How to get people and organizations to collaborate? Not sure, incentivize them perhaps as you say.

Defined versus loose collaboration, and the answer for what is better may well be in the hands of the people and groups doing the collaboration. In other words the answer might be...both.

Collaboration among Omidyar.net members and Invisible Children founders really seemed to help drive IC much further much quicker, and certainly did a great job energizing the o/net community.

Peace Tiles did a great job of using the Peace Tile process as collaborational element between two organizations.

How does one "open up" collaboration in general?

Love this thread.

Mark Grimes said:

Collaboration among Omidyar.net members and Invisible Children founders really seemed to help drive IC much further much quicker, and certainly did a great job energizing the o/net community.

Yes, and let's piece this together. Life in Africa's more intricate collaboration with Invisible Children grew from the Onet connection, but was very negatively charged. At the end, in spite of a lot of good achieved together, we both had to let that collaboration go. The lack of a clear agreement for 1.5+ years was a devastating factor for Life in Africa's organizational culture, for our members who worked for IC, and for our microfinance program in partnership with Kiva. When a lot is at stake for the partners involved in an action oriented collaboration, I've learned that it's really important to have clear agreements in place.

Peace Tiles did a great job of using the Peace Tile process as collaborational element between two organizations.

http://peacetiles.org is such a wonderful collaborative medium. The human connections that peacetiles enable are so lovely - powerful and not expensive. One of the all time favorite collaborations I ever participated in was Peace Tiles to Darfur. Life in Africa members and I led a workshop that taught kids in Northern Uganda about the conflict in Darfur. They then created an incredible peacetiles mural as a gift for kids in Darfur. I carried the tiles in my suitcase to LA, where Gabriel Stauring picked them up and packed them for his upcoming trip to Darfur. I'll have to dig up the links to the content that we all created for that collaboration.

How does one "open up" collaboration in general?

I am hoping that inviting with intent might be an adequate place to start. Help me twitter?

Love this thread.

Tweet Tweet :)

• What does the term "collaboration" mean to you when it's applied to your thinking about Social Change?

Re: Definition: taking cooperative, collective action for greater social impact.*

I would expand the definition. Collaborative approach in the social sector is a way of doing business that promotes transparency and puts a lens on your work that supports open standards and fosters development of solutions that help the field as well as solve your problem. Simply allowing information to be available is a way of fostering collaboration. It is not necessarily a discreet action or initiative but an openness which enables awareness and future collaboration.

At the end of the day, collaboration may in fact lead to greater social impact (greater reach & larger scale impact), but how it does this is equally important. Collaboration allows for greater efficiency and the leveraging of core expertise of multiple organizations. Enabling organizations to capitalize on the strenghths of another, to complement skill sets and services - this is the beauty of collaboration. Collaboration can take the form of mergers, serve as a tactic for sustainability, and play a key role in scaling.

• Can you share good or bad examples of collaboration in the Social Change sector that you've participated in or admired?

http://search.socialentrepreneur api.org First open source database of vetted social entrepreneurs. Simple, yet impactful, scalable, and beneficial to not only the participants but many others - It has created actionable knowledge and the value of the tool will continue to grow along with the increased collaboration.

• Is collaboration more effective when it's structured or unstructured?

Two schools of thought - don't go in with the answers, answers need to be built. Alternatively, you DO need a process and ideally a "shepherd" to ensure that time is used efficiently and progress is made. Otherwise, people return to their daily work demands and the collaboration takes the back seat.

• Does collaboration ever fail to increase social impact? If yes, what are the factors that lead to failure

Yes, I would think so - when the collaboration is forced, not a good fit, not clearly defined, or is not mutually beneficial. Also there needs to be clearly identified champions from both organizations to be successful.

• What are the biggest incentives for collaborating? The biggest deterrents?

The biggest incentive is solving specific internal organization issue or challenge. The biggest deterrants: fear, money, and time. You need upfront collaboration that is low risk, high reward, then you can build to bigger collaboration. Precedent from other industries helps, proof of concept helps, "pilot programs" help. Asking for $ upfront can not only cause friction, it can be a complete barrier. (Not always, of course, - well thought out, larger scale initiatives may take longer, but that rigor can overcome barrier and fear of risk associated with deploying resources). Think about what could go right - not just what could go wrong.

Defining collaboration isn't so easy, because collaboration can be something so simple, like adding a post or a small edit, or complicated like an enduring partnership.

