Social communities

Why we do need social entrepreneurship and what it is
150 150 eriks

It cannot have passed anyone that the Grameen Bank got awarded the Nobel Peace Prize some time ago, and the scientific community thinks about the social entrepreneurship more seriously than ever before. Yet many both inside the social entrepreneur community as well as outside tend not to see what social entrepreneurship is and more importantly why we so desperately need it.

Simply put, social entrepreneurship is to share knowledge of the developed world with the developing, whether that is building water pumps or creating distance learning programs. It all comes down to the very simple passage from a well-known book the bible and a certain Jesus. “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” There have been a lot of misconceptions about this historically. A lot of the so called aid work has been focused on ether giving funds or just pure charity technology.

Why is this fundamentally wrong?

I did some consultancy work as for an IT-strategy some time ago and explained what I see the five characteristics of any strategy – financial, technological, legal, management, organizational – which should be well-known, but too often seem like total surprises to clients.

  • Flexibility
  • Stability
  • Sustainability
  • Maintainability
  • Scalability

Considering these characteristics, it isn’t that hard to realize that the traditional aid work strategy is doomed to fail, and so it has. Here is where the social entrepreneurs take or honestly should take on the challenge to create sustainable projects which hands over tools/instruments for the people themselves and not finished products. The Stanford GSB professor and economist Paul Romer calls these tools and instruments meta-ideas and he in an article in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, David R. Henderson, ed. Liberty Fund, 2007 puts it as

“Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas. These are ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas.”

These meta-ideas are very, very important as we will see later. For now let’s leave it and further consider the challenges met inside any social venture. The ventures will of course all have financial, technological, and legal issues, but you will also have to think about the management issues as well as the organizational issues. A majority of the ventures I have come across tend to forget the latter two. They look very nice, but will probably never be sustainable. The ever so important legal issues are today well-known. Copyrights, patents and intellectual property rights are all daily elements of entrepreneurial work today unfortunately. Extremely put, in the developed world we have too much regulation, and in the developing world we have none. Hernando de Soto talked about this in The Mystery of The Capital, which discusses how to recreate the so often existing informal economy in the developing world to a formal economy.

We now realize that a social venture is any venture – for-profit or non-profit, which aims to bridge the knowledge gap and empower individuals and the community in the developing. Ironically, the developed world will have something to gain by getting more closely involved in the developing world in another manner than before. Without getting into details about the nature of it I would remind any skeptics to read the basics of trade-off, comparative and absolute advantages, and you will see that it is pretty obvious. In order for it to work we need to have consistency in the legal and economical system as Hernando de Soto is talking about.

What few people realize is that we have to have a consistent view on how we should work together and how economical growth is created. Living in a global economy requires a lot, and we still haven’t found the right path to create a sustainable and fair global economy. Considering the ever so important environmental problems we will also by this create a structure in which we can solve this as environmental problems are global whether we like it or not.

Paul Romer and his well-known New Growth Theory explain it all.

“The knowledge needed to provide citizens of the poorest countries with a vastly improved standard of living already exists in the advanced countries. If a poor nation invests in education and does not destroy the incentives for its citizens to acquire ideas from the rest of the world, it can rapidly take advantage of the publicly available part of the worldwide stock of knowledge. If, in addition, it offers incentives for privately held ideas to be put to use within its borders – for example, by protecting foreign patents, copyrights, and licenses, by permitting direct investment by foreign firms, by protecting property rights, and by avoiding heavy regulation and high marginal tax rates – its citizens can soon work in state-of-the-art productive activities.”

Interesting stuff, right?

Freedom of movement of merchandise, labor and money is crucial for success and economical growth. Many tend to forget that the fairness needs to be there. Some claim the market should tell us completely where we should go, but we have some moral and ethical obligations to protect and inhibit a too unfair market to emerge. Think of it as a supervised evolution.

The European Union is an example of what can be done to, but also gives us insight in what the difficulties are when creating the global economy. Start by considering the break in a pool game. The tightly assembled balls will rush off in all sorts of directions after the white ball smash into the formation. In time they settle in a new more “relaxed” formation. The nation’s economies will react similarly to the shock of change when opening up the borders. Letting it all loose at the same time would be careless, and just look at the shock waves which happened in Russia after the fall of the Soviet regime. It is just about calming down now. We cannot let this happen on the entire globe.

Looking at the developing world and honestly the developed world too, the governments play an essential part of how to implement a structure to handle these new scenarios and interactions. The important part is that they realize what role they should play and stay focused at their part, that is create an educational and legal system that nurtures technological, process and value innovations.

It cannot be over exaggerated how important the educational component is. Education should not only teach the youths (as well as the adults) the necessary tools and knowledge, but also create confidence in the people and a sense of seeing possibilities and not problems. Here is a huge opportunity for social ventures, and thus we find many attempts here.

