Mashable Funding Decisions: Who Profits?
06:30 PM Aug 29, 2006
N-TEN Connect
yesterday dropped a tantalizing suggestion -- complete with screenshot
-- that it's working on an application to aggregate RSS feeds of grants
data.
A great deal remains unsaid in the post: it's not clear
where this application is on the spectrum from brainstorm to code, and
it's not clear how plausible is the "hope" to turn funders onto the
idea.
That's the real trick here -- the code is a cinch. But
it'll need some critical mass of buy-in from funders to make it into a
useful tool.
On its face, this is a great idea and if N-TEN
intends to carry the standard for it, it would be an amazing benefit
for its community and indeed all nonprofits. Play out the thought-game
and imagine a free online web application where all funders
pipe their grantmaking history through real-time metadata. That would
free up enormous resources burned in needle-in-the-haystack grant
researching and outlays to funder-searching ASPs employing armies of
clerics to turn foundation annual reports, press releases and 990's
into proprietary tables of indexable data.
Hallelujah.
As I mentioned last week when Michael Gilbert published his RSS grants survey,
I'm curious -- and skeptical -- about adoption by funders, as opposed
to the stated gee-whiz factor of program officers negotiating
SurveyMonkey. (And don't forget the selection bias: who would take the
survey except people already interested in grants by RSS?)
And
the reason is that that's an awful damn lot of transparency. Sex,
religion and money are supposed to be the great American taboos, but in
an age when neighbors can chat over the hedge about getting blowjobs
and embracing paganism, lucre remains an ever-so-delicate topic.
Though
funding decisions are formally public in the sense that you can get a
990 and dig through the grant decisions, or subscribe to the Chronicle of Philanthropy
and squint through the small print, the inconvenience of so doing gives an occult quality that the field may not be keen to release. Real-time grant streams hold the
prospect of inviting the hoi polloi into the holy of holies, and in
direct proportion to the extent such streams realize the hoped-for
benefits.
Turning a snapshot of organizations' grant funding
from journalistic research into instant online access potentially
hands A-list political bloggers (on either side) ready-made attack
material on advocacy organizations -- "they're funded by the Rooster
Foundation, which also supports the Council on American-Islamic
Relations! We call on them to denounce jihad!" Next thing you know, the
ADL is weighing in on what you thought was a health care debate.
And "worse" yet: it practically begs to turn the spotlight on the funding entity.
Like the post-Durban hit piece on the Ford Foundation
whose legacy was a preposterous disavowal-of-terrorism contract Ford
demanded of every fundee, or the invented-from-whole-cloth Pewgate affair.
Multiply that by a few hundred funders and a few thousand bloggers --
enemy bloggers looking for ammo, friendly bloggers with an idea that
they're no less qualified than a fourth-generation descendant of Andrew
Carnegie to decide who in a cause they care about gets backed -- and
you get a sense of why a foundation might be a little reluctant to
grease the skids.
Who evaluates the evaluators? Are foundations --
many slow to implement web 1.0 efficiencies like online
submissions -- braced for mashups that map their child poverty giving
by location vis-a-vis the actual change in child poverty statistics
over time ... and then publicly call out inefficient donors? For
dissatisfied service recipients to punch up the nonprofit's donors and
send their beef straight to the folks with the pursestrings? For viral
campaigns aimed at getting a board to fund, or de-fund, particular
projects?
Are nonprofits ready for those things?
All these matters of authority and accountability are no less urgent
now in the absence of such fungible streams of data, but they're very
difficult to grapple with because those most knowledgeable of the field
tend to be those most invested. It takes power to criticize entities
that pay one's rent ... power, or else freedom in the Janis Joplin sense. It strikes me that the people with the most at risk in altering that equation are also the ones who get to decide whether to make their grantmaking into metadata.
Small
wonder that some of the best bloggers from the inside were/are
anonymous -- and that blogs like "Hail, Sons and Daughters of Carnegie"
abruptly close up shop citing the proverb, "tell the truth and run."
The invaluable Wealth Bondage appears to have followed suit this month. (Fortunately, the respective principals, and others, do continue to converse on other blogs such as White Courtesy Telephone.)
What's that web mantra? Power to the edges?
Heck, it's doing just fine here in its six-story glass atrium.
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