Every unpaid volunteer; every pro-bono professional; everyone working on some project without pay; all of them are investing in their particular futures. This is particularly true for nonprofit startups.

And I mean to use specifically that word—investing—this means they are giving of their talent and time with some hope or expectation that things will work out in a particular (and good) way in the future. They have some vision of what they are working toward. A truth that so few nonprofit CEOs understand is that volunteers are actually donors and they deserve the same respectful treatment as donors.

This situation should create a covenant between the individual(s) and the organization. And in far too many ways and places it does not. The time and talent of volunteers are too often treated as worthless. Too often they’re paid nothing and they end up being treated as big zeros.

When you start a social-benefit organization, you should think about this in advance, and you should do some planning about:

• the role of your volunteers  in the strategic planning process; it varies, but you should make it explicit;
• how to value the creativity and work of your volunteers;
• how to keep them engaged in the process without getting discouraged if you begin raising money and start paying for some services;
• how to cycle back with everyone to evaluate how things are going and whether their goals are being achieved.

Also, an individual’s circumstances—more specifically whether they need to be paid for their work or not—doesn’t change their value to the organization. If you had two core founders in your company and one needed to be paid while the other could afford to ”invest” time in the venture, which one would you reward with stock certificates? Which is worth more—time or money? Or are they worth equal amounts?

And why is it that almost the opposite happens so often in nonprofit startups? Once the money comes in, or once the organization gets off the ground, those who invested in starting the org find that the transition to paid staff may be difficult or even impossible. Shouldn’t those who add their creativity to the mix be rewarded?^[1]

As JP Rangaswami pointed out recently,^{[see 2, below for link]}

It all begins with a state of mind. A willingness to share. A focus on being open, a focus on enabling people at the edge to do things they would otherwise not be able to do.

Without that state of mind there are no volunteers, there is no set of standards and protocols, there is no process, cumbersome or otherwise, to let the internet evolve: there is no internet.

Without that internet there is no goldmine for “rightsholders” to strip of all value. Without that internet artists will get paid even less than they do currently, however unlikely that sounds.

So, what I’d like you to focus on is the intentionality, the intent, of deciding up front the role those who are contributing without financial compensation, are going to play in your organization. And how to treat them fairly and equitably when it comes to shared outcomes.

[2] The Silent Spring of the Internet: Part II: Understanding “unpaid”— JP Rangaswami Confused of Calcutta

The post Volunteers are donors and investors appeared first on Sky's Blog.

[vimeo 6827318]

* Understand risk. Buy low, sell high. Manage your risk.

* Spend your time (as in investor) on the companies that are doing well, don’t just “nickel and dime” the ones that are failing.

* The cost of failure is decreasing. If you start from open source, and have a designer, an engineer, a products guy, users, and you get growing 30% a month or so, you don’t even need to write a business plan. [just after 9:00 minutes into the video – THIS IS THE KEY point I want to make]. If you can get your project to the point where it is running, growing, perhaps bringing in some money, you bring in the VC investors at that point – no earlier!

* Open standards give you a big advantage. Big companies spend $ millions to even think about a new project, but you can get your project off the ground for far less by starting with open source, good ideas and good thinking.

* Development methodology needs to be flexible, iterative, and respond to what you can learn from your customers. ”If you’ve launched your product and you’re not embarrassed by it, you‘ve launched too late.”

* Distribution. Every failed startup has had a business model, team, and so forth, but no users. Almost every team that has users eventually comes up with a business model [if they’re smart and paying attention]. You must be viral – you must infect your customers.

The post Joi Ito on Innovation and Startups appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Chris started by saying “I don’t have an agenda; I don’t have an announcement…” referring, of course, to the number of companies that had been making announcements on the stage. Probably not unusual, since you want to make product announcements where they will be heard, but it was certainly being noticed this time around.

The full video of Chris’ talk appears at the bottom of this article. I’m going to pick and choose from the points that Matt jotted down.

So, what is the essence of community? Community…

[Chris says] Community… lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, likes, dislikes and the people we link up with;

Sky sez: Community is a construct composed of our connections and interactions — to that extent, wherever we go we bring those connections with us. Because we are becoming highly-linked through electronic media (and social media), our communities may in fact be available to us almost everywhere we go! Communities of interest and Communities of practice are examples of these kinds of virtual communities (unlike our neighborhood, which is a physical community). We all participate in many communities, sometimes interacting in a number of them at the same time.

