Peter is dedicated to developing Internet technology tools that help the nonprofit arena. He’s spent the last year and a half creating a way to more easily find, create, and participate in online social change campaigns by developing a kind of search engine for all of the listings on GiveMeaning, Change, FirstGiving, and a dozen other sites.

This will make it infinitely easier to learn from these campaigns, both individually (to decide what to support or create) and collectively (by mapping campaigns by location, issue, activity, etc.).

One of the benefits of voting for Peter’s project (which will take about 20 minutes) will be learning about the other contest entries, getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a whole array of technologies and websites that are being developed for nonprofit causes.

If you have a few minutes today or tomorrow, please visit http://www.socialactions.com/vote-for-the-social-actions-mashup for an introduction to Peter and his work and for quick instructions on how to cast a vote for his project.

In Peter’s words: 

Dear colleagues and friends,

I need your vote in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge to advance my work in micro-philanthropy.

In response to a call out for the most innovative example of a mashup for social change, I have proposed a project called “A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms.”

You can read the full description here: http://tinyurl.com/3berjh

Over 120 projects are competing in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Your support for “A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms” will help me break into the top 20. As a finalist, I will be invited to attend the conference, compete for a portion of $100,000 in funding, and win over the support of funders, foundations, and collaborators.

This exposure is necessary for me to bring about open standards for indexing and syndicating peer-to-peer social change campaigns from a range of social action platforms. My goal is to simplify the process of finding, creating, and participating in online social change campaigns.

Voting ends on Monday, March 24th at 5 p.m. PST.

Simple instructions on how to vote for my project: http://tinyurl.com/2cbs8z

After you cast your ballot, please let me know by email. This is the only way for me to know when and to whom to send thank you notes! 

Additional things you can do:
- Blog about this project
- Forward this email to your friends, family, and colleagues
- Post a link to this project on your Facebook profile

Thank you in advance for your support.

All the best,
Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com/peter

PS — I don’t usually send mass emails to colleagues and friends. I’m doing so in this case because I’m passionate about my work, and need as many supporters as possible to further this independent project.

From Clay Cooper, the co-founder and CEO of Speak Shop:

We created Speak Shop to help languge instructors work their way out of poverty. We currently have instructors in Antigua, Guatemala teaching Spanish online via videoconferencing. They use our online marketplace to establish their own microenterprise by setting their own hours and rates. The tutors currently charge $8 per hour which is 2-3 times more than what tutors typically earn when they teach in person. The instructors have taught over 5,000 lessons online since we started! We also plan to expand to other countries and languages.

If you are still interested, this two minute video does a much better job of describing us:

But always and inevitably my attention turns back to what it is we’re connecting for. What is it we hope to accomplish with this ever-expanding ability to share our ideas and our money and our influence? What relationships are we looking to build with those we can now more easily reach? Especially where we’re connecting with people and communities in far away places, with cultures and economic conditions much different than our own, what influences do we want to have, and how do we want to be influenced, as it becomes easier and easier to connect with the more remote corners of our world?

The other day I was introduced by Tom Munnecke’s Good Ancestor Principles workshop, to David Ellerman’s ideas on helping people. “Helping” is one reason to connect with people and a key element in the work I do in the name of ‘international development.’

I really like the way Ellerman defines the role of helping. Rather than framing it as delivering assistance, or even teaching another how to assist themselves, he frames it as encouraging and amplifying the good that’s already going on within the other’s world.

The role of the “helping agency,” he says, is to catalyze, foster, and otherwise amplify 1) positive things that are already happening and 2) any experimentation that’s already happening for the purpose of improving upon what’s already going on.

Some excerpts from his 2002 paper on helping as delivering ”Autonomy-Respecting Assistance“ that I particularly like:

The helping approaches of engineering and benevolence fail because they either override or undercut the autonomy of the doers.

There is no “outside in” way to deliver “inside out” change [see Covey 1990].  Some major agencies show their failure to understand this point by labeling their education programs as “Learning Delivery Programs.”  An agency can deliver training or teaching—and learning may or may not take place, but an agency cannot “deliver learning.”

The role of the autonomy-respecting cognitive helper is not to teach or disseminate knowledge but is the Socratic role of being a midwife or facilitator of a learning process on the part of the doers.

In this model of decentralized social learning, the role of the center or helper is that of a broker fostering horizontal learning in the form of visits, secondments, twinning arrangements, or consulting contracts between successful doers and would-be doers.

The alternative to the helper supplying motivation is where the helper finds virtue afoot on its own.  “In these situations, the donor would set himself the task of rewarding virtue (or rather, what he considers as such) where virtue appears of its own accord.” [Hirschman 1971, 204]  The helper would try to catalyze linkages, maximize demonstration effects, and in others ways to amplify the found small beginnings of positive change.