I may be off point, but I suppose it's what's on my mind right now :-)

Generally social change connotes a progressive mindset. It's very interesting to me to see how in the USA today there is such a polarization along the liberal and conservative axis. What's strange is that when I think of real challenges confronting people today, liberal and conservative don't seem the most important categories in responding to them.

On Facebook I've got a nephew whose very much in thrall of Hannity-FreeRepublic-Fox News conservatism. Recently he posted videos of a PR guy named Bob Basso who does performances as Thomas Paine on TV and YouTube videos. These are wildly popular some of them with 9 million views. Tea Bagging...

I've also been surprised to see people from Onet who I feel I've collaborated with posting similar sorts of expressions on their FB Walls. Oh and with the G20 here looking at the online media of that event and seeing how much references Alex Jones who expresses paleoconservative views.

The Thomas Paine shtick reminded me of an early book by Jeremy Rifkin "Common Sense II" where Rifkin channels Thomas Paine in not such a different way from today's Bob Basso. The biggest difference is Basso is creating a bigger audience: Collaborators?

There is anger across the land, and I see that right-wing politics is talking up revolution. Sadly, if history is any guide, revolutions are a sort of social change that seem mostly to end badly.

While the definition of collaboration is left very open, I think implicit in starting the thread is an idea of online collaboration which crosses multiple boarders.

So back to Basso and channeling Thomas Paine. It reminded me of Rifkin back in the 1970's. His book was in collaboration with some of what Ralph Nader was doing at the time. And more generally connected with ideas about creating "economic democracy." One of Nader's efforts in this was "The People's Bicentennial Commission." The only references I can find to that are right wing organizations and the many anti-activist sites online. The People's Bicentennial Commission is long forgotten, but the people most closely associated with it never stopped working on economic democracy.

Thomas Paine died in New York City in 1810 and apparently there were only six mourners, two of them black. The popularity on the right of agitating revolution I suspect relies on the notion that like Thomas Paine, nobody will remember down the line. Whatever one thinks of Rifkin, after his two early books with revolution in mind, his career has taken a different tack. Few of the people associated with the economic democracy movement contiued to speak in revolutionary terms after the mid-seventies. But their ideas continued to be radical.

One of the founders of The Democracy Collaborative is Gar Alperovitz. Now I tend to identify as a lefty, at least in casual conversation with most Americans. But when I read an associate with the left online, at least in the more historically shaped leftist thoughts, I'm really not there. Alperovitz speaks my language, there's no party line or academic school one has to pledge fealty to.

I had my nephew take the political compass test which asks political opinions and then graphs them on two axes: left-right/libertarian-authoritarian. Not surprisingly he's no right wing authoritarian; he only plays one on Facebook. That's not quite true, he really does identify as right.

Perhaps in American politics today the winner will be the ones who can capture the generalized anger that's out there.

There are a few points I want to make in all of this. The first point has to do with collaboration across politically charged rhetoric. I think there's much more space for collaboration than is often thought.

The second point is during the sixties and seventies there was lots of talk about revolution from the left. Some of it had to do with a particular sort of revolution, but I think much of it is very much like the calls for revolution today coming from the right; it is more about people expressing anger about things gone wrong.

The third point is that since the 1970's many really smart people have been collaborating together to create ideas for positive change. This work has been much more practical and extensive than people imagine and doesn't fit neatly along the left-right continuum.

The forth point is it seems that there is a view that large scale change follows from local actions. Getting local can mean very local, like your home and block, but it can also mean regional issues like watersheds. The boundaries of local are not always political boundaries, but the attention is towards issues which are bounded.

In all the time I've know Christina she's been thousands of miles away. I think it is possible to collaborate across such distances. And I often wax eloquent in a cyber-Utopian sort of way. Nevertheless, I think that the insight about global change following local action is very important. People far away can be of most help with a focused local program. When people collaborate online from all over, the collaboration is best when there is a clear object. A good example is Flickr, people know what the site is about: posting photos.

I think Global Voices is a terrific example of online collaboration. But where it succeeds best is in making local and particular issues known to a broader audience.

Collaboration is best when it is specific, when it's locally oriented or object oriented. I bet that lots more Americans today know who Bab Basso is than know who Gar Alperovitz is. Still, I think it quite significant that so many working for social change in the sixties and seventies dropped the revolution talk and got down to practical work. There's a great well of experience upon which to draw that really isn't so easily poisoned by political propaganda as may be thought.

