the focus on how the system set up this outcome is really brilliant. thanks, this kind of puts the whole story together. also like hildy's analysis in her comment above. but i think the contest had a really good outcome in both gaining so much attention and flaming out in a way that was clearly traceable. i also am totally tired of the frantic energy in the appeals i get to vote. that kind of urgent buzz is what is not sustainable. i am tuning them out because of their breathless anxiety and fear they are laden with. emotionally they are not pleasant communications when they are repeated so frequently. they don't feel good,and giving is about feeling, at the heart.

me too.

thanks Phil. wish you could be there.

this is cool.

it's beautiful

amazing chicken tractor pix!

I think this model would work for things where there was only casual attention needed. one of the plusses of professional journalism is that people are paid to keep track of tiresome, but important things for the rest of us, like city council meetings, zoning debates, all the parts of civil society that need active maintenance by some of us for the rest of us. i don't see a place for those information workers, who learn a beat, in this model. journalism is a way to demonstrate your expertise and handling of an issue and ability to know how to slot it into the editorial fabric of a given group's readership/audience. that has a real value. it can focus attention and make everybody smarter about important things. it can call attention to important things. that is not about tools, it is what the tools are good for.

amazing and inspiring the way you keep at it and are getting it done, son.

that picture looks so much like me on my first day of kindergarten it's not funny.

Thanks Phil, it looks to be quite a unique gathering. a lot of major foundations have signed up in the past few days, as well. people are learning to talk across silos to get things done.

Holden was wrong, repeatedly wrong in a way that seems to run counter to his basic mission and "brand." But it seems clear he deserves a chance to make things right because he was doing so many other things well. This exchange is another reminder, as if I needed one, of how suddenly vicious this medium can become in a heart beat because it lacks the moderating impact of physical world contacts and relational context.

on owning what we take responsibility for, i know some young post consumer types who took a long vacant lot and turned it into a community garden; veggies free to all, that they took some of, too. when the absentee owner found out, she put a fence around it. they'd sneak in to garden and she put out a guard. ownership matters. on o net, constitutions work for those accorded the right to vote. there was only one voter. billionaires who are so rich they don't need co investors never truly get their ideas challenged, many times. paul allen is another example.

interesting role, phil, in an interesting world you imagine/are creating.

so that's what i was doing!

Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar."

You have a way of drawing people into a dialogue that is quite amazing, Phil. I guess my only response would be, I'm not waiting for a cure. Wounded healer, if even such a designation is not too presumptious. If I waited till i knew what to do I wouldn't do much. Here is the way I learn. I was in India about four or five years ago. I saw a snake charmer. Now i know what that game is about; they have to keep up a totally random rhythm for hours, because the snake is trying to engage them in a rhythm where it can accurately assess the striking distance, bite and likely kill them. I watched for a while. bought a pipe and sat down in front of the snake. I did my best funky shaking thing, the kind of rhythm women typically find it impossible to follow when i dance. Within 30 seconds, the snake and i were the most perfect dancing partners I'd ever experienced. i looked briefly in its eye; and bailed out behind the real snake charmer. I'd already figured out where I'd put my right hand, how I'd spin, etc. He had to take over because i'd put him between me and the snake. He'd probably never seen such a crazy American. I don't know. But i discovered that charming a deadly cobra is not really a game for amateurs. So.. i guess you'd call that my learning style. Jump in with the snake and see what happens. Which is to say, I don't wait to plan things out before i move. Most times it works. Some times, and more often in the non profit, socal sector world than in the business world, it blows up in my face. But despite my basic predelictions, it seems to be working out pretty well. Looking at the snake story, I mean, if you are asking for a fool, who but a fool would try to charm a cobra?

It's not in the personal level we've been talking, but Phil, one thing we are doing is creating a map of the social capital market, a place to add coherence for the players. We've got a little bit (not much) money to put into it and it has a five part taxonomy; producers (funds and syndicators) products (funds and the enterprises (non profit and for profit) they invest in) order providers (rating agencies like b lab, fourth sector, analysts, those creating taxonomies and maps) exchanges (like the social capital market in the UK and others that are emerging) and Story (those that provide context, make sense of this movement). So basically, when you asked how I'm viewing my role with the people we are working with, I changed the subject. Not very adroitly, I admit. I guess when I do think about that, I just consider myself a fellow traveller. My experience has been in helping emerging markets form. This is a market where entering it subtly but insistently, turns you into something new that you would not quite have recognized before, but that, is also something the people drawn to it want in a deep way that's hard to express. Katherine Fulton said we are acting our way into a new way of thinking. I think she's right about that. Broadly, I think a new myth of capital is emerging, dethroning the Gospel of Wealth dichotomy foisted on us by Andrew Carnegie and other robber barons. The market is not a force of nature. The market is part of nature, and has to be responsible for its impact. And we all are discovering that we have to think about our impact in new ways, with feedback from Iraq to the arctic melt, to children who die needlessly of poverty related causes every three seconds, to the spiraling wealth disparities in the U.S. Plus, I have grandchildren now. So my time horizon has shifted.