So if we wanted to create or join a “helping agency” (aka individual or organizational social action initiative), Ellerman’s ideas add a level of complexity to the already complex process of recognizing a need, delivering funds, and adding sticks and carrots to encourage that the help has the desired impact. But I’m inclined to agree with Ellerman that this kind of assistance-delivery is what is needed.

When I get excited about P2P techno-activity, it’s because those tools help us to understand one another — to more easily and directly share our ideas and money and other measurements of value with one another — and the more we do that, the less complicated and more intuitive and common sensical Ellerman’s model of assistance will be.

Additional reading: David Ellerman’s latest book, Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (2005)

Sprouts are still in beta testing, but you can leave an email address on their website and be notified when they’re open to the public.

I’d known about the contest for a while, but I’m a huge fan of both Seva Mandir and the Mountain Fund, and the emails got me thinking about whether the Challenge might be used to help a nonprofit reach goals that extend beyond simply winning the contest. The chance of any particular nonprofit winning the contest is statistically small, but the contest could still be a great opportunity to draw attention and donations to the organization and its work. Here’s an edited version of some suggestions I shared with both organizations, posted here in hopes that they help others create the largest impact possible from this and similar competitions.

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My first suggestion would be to think about using the contest to launch a campaign that combines the goal of winning $50,000 with a fundraising goal (i.e. raising $50,000 through $10 donations). The attached spreadsheet provides a quick introduction to the power of the kind of “viral marketing” that online campaigning can represent. It’s interesting to play with the numbers to see their effect on the amount of funds raised, and to get a sense of just how effective these campaigns can be.

A few related suggestions:

1. Consider setting the X in “ask X number of people to donate” with a number that’s meaningful to your organization and that draws attention to a little known fact that would connect them emotionally to the program that would be funded.

2. Ask them particularly to forward the appeal to their friends and colleagues who might not have heard of your organization before. As these would be reaching a new audience, make sure any appeal by email contains a solid introduction to what your organization does, where it works, etc. Although the percent of people who choose to donate in response to this campaign is very small, you should see new newsletter subscribers and other indications that the campaign is introducing your organization to future donors. Taking this step also substantially increases the chance of winning the Giving Challenge contest! 3. Be really clear about the deadline. Give people a reason to donate today and forward your appeal today.

4. Provide daily or near-daily email updates until the deadline arrives. Assume that your audience wants to know how the campaign is going, and that your email updates will serve to remind them to share your appeal with others.

Also, if you haven’t already, consider reviewing Peter Deitz’ blog. He’s an NGO consultant based in Montreal who specializes in this kind of fundraising. Among his recent posts you’ll see two slideshows that would be useful to a nonprofit organization that’s considering this and other kinds of online fund development activity: http://www.socialactions.com/sharing-the-message-webinar and http://www.socialactions.com/person-to-person-fundraising-tools.

Wholeness, Understanding, and Development: An Episystemic Inquiry

Here’s the Prologue, which provides a little more detail about why my questions led in this direction: 

“The research presented in this thesis takes the relatively unusual approach of exploring ideas from two seemingly disparate fields—those of physics and international development… My motivation for this study stems from two personal experiences. The first was a backpacking trip taken several years ago in which my husband and I traveled through a number of developing countries. This experience propelled me to enter graduate school and become professionally involved in relieving the political and economic distress witnessed during that trip (a summary of the trip and its impact on my decision to pursue a degree in International Development is provided in the thesis’ Appendix 1).

The second was an experience I had several years ago in which two herniated disks in my lower back were instantaneously ‘healed.’ This experience (described in the thesis’ Appendix 2) seemed to represent a pretty efficient and effective example of positive change (one of the definitions of “development”). At the very least, it indicated a capacity to affect change that I have not seen addressed explicitly in mainstream approaches to social and economic development. I began to question whether that capacity could have a place in current international development paradigms.

While considering this, I came across the work of David Bohm and F. David Peat, two physicists whose perspectives seemed to provide a tentative explanation for the experience with my back, and who also seemed to share my interest in the social and economic challenges that are the focus of development. As described in the Abstract, their perspectives have to do with understanding the concept of “underlying wholeness.”

In part, this study is very much about understanding that concept. But it also turns out to be very much about understanding—or having the capacity to understand—any world view that is very different from one’s own. Exploring Bohm and Peat’s perspectives with those aspects in mind brings something of value to those interested in the field of development. How would consideration of an “underlying wholeness” change the way in which we interpret ourselves, our context, and the processes by which we attempt to change the world around us? And how would the concept of development as the “capacity to understand,” from their perspective, differ from similar interpretations of development?”

Excerpted from Egger, Christine D. (2005). Wholeness, Understanding, and Development: An Episystemic Inquiry. Master’s Thesis. Michigan State University. Lansing, Michigan.