One of the pitfalls of imagining collaboration is imagining that political agreement is prerequisite for it. In politics divide and rule is the oldest game around. There is an advantage of a a group identity which has an targeted enemy. But the drawback out weigh the advantages. Basic trust building between people is more effective, I believe, than exploiting ideological difference.

#i4c Housekeeping: Bridging with Twitter

I would like to experiment with connecting this discussion and the many related conversations that participants here are engaged in elsewhere online. With intent, I have invited some people I really respect from my twitterstream, so building a bridge to Twitter seems in order.

Future posters to this thread: please help us build it as follows

1. If you have a Twitter ID, please use it to tag your posts.
2. Please use #i4c to connect this discussion with other related developments in your Twitterverse
3. There is now a wikispace at http://www.ned.com/group/i4c/ws/ _i4c/ where you can add your TwitterID on a consolidated list of others who are in multi-channel discussion about related sector developments.
4. I've edited the intro to this discussion to include specific Twitterbridging instructions.

Thanks!

@ChristinasWorld

Jill Finlayson said:

Think about what could go right - not just what could go wrong.

Thanks for sharing, Jill. Your comment prompted me to add a question to the intro:

• Is there a pattern of factors that lead to successfull collaboration?

This conversation topic has come up in the past, on Omidyar.net and here. I've offered thoughts on this that I'll repeat again.

I think that for their to be collaboration, someone has to step forward and define a purpose, or a reason, for people to begin to connect with each other. That could be larger or small, but until someone takes that role, there's not likely to be much collaboration.

Secondly, this is a process of invitation, such as open space that Michael Herman teaches. Just because you think you've identified a problem, does not mean everyone will be knocking down your door to join you in solving it. I've been building a network of people involved in tutoring/mentoring since 1975, and it has expanded to include people from around the world who are interested in poverty, workforce development, diversity, education, social justice, etc.

I send out email newsletters each month (and before the Internet I sent printed newsletters, but less frequently and to a much smaller network). In these I share ideas that I learn from other people, and point to others who I want to help, and who I want to help me. At this link are 55 web sites related to collaboration. http://www.tutormentorconnection .org/LinksLearningNetwork/LinksL ibrary/tabid/560/rrcid/13/rrscid /26/rrpid/1/rrepp/20/language/en -US/Default.aspx

Thus, you need to be persistent, and you need to find a way to "stay in the game". From 1975 to 1990 I had a full time job that paid my bills. Since 1990 I've had to raise the money from a wide range of private donors to do this work (thank you Christina for your donation!). If you can't find the money, and can't continue the process of invitation, and network building, it's not likely the collaboration around your idea will ever grow beyond informal networking.

Unless....

In the book titled The Spider and the Starfish, the idea of decentralized networks is explained. I apply this in my own thinking. I put my ideas on the web at http://www.tutormentorexchange.net and talk about them in a blog at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com

Anyone can take ownership of these ideas, and some do. They don't need to pay me for them (although helping me find the money to keep me paid would be nice). Thus, other leaders might be using their own time, talent and dollars to make these ideas come true, and I don't even know about it.

This is not formal collaboration, but maybe a stronger glue, because it aims to connect us around a common purpose, where each of us can "do our own thing" to achieve a common goal.

If we keep doing this, and keep inviting people to come together, this can lead to more formal collaboration not only between myself and others, but between the people who I connect to each other. I may not ever know that some of these are taking place, but again, that is my role in network building.

An example of this is that I first learned about Social Network Analysis from conversations on Omidyar. On Nov. 20 Valdas Krebs and Jean Russell will be presenting information about SNA during the Conference that I host in Chicago every six months. This coming together is a result of over 4 years of networking and sending invitations. It may lead to nothing more formal, or it might lead to me using donated software to map the network of the T/MC and use these tools to build more support for the vision we share. See http://www.tutormentorconference .org

How do we know what is happening? On-line documentation systems offer potential for understanding the impact of the collective efforts of many people, over many years.

We launched an on-line documentation system in 2000 that enables anyone who is working with T/MC to document actions that lead to long-term growth of tutor/mentor programs. Visit this at http://www.vattsystems.com/ohats /Home.aspx . You can log in using GUEST as the username and VISITOR as the password. The metrics charts link to Ning discussions where you can ask meaning, and "collaborate" with us to make this system work.

