philanthropy

I first joined ZeroDivide (then the Community Technology Foundation of California—whew, what a mouthful!) as a program officer over eight years ago.

I have no formal education or training in program officiating. (But I should ask: who does? Those of us in the field, we’re all accidental philanthropists for the most part.) There’s no certification per se, no accreditation, no good housekeeping seal of approval for the philanthropy sector.

Ruth Williams and I are at the Hewlett Foundation for a Northern California Grantmakers briefing entitled Web & Where 2.0+ There is also a webcast.

I recently visited Beijing and Hong Kong and witnessed first hand the exciting things happening in China's philanthropic sector.

Marc Fest, over at Knight Foundation, pinged me about a new digital media partnership that they have launched with MTV.

I’ve been impressed with the way the Knight Foundation is catalyzing innovation and entrepreneurial thinking through their philanthropy.

I’ve blogged more about technology in the nonprofit space than about the philanthropy space, but I’ve been avidly reading philanthropy bloggers such as Tactical Philanthropy, Philanthropy 2173, and the White Courtesy Telephone.

I read with great interest Amy Luckey’s (of Blueprint R+D) article, Grantmaking 2.0: Using New Technology to Enhance Grantmaker Practices, published this month on the Grantmaker’s for Effective Organization’s website. And not just because I am one of the experts she interviewed—I admit to being in good company and, as usual, feeling like I learn more from our interaction than I contributed.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge’s award winners and the significance of this new model of grantmaking.

The Knight Foundation today announced the award winners of its innovation prize, The News Challenge. I’ve been following the challenge and was very curious to see who they would ultimately fund—the list of folks is downright impressive.

What do I like about what the good folks at Knight did?

There’s a lot of momentum and buzz behind OpenID lately. More and more services and websites are accepting OpenID logins as well as offering OpenID authentication services to its users.

I love this.

After reading Tim Bray’s post about Sun’s implementation of OpenID, the wheels in my mind began turning. He explains that Sun’s OpenID is only for Sun employees. Ergo: Sun OpenID == Sun employee.

Om Malik writes about Web 2.0 and antiquated businesses. Replace the word “business” with “nonprofit” and the mind reels:

Don’t get me wrong. No stretch of imagination could conjure Moo into a technology business. No, no. Moo is a technology-enabled business. Forget patent-protected code (thank you, Justices of The Supreme Court!) or over-designed hardware. Moo is the epitome of a business that has truly harnessed Web2.0.

Yessir. The Web is the foundation.