… is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks;

I have already made a comment on this (prior to hearing Chris), in remarking that bloggers are beginning to spread out beyond blogging and take their communities with them into Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. But, of course you’ve noticed that too. You probably started tweeting a long time ago, added a Facebook or Linked-in profile, and put more of your photos on Facebook now than on your old photo-sharing site. So if it’s true that 25% of Web traffic is to Facebook^[2][3], then this certainly means that some of the social behavior that motivated blogging has moved, with many of us, to Facebook.

… is a commodity, but people [themselves] aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special;

I’ve been promoting this idea for years—and I still have to remind clients that they can set up an online community web site, but they still need people to staff it, and they still need customers’ voices to make it really happen. And when you inject people into the equation, it forces things to scale more linearly and it costs more for upkeep and maintenance of the human community members.

… cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”;

That’s the essence, isn’t it? You have to listen to what your friends, community, customers, are saying. I’m reading Peter Block now, and he’s one of the masters of using transformational change to solve community issues. [Photo is from peterblock.com.]

… is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbour;

About a year ago someone asked me whether The Dalai Lama Foundation wasn’t just “a big web site with a small organization…” At first the question offended me, but that didn’t last long as I realized and even pointed out that the organization in fact did do much of its work online. So it is indeed a large web site with a (smaller human) organization behind it. The organization was and is distributed geographically. It uses network communications to get people going and then local groups of people may begin working on their own. There is little planned organization of this process, and it grows entirely organically.

… grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons;

Leaders arise organically from within communities. Leaders arise when a cause needs someone to carry it forward. At the Foundation we have had six years of growing in response to leaders who arise organically and naturally from our communities. This is reflected in the many projects that the Foundation has incubated or supported. This leaves the central organization small, but promotes the growth of new organizations that respond to the immediate needs of the constituent communities.]

… is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream;

Yes, community is looking outward to see and to listen to what those in the community want. And that’s why leaders develop and grow organically within healthy communities.

… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.

Focus on these points: 1) look for people who share your needs, desires and motivations; 2) connect with them; 3) expand that connection by listening to the needs of those in the communities you form or join; 4) help foster organic growth of leaders within your communities; 5) continue looking outward at all times!

[swfobj src=”http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2752312″ width=”480″ height=”386″ flashvars=”autoplay=false” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”true”]

[2] Could 25% of page-views on the Web really be attributed to Facebook? Drake Direct says so. Their source for the stats is compete.com, which uses a sampling methodology (they have a sample set of people who “represent” the Internet user population) and projects their results to a large population (all Web users). They are not directly measuring real traffic to any web site—they are estimating. I have done statistical work of this sort, and for certain kinds of probability distributions it is problematic…particularly long-tail distributions. So don’t believe the 25% statistic, but do believe that traffic to Facebook really is quite high!

[3] Remember not to confuse the Web with the Internet. It is only a subset of overall traffic on the net. Email probably still accounts for far more traffic than web pages, and video is coming into its own rapidly.

The post Chris Pirillo’s “Pillars of Community” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties –  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned:

{Eliane’s photo-mosaic of the geeks – at left.}

This trip is largely a different set of geeks than for the UK, with only Renee Blodgett, Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble and myself overlapping from the summer UK visit.

The issues: 1) mashup of geek blog posts; 2) Flickr photos; 3) conferencing.

Pickup geek’s writing from their own blogs: The biggest issue is to create a central web site that incorporates information from all of the geeks while they’re on the road. You can’t ask busy people to write up duplicate posts for a central blog — they’re busy writing for their own blogs. So the answer is to syndicate their blog posts — pick up posts from their blogs, copy them to travelinggeeks.com and insert them there, with a minimum of fuss. Ideally this is a 100% automated process. Well, surprisingly, this still is a very hand-built kind of process, although once you’re done, it can run 100% automatically. Underneath everything the site is built on WordPress, which supports blogging as well as more “static” pages. There’s a neat WordPress plug-in called FeedWordPress^[1] that lets the blog read RSS feeds from each geek blog and copy the relevant posts over to the TG blog for republication. But things have gotten more complex since the geeks visited London… now we need to not only bring in blog posts, but we need to deal with Twitter streams, Twitter hashtags, Flickr photos and YouTube channels. Our “bloggers” are no longer simply bloggers.