It starts with a purpose, and an ability to communicate that purpose on a regular basis to a growing number of people.

Is this easy? No.

Hey everyone, it's Dwight from InSearchofSanuk.com (Thanks Christina for inviting me to join this discussion.)

What does the term "collaboration" mean to you when it's applied to your thinking about Social Change?

One of things I harp on is community building online and locally. One way to gauge our openness to collaboration is to examine how we welcome and nurture newcomers. Social change is expanding and will continue to become a popular topic among all types of people. In the same way all bloggers aren't tech nerds, all social change advocates won't be intellectuals or working at ngos. It's the responsibility of people who have been in this community longer to make sure newbies are able to jump in and find their role.

So this has to happen regardless of people's background or previous experiences and if we encourage the engagement of individuals passionate about social change, getting organizations working together becomes a lot more tangible. I'd like to see this continue in both structured and unstructured ways. Conferences and forums are great, but unless the conversation diffuses to the public we impede the type of global solutions we need for the systematic change we all hope to see. The same is true vice versa. My good intentions are lost if I'm not given a platform whereby I can connect to expertise, financing, and general support capable of pushing my ideas into fruition.

I'd like to see us more open and doing more to leverage the power of new "social change converts" and I hope in the future to work more on developing content to help people make the great leap from their intention to help to realistic, sustainable action in their respective communities.

~@insearchofsanuk

PS - thanks to everyone sharing valuable links and perspectives

Hi,

I am Sylwia Presley, and just wanted to add my thoughts - I think on-line collaboration is crucial to make a change, however like in offline world it need to be planned, managed and directed by a person or a team of people who ensure the collaboration achieves its goals. There will be a lot of collaborative activities that can be open source, however you will need to put them in the context to actually make a change. Even now, in case of Copenhagen conference, you need NGO's and other groups to specifically call for action in order to move crowds.

Sylwia

Dwight said:

One way to gauge our openness to collaboration is to examine how we welcome and nurture newcomers. Social change is expanding <snip> It's the responsibility of people who have been in this community longer to make sure newbies are able to jump in and find their role.

Dwight, I am so thrilled to have lured you here to Ned. This community is such a great match for you. I hope you'll stick around for a while and engage. The people who tend to gather here of of the type that love to help each other out. I visited another Nedster in Thailand about 2 years ago. She's currently traveling and meeting with a number of contacts she made through this community in developing her PhD thesis. As you're poking around here, be sure to connect with Linda Nowakowski - she's lovely and I believe she'll be headed back to Thailand at some point soon.

I completely agree with you about the need for newcomers to the social change space to be able to find help. One of the sector level challenges I personally find right now is that you are not easy to find. http://socialentrepreneurapi.org is a wonderful tool for finding social entrepreneurs who are already "pedigreed," but it's very difficult to know who and where the newcomers are who need help.

I've recently posted an article to the internet4change blog that offers some advice for social entrepreneurs who are seeking collaboration online. I hope you find it useful in understanding how to nurture the right kind of attention through your online presence.

5 pillars to uphold a new wwworld (1/4)

Dwight, do you have any ideas on making social entrepreneurs needs more visible to each other? My thinking is that if we can see each other better, then maybe more collaboration on start-ups would naturally start to take place.

Welcome to ned! I hope you love it here.

Edited to add Linda's profile link and add a more deliberate Welcome to Ned

Sylwia wrote:

collaboration is crucial to make a change, however like in offline world it need to be planned, managed and directed by a person or a team of people who ensure the collaboration achieves its goals.

Sylwia, thanks so much for chiming in. Your point is well taken and logical. But I wonder sometimes if planning and management is really a driving force in achieving collaborative impact. Some of the most fulfilling collaborations I've participated in were very loosely structured - someone needed help with something, and others helped.

Dan Bassil Wrote:

someone has to step forward and define a purpose, or a reason, for people to begin to connect with each other. That could be larger or small, but until someone takes that role, there's not likely to be much collaboration.

Dan, that makes a lot of sense to me at every level. That role can eventually be taken by nations at something as large as Copenhagen, but at the beginning there was one person who stepped up and said: lets get the nations together. I think any social entrepreneur in a start up phase could begin to attract collaborators by saying "I have an idea for how we can work together."

