Posts by Nathaniel Whittemore
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New Orleans Wins Super Bowl, Gets Social Entrepreneurship-Loving Mayor
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Digital Work for the Poor: The Next Big Opportunity?
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In Haiti, Are Informal Markets a Hope or Hindrance?
The Top 5 Ideas From TED Fellows
Published February 09, 2010 @ 02:49PM PT
I spent this morning watching the TED Fellows talk about their work -- a group that included clean tech entrepreneurs, scientists, musicians, artists and more. All are, as TED Fellow founder and TED Community Manager Tom Rielly put it, polymaths who excel in far more than just their particular area of expertise.
Although I loved all of their presentations, five ideas stood out to me in particular as game-changing, mind-bending or generally vital.
1. The power of local value chains: Kickstarter founder Perry Chen talked about his company's model of giving artists and creators the power to harness their audiences for financial support. While I've been a fan of the company for awhile, I was incredibly impressed by the clarity with which Perry explained Kickstarter's fundraising principles -- particularly Kickstarter's efforts to create local value economies that care about things that larger exchanges and markets would easily bypass. As Perry explained, supporters of most Kickstarter projects derive their "return" from the act of co-creating whatever the project is. It's a reminder about the importance of rethinking "rules," especially when the conditions that create those rules have changed.
This Week: Live from the TED Conference
Published February 09, 2010 @ 01:35PM PT
Right now, I'm on my way to the TED conference, one of the most renowned events for global thought leaders in the world. For the next five days, I'll be surrounded by new ideas and, frankly, a lot of people who have the power to make those ideas happen.
While TED’s origins go back a long way, it’s only since TED started making its talks available for free to the public in 2006 that it has morphed from a must-attend insiders' event to a true leader in the fight to, as I wrote last year, “make the world safe for smart.”
Since the first videos were posted on TED.com, TED talks have been viewed more than 200 million times. This is no not-fly-by-night video fad. These are intensely intellectual and creative talks meant to prod and stretch the mind into new shapes and modes of thinking.
G7 Countries to Cancel Haiti's Bilateral Debt
Published February 07, 2010 @ 02:06PM PT
In a show of support for earthquake-devastated Haiti last night, the leaders of the G7 nations announced that they would be canceling all of the country's bilateral debt.
As the BBC reports, the actual amount in question is small, as Haiti's largest bilateral debts are not held by G7 nations (which include Canada, the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Japan). Most of its debt is owed to multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund. While such agencies cancelled some $1.2 of Haiti's almost $2 billion in debt last year, the chorus is growing louder for them to eliminate the remainder.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner welcomed the G7's commitments, and said that the U.S. would help lead the conversations to get outstanding debt to those multilateral bodies canceled.
Yesterday's announcement comes on the heels of decades of debt relief activism -- and controversy.
Launching a No-Office Experiment
Published February 05, 2010 @ 10:50AM PT
The world of work spaces is getting revolutionized. Co-working is exploding everywhere, and it's never been easier for teams to be located in multiple locations, thanks to the power of virtual collaboration. But for most large companies, virtual working remains the exception. That's why it'll be so fascinating to see what Inc. Magazine will learn as it launches a one-month experiment to work without an office.
In a blog post a couple days ago, Inc.'s Max Chafkin announced the company's plan to learn the good, bad and ugly of the virtual work lifestyle -- the hard way. For one month, some staffers will work from home, and others from cafés. Everyone, though, will be learning the tricks of the trade with new applications and technology to ease the blow.
During the experiment, they'll be blogging about their experiences, and at the end of it all, they'll publish a piece about the month they spent scattered in different locations. As Chafkin points out, their experiment is particularly significant, given that the norm in the publishing industry remains having writers, editors and designers in the same place as they finalize a piece.
Making Foundations More Transparent
Published February 04, 2010 @ 02:31PM PT
Whether you think they're relics from another era, or vital actors for a more just 21st century, most people can agree that foundations have been relatively slow-moving when it comes to engagement with social media. Larry Blumenthal of the Robert Woods Johnson foundation, for example, wrote last year about how it's like pulling teeth to get foundation officers to get on the interwebs.
But the new era of social media is about more than chatter, it's about transparency. For that reason, it's great to see the Foundation Center's new initiative, Glasspockets, push foundations down the path of openness.
Glasspockets is basically an interface that helps break down the information that foundations make about themselves into more easily navigable and comparable chunks. A Glasspocket profile of a foundation includes links (or reveals the conspicuous absence of links) to the different social networks the foundation is on, as well as to whistle-blower procedures and searchable databases of past grants. Most of the information comes directly from foundation websites, but this tool makes it much easier to get to exactly what you want and need.
One of the reasons I think this is important is that even when the nonprofit sector collects data (foundation grantees are a good area), it's usually extremely hard to find, navigate and manipulate. This project takes a first step toward making that information more accessible.
How Legit is Pepsi Refresh?
Published February 04, 2010 @ 10:50AM PT
After the Chase debacle, one could forgive the nonprofit sector for being a little leery of cause marketing competitions. Now, though, Pepsi has launched its major "Pepsi Refresh" initiative, the company's major brand positioning for 2010. At the centerpiece of "Refresh" is a series of monthly cause marketing competitions, in which up to 1,000 nonprofits can compete for award money. Each month, users vote up the top nonprofits and Pepsi will select up to 32 winners.
The question is: how does the initiative stack up? At first glance, it seems to be doing a whole lot of things better than some of its predecessors.
Here's a run-down of its notable features:
1. Varying competition levels. One of the challenges of something like the Chase competition was that the variety of entrants meant that tiny nonprofits with a few staff were competing against comparative juggernauts with far wider networks and far more time. Refresh addresses this by having four different award levels — $5,000, $25,000, $50,000, and $250,000 — so that organizations can pick the level at which they're most likely to compete successfully.
The Top Three Lessons Avatar Can Teach Social Entrepreneurs
Published February 04, 2010 @ 06:27AM PT
Avatar has officially broken all the box office records. It's made more than $2 billion in the global box office, and as of yesterday, it surpassed Titanic to become the highest-grossing movie in U.S. history. As I watched it yesterday for the second and a third (long story) time, I couldn't help think about a few lessons that social entrepreneurs could take from the movie. I'm listing my thoughts here, in ascending order. (SPOILER ALERT: I've tried not to give away too much, but if you haven't seen Avatar, you may want to turn back now.)
#3. The Profit Motive is Complicated and, Unchecked, Often Dangerous: This is the one of the movie's most obvious lessons, but still important to restate. The main conflict in Avatar is that a company from Earth is trying to get the indigenous Na'vi on a planet called Pandora away from their ancestral home because it sits on an extremely rich deposit of "Unobtanium," a metallic substance that sells for $20 million a kilo. The Avatar program is a scientific approach to learning more about the Na'vi and Pandora, which the company supports financially as a way to find a diplomatic approach to getting the Na'vi out of the way. At the same time, the company has a private army that's chomping at the bit looking for an excuse to go in with all guns blazing. As protagonist Jake Sully puts it, "This is what they do. When you're sitting on something they want, they make you an enemy so they're justified in taking it."