Mash multiple feeds together: OK, so some of our bloggers have several places where they interact online. The trick is that most of these now present/expose RSS feeds, and you can read and manipulate data from those feeds to create a single mashed feed that contains only the information that you want to use. Yeah, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, all present RSS feeds that let you get at your photo-stream, your video-stream, and your tweet-stream. The trick here is to use Yahoo Pipes^[2] to mash them together. Pipes will read multiple blogs’ RSS feeds, check to see if there are blog entries in a particular category, and then mash only those articles into a new RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates. The system is so flexible that not only can it recognize categories, but it can search through the text of a blog entry or any of the other characteristics that typically appear in an RSS feed. If one of our geeks has, for instance, three feeds, Pipes can filter each feed according to different criteria, and then can merge them together into a single feed, with things interleaved chronologically, that I can have FeedWordPress read and digest. (FeedWordPress can’t do this mashing of multiple feeds…)

Mashing the geeks’ photos: On the UK trip we used a couple of tools to help manage photos. One of those was MobyPicture, which lets you upload a photo once and have it copied to your accounts on multiple online photo sites. It’s particularly useful for mobile phone users, and there’s also an iPhone app, which I find very handy. Though I do love Moby, on this trip we didn’t need this kind of multiple uploading, so we gave all of the geeks access to a Flickr group Traveling Geeks, making the membership “Invitation only” but the viewing “Public.” They’ll upload to their personal accounts, mark the photos for the group, and we use the flickrSliDR slideshow maker to then include all photos, even the most recent, in a slideshow.

Zorap: This hot media-sharing space provides video, audio (mp3), photo and other media sharing within a common space (a room). The tech is rather demanding, so it’s not for the faint-of-heart and you’d better have a fast computer, but when it works it is marvelous. Multi-way (not just two-way like Skype) video conferencing is coming of age.

We are counting on broadly-available wi-fi support at most of the venues in Paris. Orange is supplying us with 3G connectivity to fill in when we can’t find wi-fi. Over the last two days (on my way to Europe) I have used a 3G iPhone tethered to my MacBook while on the California Zephyr (rail in the US) for 5 hours, and wi-fi on American Airlines (excellent bandwidth) within the US. So more and more I’m becoming accustomed to haveing a connection wherever I go.

[2] Yeah, I’ve used Yahoo Pipes for some time now.

[3] Yahoo Pipes has a problem with Typepad-generated “categories” that took me some hours to puzzle out. Typepad “categories” have an extra layer that appears with the XML of an RSS feed that makes filtering impossible if a post has more than one category. Rather than create a whole inscrutable article about it, let me point out that a solution has been developed, which consists of breaking the categories out into a list and then processing the elements of that list rather than trying (unsuccessfully) to parse the malformed feed. I’ll have to write an article on this later.

The post Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Earlier, in London, some of us had similar conversations with companies who are implementing social media strategies to be in closer touch with their customers. One of the companies I spoke with, in a conversation held under Chatham House Rule (meaning “not for attribution” or “off the record” in US press terminology), the head of customer support told me he had opened a Twitter account, reviews around 500 tweets a day, and helps between 10 and 50 dissatisfied customers resolve problems they’d been having with his company. This apparently takes him only a small amount of time (an hour or two, from what he said) and generates a huge amount of goodwill at very low cost, for his company.

I’ve been advising my clients for at least the past year to not worry about “attracting eyeballs to their web site” but instead to focus on making there presence felt “wherever the customer lives online.” In the case of my customers this means setting up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, and then using those to engage in genuine conversations with customers – not one-way marketing-speak.

Oops, almost forgot – listen to what Susan has to say about all of this!

She calls it Social Influence Marketing and it has three core components: 1) Social Listening; 2) Participation; 3) “Appvertising” (Give-to-get).

The post Companies must go where their customers are appeared first on Sky's Blog.

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Each night, as we’ve been winding up or down the evening activities, Craig has bowed out at a reasonable hour to go online and attend to customer issues as they come up. Being +8 hours from San Francisco’s time zone has helped, but it’s still a remarkable thing to see this kind of dedication.

The post Backstage Pass- Real Customer Service appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I recently heard about my friend Alan M. Webber’s recently-published book Rules of Thumb. (Also see his book blog.) I have been reading the reviews and publicity – and I like what I hear, so I ordered Rules of Thumb as an e-book (lots cheaper than buying a paper book) and I’ll skim it later today. I met Alan just about two years ago, over an arranged brunch thanks to Betsy Burroughs, and then spent a day strategizing about the Waldzell Meetings.