I can give an example of a collaboration, where the creative ideas of one organisation were sucked away and the intellectual property stolen, by a supposedly collaborating organisation. This organisation then used the ideas, found funding for them, implemented the ideas, which failed, as they had been poorly understood by the stealing organisation. This set back what were good ideas several years, as funders had noted the tried and failed.

Eventually the original organisation who came up with the ideas were able to persuade the funders to try it again and this time it proved successful (and is still successful). Essentially it required a social enterprise, not a charity or NGO, not a school or college, to implement, a social enterprise, which thought and developed policies with a social conscience, not, as is most common, selfishly.

So, therein lies the rub. Some organisations are incapable of collaborating for a common good AND some funders are insisting, nay forcing, organisations to collaborate in order to attract funding, which is in its own way, just as selfish, as the funder does not want to fund multiple organisations, as it increases its own exposure to risk.

In Africa, in particular, suspicion can come first and thus collaboration requires perhaps some "parallel-working" for a period, where neither is really in each other's pocket.

Trust and suspicion are justifiably important when considering collaboration. How do we mitigate these natural feelings?

The end of the first story I mentioned is a happy one. The stolen from organisation forgave the stealing organisation and the stealing organisation realised that perhaps the organisation they stole from was a worthy organisation and mutually beneficial collaboration took place, some fifteen years after the first incident.

So, it can take some time....

Christina Jordan said:

• What does the term "collaboration" mean to you when it's applied to your thinking about Social Change?

I wrote a piece and an accompanying slidecast that defined collaboration and proposed a way for thinking about how to improve it. What's critical to note is that collaboration isn't collaboration unless there's a bounded goal. In other words, it has a well-defined end.

We can talk about how to work together for better social change, but shifting to true collaboration means defining actual end points. Things like, "Have a great conversation about social change with lots of people" is a valid endpoint. How you frame these is critical.

• Can you share good or bad examples of collaboration in the Social Change sector that you've participated in or admired?

One of my favorite examples of nonprofits collaborating effectively for social change is the Leadership Learning Community. I'm totally biased; I'm on their board. They are great at identifying opportunities where there is overlap and saying, "Hey, why don't we do this together?", turning potential competitors into partners instead.

• Is collaboration more effective when it's structured or unstructured?

The answer is yes. :-)

Structure is great. The problem is when people impose structure too early. In a rapidly changing world, you rarely find models that you can replicate entirely as is. That means that you have to approach collaboration with a very open mind, honoring your previous wisdom and experience, but not worshipping it.

• Does collaboration ever fail to increase social impact? If yes, what are the factors that lead to failure?

Let me throw in a sports analogy. There are teams that are shining examples of collaboration and yet fail to win the championship. And there are teams where the players barely talk to each other, and yet somehow, they manage to win.

Collaboration is not a panacea. Lots of things have to happen well in order to increase social good.

• What are the biggest incentives for collaborating? The biggest deterrents?

I'm not sure you can generalize effectively, but I'll throw out one important incentive: Modeling. Time and again, we have seen that when a group -- however small -- models collaboration, those around them adopt that same spirit. There's actually good theory backing this up (cooperation theory and anchor tenant theory in economics).

In other words, change by doing. Don't wait to convince everyone to collaborate effectively. Model it.

• Is there a pattern of factors that lead to successfull collaboration?

I've been exploring this for a long time. I have a very rough, incomplete repository on my company's wiki. I'd welcome contributions and comments there, as that will give me a good incentive to add and refine the content there.

Great discussion everyone!

I hope to add to it soon, but I'm still collected data.

;-)

I think we are ready for the next stage.

Initially, we discovered the web and its potential. We got enthusastic about collaboration. But then also frustrated about what really came out. This frustration I share and I believe was the driving force to start this thread.

I think we need not to define what collaboration is, because it takes sheer limitless connotations. The challenges I see are:

• 1. we want to collaborate, but do not know how
• 2. we want to collaborate, but don't know how to find collaborators
• 3. we want to collaborate, but can't find matching projects
• 4. want to collaborate, but we run into money problems

1. For this to work, we need to clearly define what the goal is, as has already been posted. From this, inspire others or define work packages you need collaboration for. Building a house needs different collaboration than financing a local alternative energy startup.
2. How do I find collaborators? There are literally thousands of sites with relevant information seeking people. We need new methods and tools to find each other. I believe the net will evolve in this direction. The web now is a collection of singular efforts. It's time to connect these efforts. To think of a giant organisation maybe. How do we get aware of each other? I didn't know http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/, nor http://search.socialentrepreneurapi.org/, nor http://peacetiles.org before... and I am not going to be able to check them and all the other countless great sites out there.