In more general terms, Paul Romer puts this as:

“The one safe measure that governments have used to great advantage has been to use subsidies for education to increase the supply of talented young scientists and engineers. They are the basic input into the discovery process, the fuel that fires the innovation engine. No one can know where newly trained young people will end up working, but nations that are willing to educate more of them and let them follow their instincts can be confident that they will accomplish amazing things.”

Now we have this arsenal of with knowledge and confidence armed youths who will save themselves. Let them do the magic. They can and will do that… It will happen as we did the same thing here in the 19th century. We have just forgotten about it.

Wow, what a sunshine story, Erik! It sounds so nice and neat, but what about the entrepreneurs and what is the role of the open-source mentality?

I will use the previously quote:

“Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas. These are ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas.”

Do I really need to say more? Openness and exchange of ideas is crucial. If they legally are open-source or not doesn’t really matter so much as long as the mentality is to share information. The social media also known as Web 2.0 is an excellent example of how the openness should be. It should be easy to build on top of other solutions and ideas and derive new innovative solutions.

Why do we need to do this?

Again Paul Romer:

“First, the country that takes the lead in the twenty-first century will be the one that implements an innovation that more effectively supports the production of new ideas in the private sector. Second, new meta-ideas of this kind will be found.”

It explains it all. What’s so cool is that you get to create a better world in the same blow. Who doesn’t want to do that?

Final question to you: Do you really want to be on the losing team?

  • eriks
  • 0

Comments on The future of citizen media
150 150 eriks

I got some comments on my latest blog. I have mostly gotten positive feedback. However some critical voices have been raised though, who summarized say: “It will never work out. This is just a gimmick.”

My opinion: It will, it should and it must.

I will elaborate shortly on the comments I have gotten over the phone, in emails, on IM and in person. (Especially since one of my closest friends believe I blog too long entries. :) )

Challenge 1: The good guy never wins in wars, because they are naïve.
Does that really mean it is not worth fighting for goodness? We should always jump right into the action. Everyone who knows me knows that is only a matter of time before I bring up the water drops on the stone will always make a hole. I use it to keep the faith that there is a solution.

Challenge 2: Journalists are already able to give this personal view of events.
How many are the journalists and how many are the rest of the world? I know, I know. This is really an unfair comparison. The biggest advantage to use citizens is however that they are everywhere. There is a big need for the news organization to participate in presenting the news as they can via their professional presentation provide it with the credibility needed.

Challenge 3: Seeing the uncensored, unfiltered and unedited view will probably just stir up emotions and is not a force towards peace.
Darn right it will. It should. However, when we see these “reports” whether they are broadcasted on BBC, CNN or on the blog by a private person, we should always start to question what we see, why we see it. Is it the truth? Thinking critical is a responsibility for each citizen. I cannot make it enough clear that the traditional media has a crucial role to play here. They can help the new media learn it lessons, and learn from it.

Before continuing I would like to kill one myth that has come up during my time here at Stanford and my various discussions with different people. Just because a citizen “reports” something does not necessary mean that it is newsworthy. Most of what is written only has news value for you friends and family. There are cases where big things have been brought to the attention by the blogosphere and the new media initiatives. Many of these examples are brought up in the book “We The Media” by Dan Gillmor.

Going on.

Showing pictures of dying wounded, starving and/or suffering people are never fun and seeing the misery will initially stir up more emotions. However the first step towards any change is to understand, and for that you will have to see. See the human perspective, in some form. I guess that she has never heard of the Swedish saying: “After the storm there is always peace and calmness”. Storms will come one after the other, but understanding the storms will help us protect us against it. Another example is found in our human ancient past. Before us as human beings knew how to handle fire, we fought, and feared it. Then we learned that it could be our friend. Now it is an essential part of our life and has played an important part of our society’s development.

We should the possibilities, working towards changing this world to a better place. Obviously there are so many people out there, who are against seeing the pain, who wants to cover it up and against openness. One of my favorite quotes is one by a certain Mr Kierkegaard: “To dare is to loose control for awhile, not to dare is to loose yourself”.

We should remember this. It is easier to hold on to the past than to go on. The path is usually rocky, unclear, narrow and long. But hey I like roller-coasters, thanks to someone really special to me…

  • eriks
  • 0

Wikipedia is dead or not?
150 150 eriks

I read The death of Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr telling the story of the death of Wikipedia. I have as many know been critical about the Wikipedia, which is a great construct, yet surprisingly very few realise that any review systems will need hierachies within the community.

I guess I will settle with once again citing Clay Shirky from one of his speeches The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which by the way should be read by anyone that calls themselves experts or developers of social software.

Now, this story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written. You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”

I guess very few people do their homework… My answer on whether the wikipedia is dead or not is yes, but might get another life when people start doing their homework on how to create cpommunity driven software.

The only “social software packages” I have seen so far that has created a community feeling yet does not fall into the pitfalls are developed by the organization Barnraiser. Why? Because it is built for real people by people, who have done their homework.

  • eriks
  • 0

The Future of Blogging
150 150 eriks

Blogging is changing the way we look on the content on the web and the media. It is more and more becoming a way to easy-publish to the web. Yet many blogs are lacking the fundamental design and architecture of a more conventional website. Where will this saga end?

