Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2016

How are we to make sense of the changing nature of work and the demands of digital capacities in thinking about civil society? Several years ago, Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation posited a “pace layer” approach to thinking about change. As shown in his graphic below, he notes that change happens at different paces—some is much more rapid than others. While some components change rapidly, others change more slowly. These time scales should not be seen as being in tension; it is not better to be fast or slow. There is a role and reason for the pace of each layer. While fashion can change with the season, governance requires deliberation and recourse and therefore moves more slowly. The most trouble arises when one of these layers moves at a rate other than its norm, such as we are now experiencing as nature shifts quickly due to global warming.

What do tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, former labor union leader Andy Stern, and investigative author Barbara Ehrenreich have in common? Now add in the Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and Open Society foundations; Obamacare; Uber; and Rosie the Robot from the 1970s cartoon series The Jetsons, and what do you get? They’re all contributing to—or thinking and writing about—the future of work.

The definition of digital civil society gives us a starting point. The definition contains three key elements: voluntary action, private resources, and public benefit. Each one contains a set of values that need to be applied to digital resources.

Ever since Network for Good launched back in 2001, the modifier “. . .for good” has become ubiquitous. There are computer scientists for good, search engines for good, magazines for good—the only thing I haven’t seen is “Evildoers for Good.” As a buzzword, the phrase “. . .for good” has so pervaded our vocabulary as to become genre defining, like the role of love in pop music or car crashes in action films. At the risk of buzzword overdosing, I think it’s fair to say that “. . .for good” is the uberbuzzword of the social economy. I’ve clustered the following list into “buzz-topics” that align with the broader themes of this Blueprint.

How can nonprofits and foundations govern and use digital data ethically, safely, and effectively? This is the question addressed by a new website, digitalIMPACT.io.