An example: imagine a form. You enter a few details, and get a list of relevant collaboration possibilities. The clue: instead of having to register yet to another site, the net gathers all this information for you! Does it matter if it comes from xyz.org or abc.org? Or the other way around: you just push your information, which "magically" reaches to relevant peers!

3. see (b) Also, cool tools for new forms of working and investing are needed. E.g. a platform, you can start/join projects, you can invest currency in them, or contribute work, help in the administration - whatever the need. The profits from the project are redistributed according to a pre-defined key to investors and contributors. The project is finished and the organisation dissolves, freeing you to go on to the next project. Or it can continue if there are new requirements, or it's just worthwhile continuing the effort.
4. Finally, the biggest inhibitor for successful cooperation in my view is - money (do you agree?). For example, I don't want to be enslaved in a paid job never again. I have found countless ways of contributing, but most can't offer me more than food and lodging. This means I have to come up with travel expenses, etc - my reserves are already dried up. I believe in an economy of abundance, where we define the currencies we need ourselves, and create our own wealth. Then, we'd pay contributors in such currencies, and they will be a able to spend their currencies for other contributors, etc. In an idealized future multi-currency world, we'd be able to exchange such currencies and even be able to pay for food, etc. I invite you to look out for alternative currencies, they are spreading like mushrooms.

I am aware that this post just calls for new tools and puts an image of an idealized future instead of helping on imminent needs. However, this is natural I believe; a skyscraper couldn't be built at the time when only hammers and nails were available.

Fantastic conversation, thanks.

Can you share good or bad examples of collaboration in the Social Change sector that you've participated in or admired?

Recently discovered Where Are Your Keys: The Language Fluency Game. This is an example of collaboration I admire on many levels. Evan Gardner studied to be a Spanish teacher. Doing his Masters work he became aware that Native people in the Pacific Northwest were keen for help in preventing the deaths of native languages. He had a brilliant idea of something to. That's his passion, but there's no money in it. He's gone back to school for nursing hoping that would be a way to support him so he could have enough to spend his time on the language project.

Willem Larssen got introduced to Gardner's methods studying a native language. He recognized that Gardner's approach was profound. They began collaborating to establish the method in an open sourced and viral way.

Is there a pattern of factors that lead to successfull collaboration?

Eugene Eric Kim's comments really struck a chord. Partly because very recently I watched a video interview with him done by Beth Kanter. Digging around Kim's Blue Oxen site I saw that he's been hugely influenced by Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.

Larssen in looking at Gardner's work immediately made a connection to Alexander's A Pattern Language. That's something that's engaged my thinking for more than 30 years so my ears perked up.

It's rather easy to get caught up in metaphysics when discussing a Pattern Language approach, but there is also an easiness about it.

When it comes to collaboration I think all of us are game, as long as it's not like pulling teeth! One of the blog post at Where Are Your Keys? is The Fluency Paradigm. While the method is specifically for rapid language learning, it's also a model for learning all sorts of things. The emphasis on "fluency" is quite relevant to online collaboration.

In the Beth's video she asks Kim about Simplicity and he related how he's inspired to look at how ants behave. They can carry a lot of weight and follow trails. He points out that simplicity scales and uses Twitter as an example. Small signals are hugely important. The short messages are enough information to decide if they want to follow those trails.

The Where Are Your Keys? model is a great example of online collaboration emerging. One of the key patterns identified in both the language model and Kim's work is simplicity. I wish I would take that lesson to heart ;-)

I have been looking at collaboration from a marketplace physics point of view. I wrote about this at change.org (http://socialentrepreneurship.ch ange.org/blog/view/a_brave_new_w orld_of_social_impact_data).

What I said there was that in the social sector we tend to live in two disconnected markets. One that is defined by competition, mostly competition for oxygen or the resources an individual organization needs to survive. The assumption here is that competition strengthens us. (Topic for another post) It is easy to define a market in a competitive frame. Even in a context where the data is obtuse or unreliable a competitive market defines winners via their individual ability to accumulate through "selling". She with the most, wins.