Today everybody (or more honestly speaking an amazing large number of people) want to have a blog. Corporate blogging has turned into a personalized way for CEO:s and executives to release corporate news, and thereby bring the users closer to the company. The interaction is good as they will get direct feedback from the users, even though it is unlikely that they will ever tell you of any problems they face. However, the feeling of being a part or seen is central here and the social part of the blog software becomes obvious. Even though corporate blogging has some child deceases I am confident that the proper structure will emerge.

The true driving force of blogs has undisputable been the political arena, and I think the political arena has changed forever due to it. The debate in blogs during the last presidential election in the US, especially Howard Dean campaign, is a proof that bloggers is a new type of media that will change the political arena and is a true power to count on or fear. Everybody can be their own politician and speak their mind on almost anything. An amazing shift towards the power of the people on both good and bad. That discussion truly deserves an own post, so I will leave it there.

I am working on new ways to deliver news to the web during my time here at Stanford and I will shortly reveal some more details on the project. A question that is quite important when looking at this is what the news media really is, and in particular what a newspaper is. A drastic and maybe controversial approach is to consider a newspaper as nothing else than a well-reviewed group blog. Of course this is quite a simplification of reality, but still very much true in many ways. However, the payed (or unpayed) journalists that are assigned to write about a certain subject, reviewed by editors, approved by the chief editor and then published either on the net or in a paper edition. A blogger does all these steps at least subconsciously too before the blog item is created. A bit ironic, hey? The difference between a newspaper and a group blog then becomes were fuzzy. Therefore blogs cannot be discussed separately from conventional news media. (Conventional media might be a better word as podcasting is bringing both radio and television closer to the web.)

There is a great book “We the media…” by Dan Gilmor covering this topic and almost every aspects of it. If you have not read it, you really should. The book addresses the ongoing “battle” between the blogs and the conventional media.

The future challenges of the blogs are closely linked to the differences between blogs and conventional media. Blogs are uncensored, yet unreviewed (by others before publishing). The commenting system will be some kind of review system however. There is yet a need to address the trust of the content of a blog, which is one challenge for the future blogosphere. “Why? Just plug in a review system and there you go.” Well I am afraid it is not as easy as that. One of the true powers of blogs is the free form. You want to preserve the uncensored feeling of the blog, yet increase the trust of the content. A kind of paradox in itself and in there lies the challenge.

Another challenge of the blogosphere will be to find a way to solve the issue of the ever increasing number of blogs. More and more people start blogs and become active in them. The number of sites is increasing, and the volume of information is exploding. You will have to read more and more blogs whether you like it or not. Time is always limited. How many times have you not wished there were 48 hours per day instead of the always to few 24 hours… The time necessary(?) to read blogs can and will intrude on your work and personal life if nothing is done. Maybe the Darwinistic laws will solve it, but then again maybe not. RSS-feeds were created to solve this matter, but the growth of the blogosphere now really calls for some other approaches to decrease the workload of reading blogs.

On top of reading all these blogs you will have to write almost everyday on your own little blog to spread your message and preserve an active audience. Web traffic is funny. It is hard to obtain it, but it but so easy to loose when you have finally have it. Therefore many bloggers feel the need to constantly publish new posts. Some write many short posts, and some write a lot of “yada yada”. Nevertheless it still is not a sustainable solution. There are too many blog posts that comment with a few lines and linking to another blog post that is commenting on another that is commenting on another that is… Yes, you get the picture. It only contributes to the volume of content noise to be a bit harsh.

Design of the website might partly solve the problem of traffic, even though it is no full-proof way. Notably, I read a comment on this by Jacob Nielsen, who said that one of the most common errors of blogsites is that they hide their “highlights”. When you look at many blogs, the most read blog posts or highest graded blog posts are normally never listed so that the reader can easily retrieve those. Such a list can at least help some to keep the traffic alive and fairly high.

Is all you (Erik) talk about problems, problems, problems… Certainly not and I am not at all pessimistic about the future of blogs. Yet these features and challenges should/will be addressed and solved.

So what is likely to happen in the future? The way I see it the blogosphere and the conventional media will move closer to the each other, very much as Dan Gilmor predicts in his book. However, I do not fully envision the conventional media being “replaced” by the blogs as they fulfill different needs. The conventional media will in a more thorough way cover a story and have a more profound research before publishing the article. Normally blogs are like a tabloid version of a “story” and in many cases lack the proper proof of the content. However, blogs could be consider as an amazing control system of conventional media. Therefore it is likely that more softwares with built-in light versions of review systems to increase the trust of the content will be developed and released.

Group blogs or portals, like the http://www.corante.com, will be more common and will create a wrapper for people with similar topics. This will solve the issue of feeling the pressure of frequent posting as well as keeping the traffic high enough.

Well as the X-files says: The truth is out there…

  • eriks
  • 0