you raise an ego crushing viewpoint.. so i will respond in a suitably shattered way... when you talk about fools and frauds, frederich beuchner's book of bebb comes to mind. so does charles williams greater trumps and the fool in the living tarot. looking at myself, sometimes i'm a fool. sometimes a holy fool. sometimes a fraud... yeah well.. but then there is that three percent of the time that i am what i intend to be... so.. on balance.. in my own head, it sorta kinda works out.. if you keep looking at where you're going and not where you are... wave not particle.. progress not perfection. yada yada ... he keeps talking..

pretty funny. we at good capital are not raising a fund. We are setting up a birthing center. hmm not sure how that would play in powerpoint?

I think gentleness, with others and with ourselves as we redefine our lives and our goals, is a good thing. I am thinking of one investor we are working with who is new to the whole "business that does good" space. the ways his new involvement are turning his head around, you can almost see him get whiplash sometimes. one minute he's all about trying to get his pet social enterprise into the black. the next he's fretting over trying to make sure its focus stays on its mission. he's like a man living in two worlds who's trying to create a new space in the middle. he's not about to write a moral biography. but i see the change that's happening to him in a lot of the people we are working with. it's not about glory. there is a new moral hunger at work here, to quote katherine fulton. it's starting to take shape, but it's a work in progress. as you say, a little gentleness is probably in order.

I agree Phil. we entered our xigi project and Ive been getting more involved with this group. i like their approach. here is where someone could comment on xigi, with links to other comments. comments are another way that the voting works. it's deeper and more qualitative, but it all has weight in the system they are building. as you say, it's really a conversation. http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/xigi-net#comment-6928

I had a similar take to all of yours, though i think i got out with my neologisms unbent, somehow. if there is value created by this approach it's for a small group of funders who can evaluate the impacts of their investments by a common criteria. whether that metric delivers any value to the social entrepreneur, or the mission being served, or is rather, a large transaction cost without additive value is a hard call. it is a piece that is myopic in that it does not realize that the impact of imposing abstract theories on a highly creative process may actually work against what they want to see in the world. many people in power are blind to the difference between their intent and their impact. http://www.xigi.net/2007/03/24/defining-social-enterpreneurship.html

I think it is a category error; it's applying a standard that works in one world, or the more limited dimensions of the traditional business world to a a world or setting that does in fact have spiritual dimensions. one way we express it, and we're still working on language, in response to the market, in explaining our goodcap fund, is to say we are working with investors who are looking at their money with an added dimension: risk return and impact. all that said, we do provide ways to show that impact, but it's not a granular accounting for good crushed into powder and forced through a seive; it's more what my partner tim calls dollarized social impact. the number of houses built, the number of jobs created, etc. as i said, it's language that is in process of being formed, because essentially, we are creating a new asset class, along with other folks, somewhere on the lines between giving and investing. it's a new space that has elements of both worlds. rigorous due dilligence, real financial return of capital, but done with the purpose of creating a bigger impact for good in the world. investing for good.

when i first got into the social capital market from the traditional business world, back about seven years ago, i believed in measurement; coming from managing to a single variable (bottom line) into a world where your impact on issues like literacy or malarial deaths of neonates was what the work was about, i thought the same methods applied. they do not. in fact, i was once talking to a wealth manager who manages money for some of the more prominent neocons who delivered the real epiphany to me. if you measured good, you would lose the philanthropic, emotional, soul enriching payoff of giving to do good and thus detract from its essential value to the giver. it's not only wrong headed, it's a net value detractor.

the new b corporation rating system can solve part of this, if it gets adopted. it is a new and serious attempt to reconfigure the legal nature of the corporation; the for benefit corporation. and to validate that new legal mechanism http://www.xigi.net/index.php?map=entity&map_en=1000689