However, a collaboration market focuses on the value that defines the transaction. Winners are created by strengthening connections. An effective collaboration marketplace would define the physics for value discovery, specifically the problem that Fabio describes above. The currency of a collaborative marketplace is impact or rigorous, measurable progress towards solutions. These currency exists in nascent and siloed ways.

I strongly believe that, if we are to solve the world's most intractable problems we must be strong enough to survive and innovative enough to collaborate.

Steve Wright @conches

Taking the liberty of reposting @eekim's slidecast and the interview with Beth Kanter. Eugene, I found myself nodding my head at every point you make. Your framework is giving me courage to explain more about why I have initiated this discussion.

Zoom in! Let's get concrete

I am overflowing with things I want to say and ask in response to the last 3 posters here. Meanwhile...

What seems clear to me reading through the responses of people who have posted so far is that many of us see the nature of a nut that we'd like to crack in similar ways. Let's start cracking it, shall we?

With the aim of shifting more toward the concrete in this discussion, please also consider the following 2 questions:

1. What is in place online now that is already driving increased collaboration in the social change sector, and what do those collaborations look like?
2. What do we still need NOW to drive collaboration in the social change sector to the next level, and what will those collaborations look like?

Let's be specific ie, "we have platform x" or "we need a platform that will..."

Carry on!

1. What is in place online now that is already driving increased collaboration in the social change sector, and what do those collaborations look like?

http://www.gsix.org

http://www.w1sd0m.org/

http://www.IdeaEncore.com

http://www.springboardinnovation .org

http://www.socialentrepreneurapi .org

http://www.grantsfire.org/

http://www.stockpickr.com/

http://www.netsquared.org especially NetTuesday real world meet-ups

http://techsoup.org

http://www.businesscatapult.com

http://www.takepart.org

http://www.unltd.or.uk

social stock markets are starting to show up...

2. What do we still need NOW to drive collaboration in the social change sector to the next level, and what will those collaborations look like?

I'd like to see:

1. The Social Entrepreneur API expanded.
2. The Funding landscape mapped, matching software between social entrepreneurs and funding criteria of funders.
3. An open source database of service providers who provide pro bono, discounted, or customized services for social entrepreneurs and a Yelp feedback/referral system by social entrepreneurs rating/recommending those providers.
4. An open source database where opportunities, conferences, and funding deadlines and their related dates can be entered, filtered and seen by tags/slices (tagged for social entrepreneurship AND region, issue, population served, etc) on a calendar (including paper submission deadlines, early bird registration deadlines and the like).
5. A widget from Idealist for slices of jobs.

Each of these database needs to integrate (pivot) with the other databases and they need open source real time API access and widgets to make it easy for people to showcase the relevant slice of data for their community on their websites and various social media outlets.

Hey Jill,

your points about open source are great. And while we are at it, maybe some more suggestions:

Open source is an attitude, it's not just about software. If we want to collaborate we need to be open and trust. Get out there with your ideas, even if they are not yet clear! Someone else might be inspired by it and provide the missing link! If an open source idea is great, it will spread just by itself, benefitting countless. And open source provides the means for others (and yourself) to jump into opportunities and provide meaningful activity.

Open source is democratic, grass roots. Open source has the power to spread information virally into every corner of the world. It bears the promise of really erradicating poverty.

Thanks for starting this discussion! I am really excited to have stumbled upon it. Before I get started let me say that I have spent the better part of the last year thinking specifically about how to encourage collaborative action for social change and for the last six months and I have been building a platform at http://www.group.io that attempts to integrate some of those ideas. Hopefully I am able to add something useful to this discussion.

As a preface, I think it is important to point out that there are at least two different trains of thought that have emerged from this thread, as is probably inevitable whenever attempting to pin down a singular definition around a concept as large as "collaboration in the social change sector." About half of the responses to this thread appear to be thinking of collaboration in terms of cooperation between two or more organizations. This idea here is getting various NPOs, NGOs, and social enterprises that are working on similar goals, to work together rather duplicating efforts and competing with each other for funding or resources. In contrast, the other roughly half of the responses are focused on ways to draw groups of individuals together around a cause in order to drive social change (particularly online). The underlying thought here is more or less how to move beyond "Facebook Causes" in terms of tools for bringing individuals together to effect change. While each of the these threads are certainly meritorious on their own, I think the tools and resources required to drive collaboration between two organizations are often very different than than those required to link and coordinate groups of individuals. In order to keep from talking past each other it is worth making that distinction explicit.

