seeing GivingSpace as an opportunity to come and learn and share ideas. I'm putting in a plea for that as a worthwhile minimal bottom line function.
..
Tom. Do you think this is a good size?

David. Sure. Also, it would be good to have more ongoing dialog with smaller groups between meetings.
..
Paul. Maybe we need not only a story archive but a wisdom archive. And one of the things we’ve learned is that giving often has unfortunate results. This dialog itself – forgetting other projects – is valuable.

Tom. I've been thinking posting a collection of documents as “GivingSpace chronicles, Vol. 1”. To collect our ideas and share them, and get some pride of authorship.
..
Nipun. It would be a useful exercise to know what assets are present in GivingSpace. I'd be curious to hear what people think the assets we're sitting on are – they might be much greater than we could imagine. E.g. intellectual understanding of economics.

Heather. I think we've coalesced our working groups into 3:

• Scalable Trust Technologies. Jan, Mark, Lisa, Inne. Jan is working on pulling together some material; he will to produce a charter for the workgroup & circulate.
  ..
  
• PML & Appreciative News Markup. Mike, Nipun, Tony, Paul, Mac Odell. Mike & Nipun to co-facilitate.

• Organization/stories/mythmaking. To form the organizational culture, in terms of provocative question, vocabulary, advertising, stories. Wisdom, experience. Heather. Tom. Paul. Harold. Suzanne. Tony. Siegfried.

Doug. Yes - we can have a plenary plus working groups. Every group doesn't necessarily need a host.

Tony. So that means four conversational spaces: 3 working groups + 1 open ended?
..
Doug. Right. With a place to put our pictures & URLs so we can put names with faces.
..
Gavin. Most global communities don't survive unless 1) they have a tangible problem they need to solve, and 2) only some of the people will participate a lot, so one person has to be the gardener.

All. Rules of etiquette - keep it short and concise. Avoid verbosity.

Mike. Keep our mind open for other mediums – writing, audio, video, conference calls, Web chats etc. Regular events + ongoing conversation is a pretty good model to keep things going.
..
Tom. What’s our degree of openness and closure?

Paul. Don’t advertise until you clarify your purpose. You have to get focus.

Mark. In our open source effort we don’t advertise, but we let anyone on who asks. We not only publicly archive everything, but we make a public commitment that everything is permanently archived.
..
Tom. The editorial role is important – someone who can pull things together in newsletters, etc.

..
Closing Remarks

Tom. Why don’t we go around the circle and each say a bit about something we learned from the conversation the past two days, and a bit about the assets they bring.

Juan. My greatest asset in this context is the fact that I was born oversees – I’m your token minority. It’s important to realize that travel is very important for this kind of work, and I’ve traveled a lot, and have always been comfortable with working hands on, with the poor. I have an MBA-type degree in international management. I’ve been a Wall Street banker. I’ve volunteered all my life. My greatest asset sits next to me.
..
Suzanne. In addition to sitting next to Juan, I sit on the board of a local organization called Bread for the Journey. I’ll take a lot of these ideas back to them, and they’re already doing a lot of what we’ve talked about. They have very grass roots, quick ways to respond to need. Our thought is one of seeding ideas that can in time get more funding from larger organizations. I have ¾ of an MBA, am organized, love to surf the net, love to make linkages, see myself as a connector person – if you give me something to research I’ll do it day & night.
..
Tom. Suzanne did a wonderful job of setting up this meeting. [Applause.]

Doug. One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of lately is workshops in communities in which we ask What do you think is going on in the world? And, Given that, what do you think you ought to be doing? Building regional leadership. Very hard. Also I’m starting an institute whose function is to take on difficult issues – not to solve them, but to lay out the territory. Starting tonight I’m meeting with funders.
..
Mike. I’ve got several hats. One is working with foundations on the e-philanthropy discussion – which hasn’t reached the consensus stage. I will commit to is to get the conversation we’ve been having here going on w/co-conspirators in the philanthropic community. A second hat is oneworld.org. Our large membership of affiliated organizations gives us a Southern perspective, which can provide a reality test for the things we’ve been talking about. We just surveyed our 1200 organizations on what technology works, how the communicate w/their constituencies, etc. This could also help bring a practical dimension to this conversation. Third, personally I’m interested in the technology that’s bubbling along. I also see myself as a connector.
..
Jan. For most of my career I’ve worked w/advanced technology in computers & communications. Just now I’m between revenue-generating work, which gives me space to experiment & play in areas that are more experimental and risky. One is using technology for a bio-diversity project, the other is working with people who want to formalize identity in online systems. I’ve never been able to be fully reductionist, always seen things compulsively as interconnected. My offerings are also in being a connector: I cultivate and create diverse social networks, and I do represent the strength of weak ties.
..
Heather. What have I got out of the meeting? One thing that has not been mentioned much and bears mentioning is that what we do is really hard work. I’ve found all of these gatherings tremendously nurturing. This is what we’re doing here: we’re nurturing each other. As far as assets go, I’m a muddy-footed anthropologist – I like mess & ambiguity. What I can offer is synthesis, writing, asking provocative questions.