One of Alan’s rules, chosen by Tim Ferriss for a review, is “RULE #24 – If you want to change the game, change the economics of how the game is played.” I like this idea. Here’s how I propose to start… We have a new feature on our Learning Zone called Many Paths to Peace. Here I interview (and profile) people who have started organizations that contribute to the world’s stockpile of peace. And really, as long as they’re contributing to compassionate peacemaking, it doesn’t matter so much what their modus operandi is. Currently, I pick easy targets. People I know, or people who are nearby and easy to reach. In the past I’ve posted audio interviews and now I’m doing almost exclusively video interviews. To keep Many Paths to Peace going, we need donors, because we have equipment and time costs, and post-production and hosting costs on the interviews. I’m doing this on my own dime right now, but that won’t last as we expand. So what I propose to do is allow people to donate based on whom they’d like to see interviewed – the person with the most votes gets interviewed next because their interview gets funded first. Not entirely a new idea (and there are many reasons why it hasn’t already worked for citizen journalism), but in this case it means that our fans can determine the direction we go…rather than just going along for the ride. This model may help us both with direction and with financial support. And I have another trick up my sleeves – it’s my intent to get interviews working all around the world. Funding them might be done using a similar model. Like stringers on a newsmag.

The post Change the economics of how the game is played appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. — Doug Bowman, Goodbye Google

I love this farewell post by Google’s visual design lead because it confirms a theory I’ve long held: that Google is a company where engineers are the ruling class, while at Apple it’s designers. – Buzz Andersen, Sci-fi Hi-fi

This just blew me away because of my experiences with people from both Apple and Google.

After I recovered from rolling on the floor laughing about Buzz Andersen’s comparison, I thought just how true it is. My experience with Apple goes back to trying to convince Steve Jobs that the Apple II could be used for distance education (in 1978) – interesting that I drove Steve to a meeting where we looked at Plato-IV and shortly thereafter he visited Xerox PARC and well, that became history when the Lisa and the Macintosh were invented. But, I digress, my experience with Steve is that he understands technology really, really deeply, but he is at heart an artist and his reputation as being extremely demanding is well deserved, and stems from his artistic temperament. Then there are the Googlers, especially those I’ve met recently, who do indeed want to subject every web site to a Google Analytics interrogation to determine by a percentage point which size and color of button works best – but even before they develop any traffic to the site! (Good grief, let’s get some traffic first and then let’s see what is working with visitors.) But this business about testing a half dozen different buttons is beyond me. And I’m an engineer!

Deep breath.

Why did I say different approaches to life? (In the first paragraph.) Well, it’s because I run across both of these types in life. There are people who do a great design right up front and move straight to product (even though it may take a long time). And there are people who design something and then twiddle the bits to death before finally starting to build product. In my case, I design quickly and then jump into implementation as soon as possible. I always change the design after I see the first prototype of a product.  “Release early and release often” is certainly a motto I understand. I have very little tolerance for situations where everything has to be meticulously planned up front.

The post Google ruled by engineers, Apple ruled by designers appeared first on Sky's Blog.

on his blog

I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging so long, and have never blogged Nipun Mehta. It’s time to start making amends…

I’m going to start by pointing you at an audio interview that Michael Lerner of The New School conducted with Nipun earlier this year.

In April 1999, Nipun and three friends started Charity Focus as an “experiment in generosity.”

“None of us had ever run an organization. We just said ’we wanna help.’We went to a homeless shelter and said ’how can we help?’ And we ended up building them a web site.”

“We had a brochure … meant for nonprofits … to introduce them to the Internet. This is one manifestation that seems to work. We said the price is going to be zero, and the response was fantastic.”

“People … respond to … raw generosity.”

Here’s a short excerpt (the first two minutes) to get you interested:

Michael Lerner of The New School (…Ecology, Culture and the Inner Life, at CommonWeal.org) interviewed Nipun Mehta in April 2007 near the ninth anniversary of the founding of CharityFocus.org. You can find the entire [one-and-a-half-hour] audio interview The Invisible Revolution of the Inner-net, at CommonWeal’s New School audio archives on their web site.

[Re-posted to correct formatting errors]

The post Charity Focus’ Nipun Mehta appeared first on Sky's Blog.

EFNV is holding its second summer teacher conference on Friday and Saturday, 20-21 July, 2007 on the University of California campus in Berkeley CA.

The coordinator of Metta Center’s volunteers as well as coordinator of the planning activities for the EFNV conference is Jordan Pearlstein at the Metta Center.