What we have been working to build at http://www.group.io is focused on the latter. What we have attempted to do is provide a platform for enabling distributed collective action, with the emphasis being on the "action" piece. What has been lacking, particularly online, are ways for people for to work together to take specific action in pursuit of defined goals. (I think Eugene framed this well with his discussion of organizing around defined "endpoints"). A skeleton framework for implementing a social change might look something like this:

1. Find like minded people and bring them together around a particular cause.
2. Discuss problems/ideas/approaches/goals
3. Formulate a defined plan of action based on the outcome of #2
4. Implement the plan
5. Revise goals/plan/approach then rinse and repeat

The problem with online collaboration at present is that it is is overwhelmingly focused on the finding/discussion steps, with very little collaboration around the remaining "actionable" steps. The tools for 1. finding/linking people and 2. driving discussion are fairly plentiful (Facebook Groups, Twitter channels, Amazee, forums like Ned, SocialEdge, Change.org, and numerous blogs). But tools for actually 3. planning and 4. acting are non-existent or not targeted to the needs of the social sector.

The result is that the internet creates a lot of talk but not much of action. What we have attempted to do at group.io is to shift the focus down the chain to the planning and hopefully the implementation steps. The first thing we have created toward this end is a project management tool that works like Basecamp or Zoho Projects on the front end, but is designed on the backend to be open, shareable and searchable. So instead of confining the project to a closed, private workspace, we offer the means to ensure that the project remains open and visible. As it stands, the site is something like Ideablob.com where project focus rather than an "idea". We believe the benefits of this approach are:

1. Action-orientation: Every group is immediately channeled into "action" rather than simply discussion. Discussion still takes place, but it is channeled within the context of specific, concrete tasks rather than vague, non-actionable "causes." 2. Transparency: The project plan and project progress stay visible to the public, volunteers, donors and other stakeholders. 3. Cumulative knowledge: Creating a record and database of past projects that can be mined and searched so that future projects can track best practices or find mistakes to avoid.

This is of course only one piece of a much, much larger issue, but we hope that some will find it to be a useful tool for collaborating online. I did not intend for this to turn into a pitch for the site, but I would be very interested on feedback on what we are doing from anyone on this page. The site is currently in private beta, but if anyone following this thread is interested in beta testing the site, just send me an email at info@group.io and mention that you saw this post on Ned/I4C.

Fabio Barone said:

I didn't know http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/, nor http://search.socialentrepreneurapi.org/, nor http://peacetiles.org before... and I am not going to be able to check them and all the other countless great sites out there.

This reinforces my point about "networks of purpose". Unless someone is motivated to visit one of these sites, because they care about the purpose of the work being done, it's not likely that they will. And even if they visit one or two times, it's not likely that they will visit often, build relationships, get to know other people who visit there, and ultimately begin to work toward the same goal, either formally, or informally.

Jill,

thanks for posting your list. Do you maintain a library of these sites on your web site, or do you know of hubs that are collecting and sharing this information? On the sites I visited, I don't think I saw a links library, where they each were listing others doing similar work.

I do this at http://www.tutormentorconnection .org, where I point to other tutor/mentor programs in Chicago, as well as networks in other cities.

I host a conference every six months in Chicago and keep an archive of past workshops and speakers that other people can view to find people to speak at their own events, or to network with. If the funds/talent were available I'd expand this into the type of resource directory you have described, enabling people looking for trainers, consultants with tutor/mentor expertise, to find them more easily.

Someone else said "money is a barrier to collaboration". It is in many ways, but to me one of the most important ways it is a barrier is that if I can't bring money and resources into a collaboration, all I have to offer are my ideas and experience. Most of the time that's not enough to get others to want to work more closely together. In addition, if I'm not able to do the work of my own organization, or earn a living if I'm an independent, it's hard to participate fully in a collaboration unless it meets some self interest of my own organization or myself.

With regard to money, there is money about for "collaboration or "network" organisations. From my experience these are focused aroun "mapping" and "volume", rather than prioritising "purpose" and "quality". Although many may disagree, we have lived in a culture where accountability means numbers rather than social impact, across the three bottom lines.

I would also like to think we had purpose, a leader and and end product to "our" discussions here, as it will help mould the process.