Jennifer. Once there were two frogs who jumped into a butter churn. One said “Oh my goodness, we’re going to die,” and promptly sank. The other began flailing around, kept at it, and eventually made butter. That’s me. Been a grantmaker and a grant seeker. These days I’m working in a grassroots organization trying to actualize these new models. And – I like to listen to stories. And I do have experience with women’s international development organizations.
..
Harold. I had a chance to renew friendships and meet new people. When I retired, I said “I vow never to commit medicine again.” I’ve got various roles that might be helpful in some way. I’m President & Chair of the Annapolis Center, which works on science & public policy. Also on board of M. Rostropovich’s foundation, which brings immunization to children in Russia. Also odds & ends – senior scholar at US. Medicine Institute, Board of Millennium Cohort Study.
..
Eric. Maybe a 5th of my work has to do with the mathematical problems of identity – particularly scalability of large nets – which has led to working on the concept of reputation. I’m not particularly productive in high-level planning meetings. I’m a theoretician, and my best work is done in collaboration with experimentalists. I’m speculating that my value may lie in pursuing my research, and collaborating with Mark on possible applications in some of the software systems he’s working on.
..
Mark. I want to build things that make a difference. Building what I’m building is the most subversive thing I can think of to do. My core research program is to investigate how can we bring about systems which do have beneficial characteristics and do not have the defect of centralized power. I’ve built all this stuff to do good; you guys are providing me hope that I may eventually see this happen.

Nipun. One of the big things I got out of these meetings is sleep – ’cause I hardly ever get 8 hours! One of the things I’ve learned to value is the journey, together with people who are open. I’ve enjoyed the conversations with different people these past two days. If the world is divided into the smart & ideal and the practical & dumb folks, I’d like to think of myself as one of the practical & dumb ones. Some people like to approach things by cataloguing A through Z. I tend to be content with looking at A through C, then I want to move into action. I like simplicity. Simpler is really better for me. I’m on the board of 5 organizations, including the Seva Foundation. I’m interested in bridging the divide between giver and receiver. Be the change.
..
Liz. I’m also a connector. I work here in the U.S. for a large network of NGOs which is based oversees. I’m interested in giving people in humanitarian work ways to help them do their work better. I can bring the asset of connecting people to others who are actually practitioners around the world. What drew me to GivingSpace originally is the vision of using technology to connect people one-to-one. At this meeting I learned that GivingSpace can also serve as a place for people working in philanthropy or development to come together to talk about new approaches and learn from each other. Maybe GivingSpace will be that, or maybe it will develop specific technology applications.
..
Gavin. I’m amazed that I’m still allowed to come to GivingSpace, being a for-profit guy. I’m so impressed by the talent that’s around here, and the unabashed commitment to steering the ship a little bit in the right direction. I love learning, and really appreciate the diverse theories – that teach me what we could be – and then I’m so thankful for people who have models that we can play with, like Nipun’s & Siegfried’s & Dennis’s. GivingSpace for me is an orphanage for dreamers in transition. What I bring practically is a connection to the financial community, business strategy, history in marketing and e-commerce, experience in video production, concern with justice. I’ve got a personal desire to bring my creative side – film & video – to bear with the development side. Open to advice on that.
..
Paul. I would echo what Gavin said. On one level this has been a huge pleasure – better than a weekend in Cabo. I’ve been blown away by the focus on trust. I didn’t think a group like this would care about trust. It’s not exactly the same as love, but it’s key. Jan & Mark, all this electronic stuff focused on trust is great. I’m more of a writer than an organizer. I think of myself as a networker more than anything else. We should remember that the church communities are there, and they are big givers, not so much into power tripping. They will be our allies – and they have computers now!
..
Siegfried. What I get from this meeting is a lot of heart and a lot of support. It nourishes the soul. I also learned some English – for example that it's "URI" - I always thought it was "you or me". I've never understood why people make such a big deal about "vision” " to me it's very logical to see things at a distance. Also I'm an idealist. Also impatient. Also blunt. My mind works on similarities. I’m not interested in differences. I could go into great detail on differences, but don't care to. I'm analytic, and at the same time creative. Another asset I bring to the table perhaps is that I'm not American, I'm Dutch. And being Dutch, I know a few languages. A lot of contacts in the Netherlands, and in the international conservation community. I've been a CEO for 15 years or so in a non-hierarchical organization (unlike Harold!) so I bring that experience. Also birds and speed skating. And a home in Holland. If that can be of any use, great.
..
Inne. I'm an industrial designer. I like to play games, and think about things. I'm lazy - I like to see if I can solve problems w/talking. I have an IT firm, and I like the social aspects of technology.

Tony. For years I've told my friends, I really love to work with really smart people - I want to be the dumbest guy at the table. Well - my dream has come true right here! I'm passionately committed to the hard problems: not complexity theory, but violence, how to create peace in the human heart, why can't we all just get along. I'm a bridger, connector of different spheres of discourse – humanities & technology, business & altruism, East & West, inner & organizational. It’s compulsive – probably some kind of illness. The Dalai Lama Trust is that kind of bridging, a connecting organization, with a meta-charter – not to do projects so much as to change the public discourse. You can count on me to speak up for the dimension of meaning whenever the discussion is framed from the start in economic terms. And at the same time, like Nipun and Siegfried I’m impatient – I want to build things.
..
Tom. My goal here is to not be the center of the hub, but a peer among peers. I have a sense of minimalism - what are the simplest minimal conditions that we can create that will have things bubble up the way we want. I see it as a cascade, or a series of cascades, that will ignite an ever-expanding group of people. I'm kind of surprised to hear people speak of me as a connector - but that's OK. I've always lost interest in systems as soon as the manual gets written. I'm a model builder. In my own conceptual way I feel like GivingSpace is a very timely concept. I plan to spend some time in the Bay Area at Stanford and with Nipun. I don't want to fall into the trap of being a paid Executive Director ordering a bunch of volunteers around. Perhaps organization is the wrong word – maybe what we’re creating is a space within which organization can emerge. Also, I don't want this space to be value-neutral: it's important to me that the activity we foster be ethical and transformational. It's ironic that a former computer geek is talking virtues.