I've had a couple of interesting/pithy discussions over the last couple of days about the nature of nonprofit social work and wanted to bring this topic to the fore with a blog post. The first discussion was with "SJ" who posted a great comment to my post about "The New Volunteer Workforce" :
"What is the purpose of a given non-profit? If you manage to gather a team of 10,000 or 500,000 contributors working towards your original goal, is the precise structure of the original concept (a non-profit, incorporated in such and such a place, led by this governance structure) important? Can it change?
What happens when the new growth of voluntary collaboration has more experience and better connections than the small core of staff? How are the next level of strategy, challenges, programs, processes defined?
If the answer remains "the non-profit defined the community in the first place, all else is valuable but subsidiary", you are losing what may be the greatest value of any really successful entity or network: its capacity to transcend its origins.
Great networks can spawn new focused clusters (which may or may not have any of bylaws and directors, corporate status and budgets, and staff). They can dissolve or reshape the form of the original seed without disturbing the growth of the whole.
When you explicitly work with contributors to pursue a greater goal, they have an extra opportunity to develop their own strategic plans."
And yesterday I had a conversation with Anne Marie Burgoyne from the Draper Richards Foundation - we were chatting about their fellowship program and she mentioned that they don't fund technology - they fund movement building - organizations and individuals that can create wide reaching social change.
These two related conversations struck a chord with me. As someone who builds software for a living, it's easy to get caught up in the intricacies of coding and functionality and such. In college, I actually spent quite a lot of time studying the so-called "Oppenheimer Effect" - where engineers get so wrapped up in their work that they neglect the wider social context of their efforts. And I suppose there's a corollary in social good software, where one does, in-fact, consider the social context, as it's the motivation for creating the software in the first place, but then fixates on the idea that making great software is the end-goal.
So, it's good to get a little nudge every now and then to consider the broader picture - to put software in its place as the spark that can facilitate social movements - that can bridge people - that can provide a mechanism for distributed and loosely coordinated social work - but that, in the end, like the nonprofit organization itself, is secondary to the broader social change movement.
I think we, at The Extraordinaries, can define our broader social change movement more clearly. From my perspective, the goal is to create a cost-free market for expertise transfer. Today, there is a high cost for someone with expertise to offer that knowledge to someone who needs it. This cost is usually time. As a result, more than 75% of people don't offer their expertise to anyone but their employer. And yet, there is a percentage of this group who would offer their expertise for free, to someone who needs it, if the cost weren't so high.
Why is this important? Because information is the currency of our modern era. If you want to raise the standard of living for an individual - if you want to give back to your community - you give information. At it's core, social change work is dedicated to improving quality of life for individuals and communities; creating a cost-free market for information transfer could play a transformative role in rasing the quality of life for millions of people. And, of course, the result isn't all for selfless purpose. Higher standards of living for any given group has a trickle-up effect. Less poverty results in less crime and less extremism, for example. Beyond the cool mobile phone application and desire to craft elegant code, it's this idea that drives me to work.
Readers/partners, what do you think? Am I on the mark here? Do you agree/disagree about my theory on information-transfer and quality of life? Comments please.