Michael Nagler is founder of the Peace Studies program at Berkeley, and leader of EFNV. I had a Skype conversation this morning with him where we discussed the conference and the organizations.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Links we promised during the interview:

• EFNV.ORG and its conference page
• The Metta Center for Nonviolence Education
• Michael Nagler’s UC Berkeley courses PACS164A & PACS164B for web viewing and podcast download
• Eknath Easwaran
• Rachel McNair
• Dr. Joseph Marshall – Omega Boys Club
• Azim Khamisa – The Tariq Khamisa Foundation
• Jack Duvall – A Force More Powerful

The post Educators For NonViolence (EFNV) – Michael Nagler appeared first on Sky's Blog.

FLFP conducts workshops in schools – from grade-school thru college – their workshop lasts 90 minutes, including a video, to capture attention and inspire; it starts with interviews of people the kids can relate to, from sports figures to real people, and continues to Jonathan sharing his stories, including the shark attack he survived at Stinson Beach in 1998; proceeding to then get the kids to share their own stories in small groups of 8 or so – their challenges and conflicts and experiences. To paraphrase Jonathan – It’s amazing how similar their challenges are and yet each one thinks they’re unique – by sharing, they learn how to better approach and overcome adversity in their lives.

Jonathan has also written a children’s book Don’t Fear the Shark – a story of his shark attack, but one in which the shark is a bully mistreating humans because it has been mistreated itself – the story looks at how the cycle of violence arises and can be prevented. As he says, the story ends abruptly and the reader has to figure out how it would or could end.

Jonathan is also a hard-working member of the organizing committee for Educators For NonViolence.

[posted with ecto]

The post Future Leaders for Peace – Jonathan Kathrein appeared first on Sky's Blog.

First, a site I ran into months ago, WebWorkerDaily, reports lots of interesting things about people who work online, and you might want to “check them out.” A recent article Web Work Continues Explosive Growth, for instance.

Second, they report on a study from World At Work, which among other things indicates almost 15 million Americans engage in teleworking full time. (You can pick up a PDF of the report by visiting their web site.) If I calculate correctly, that’s about 5% of the population.

And just this week, an article on WebWorker Daily entitled What Type of Web Worker are You? lists four types of nomadic “Web Workers.” I am a combination of Digital Bedouin and Telecommuter. Mostly I work from my home office, but with my phone (on GPRS) and a few visits to client sites, I really distribute my work quite a bit. And I’m completely capable of picking up and working from a remote location for days when I need to. So there goes the classification scheme right away!

The post I’m a Turtle – What type of Nomad are you? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

What I like most is that these un-conferences incorporate many of the same ideas from “nomadic working” which I was describing in my original “I’m a Turtle” post. (Calling myself a turtle refers to carrying my work around with me in the computer like the turtle carries his shell, not to the pace at which I work.)

Jay says “Geeks are dedicated learners. They go to great lengths to stay ahead of the curve. Not content to merely implement the ideas of others, geeks are driven to invent the future. The way they meet, share information, and conduct their meetings holds many ideas for corporate meetings, starting with the fact that the geeks love to go to meetings like the two I just returned from.” The two meetings he describes are FOO Camp and BAR Camp.

And one thing I like about BAR Camp is that people go to it and actually “camp out” – they bring a computer, and wi-fi is provided for them, and they interact and are encouraged to be online and F2F all at the same time. I made some comments a while ago about meetings being no good if people weren’t online the whole time checking out the references and looking for new ideas. And so Jay’s description really hit the spot for me.

Also for fun here’s Chris Messina’s blog trail on Barcamp.

Jay’s book Informal Learning can be purchased from Amazon.

And one more reference to un-conferences – Take Your PowerPoint And… in BusinessWeek. (Thanks to Chris for spotting this.)

The post I’m a Turtle – Un-Conferences incorporate the best “nomadic” concepts appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Religion is a sensitive issue in Nigeria, as in many places, and Emmanuel has been able to help people learn about international peace and ethics based on the life of the XIV Dalai Lama in a non-religions atmosphere based on our common humanity.

Private schools play an important part in education in Nigeria. Public schools cannot handle the entire load, and students frequently begin school at a late age, so private schools have stepped in to carry part of the load. Students are encouraged to stay in school until they graduate and sometimes do not graduate until as late as the age of 23. (The photo shows Faith, Emmanuel and Mercy at Chonor House in Dharamsala.)

“Very honestly … my contact with the Dalai Lama Foundation in the first place has transformed my life. Each person knows himself – I know my background, but since January 2005 it has transformed my life in a number of ways. I should give a few examples…”

*I call these cafeteria interviews not because they offer a varied menu but because they’re sometimes conducted in a noisy or populated area, giving you the flavor of the locale, but also you’ve got to pay a little bit of attention in order to follow the interview.

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