Talent to Spare: The Untapped Potential for Attracting, Developing and Retaining Talent as an Intermediary in the Social Impact Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network (GSEN) and the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt: “…Both social entrepreneurs and the organisations that support them depend on finding and retaining top talent. Although the social impact sector is growing – with more and more university courses focusing on creating positive impact and an increasingly competitive job market – the sector might soon experience a flow of talented people leaving, frustrated with an unhealthy work-life balance or an underinvestment into culture and talent development. Awareness, action and advocacy are needed now….

Potential Solutions: …To design and implement an inclusive, overarching talent strategy that attracts talent with competitive non-financial compensation, an appealing employer brand and innovative job interviews; develops talent with a range of learning opportunities, transparent policies and need-based structures; and retains talent by cultivating a caring culture, creating awareness of employee well-being and providing clear exit strategies….

The investment made into the individuals that shape the social impact sector will determine the amount of change the sector creates in the future. Openness about talent challenges, peer-to-peer support around talent management and sharing of resources are necessary measures to contextualise the “popularisation of purpose” trend and build a healthy sector….(More)”.

The UN is using ethereum’s technology to fund food for thousands of refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joon Ian Wong at Quartz: “The United Nations agency in charge of food aid—often billed as the largest aid organization in the world—is betting that an ethereum-based blockchain technology could be the key to delivering aid efficiently to refugees while slashing the costs of doing so.

The agency, known as the World Food Programme (WFP), is the rare example of an organization that has delivered tangible results from its blockchain experiments—unlike the big banks that have experimented with the technology for years.

The WFP says it has transferred $1.4 million in food vouchers to 10,500 Syrian refugees in Jordan since May, and it plans to expand. “We need to bring the project from the current capacity to many, many, more,” says Houman Haddad, the WFP executive leading the project. “By that I mean 1 million transactions per day.”

Haddad, in Mexico to speak at the Ethereum Foundation’s annual developer conference, hopes to expand the UN project, called Building Blocks, from providing payment vouchers for one camp to providing vouchers for four camps, covering 100,000 people, by next January. He hopes to attract developers and partners to the UN project from his conference appearance, organized by the foundation, which acts as a steward for the technical development of the ethereum protocol….

The problem of internal bureaucratic warfare, of course, isn’t limited to the UN. Paul Currion, who co-founded Disberse, another blockchain-based aid delivery platform, lauds the speediness of the WFP effort. “It’s fantastic for proving this can work in the field,” he says. But “we’ve found that the hard work is integrating blockchain technology into existing organizational processes—we can’t just hand people a ticket and expect them to get on the high-speed blockchain train; we also need to drive with them to the station,” he says….(More)”.

 

Spotting the Patterns: 2017 Trends in Design Thinking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andy Hagerman at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Design thinking: It started as an academic theory in the 60’s, a notion of starting to look at broader types of challenges with the intention and creativity that designers use to tackle their work. It gained widespread traction as a product design process, has been integrated into culture change initiatives of some of the world’s most important organizations and governments, and has been taught in schools kindergarten to grad school. It’s been celebrated, criticized, merged with other methodologies, and modified for nearly every conceivable niche.

Regardless of what side of those perspectives you fall on, it’s undeniable that design thinking is continuing to grow and evolve. Looking across the social innovation landscape today, we see a few patterns that, taken together, suggest that social innovators continue to see great promise in design thinking. They are working to find ways to make it yield real performance gains for their organizations and clients.

From design thinking to design doing

Creative leaders have moved beyond increasing people’s awareness of design thinking to actively seeking concrete opportunities for using it. One of the principal drivers of this shift has been the need to demonstrate value and return on investment from design-thinking initiatives—something people have talked about for years. (Ever heard the question, “Is design thinking just the next fad?”) Social sector organizations, in particular, stand to benefit from the shift from design thinking to design doing. Timelines for getting things built in the social sector are often slow, due to legitimate constraints of responsibly doing impact work, as well as to legacy practices and politics. As long as organizations use design thinking responsibly and acknowledge the broader systems in which new ideas live, some of the emerging models can help them move projects along more quickly and gain greater stakeholder participation….

Building cultures around design thinking

As design thinking has proliferated, many organizational leaders have moved from replicating the design thinking programs of academic institutions like the Stanford d.School or foundational agencies like IDEO to adapting the methodology to their own goals, external environments, and organizational cultures.

One organization that has particularly inspired us is Beespace, a New York City-based social-impact foundation. Beespace has designed a two-year program that helps new organizations not only get off the ground, but also create the conditions for breakthrough innovation. To create this program, which combines deep thinking, impact assessment, and rapid prototyping, Beespace’s leadership asked itself what tools it would need, and came up with a mix that included not just design thinking, but also disciplines of behavioral science and systems thinking, and tools stemming from emotional intelligence and theory of change….

Empowering the few to shift the many

We have seen a lot of interest this year in “train the trainer” programs, particularly from organizations realizing the value of developing their internal capabilities to reduce reliance on outside consultants. Such development often entails focusing on the few people in the organization who are highly capable of instigating major change, as opposed to spreading awareness among the many. It takes time and resources, but the payoff is well worth it from both cultural and operational perspectives….(More)”.

Hacking the Holocaust: Remembering the data pirates, forgers, and social engineers who saved thousands.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Ava Ex Machina: “…Within the tech industry in particular, we work every day to build systems that ingest more and more of our personal information that while it might be used to sell us products, can also increasingly be used to index and endanger our most vulnerable communities. Software engineers are often unaware of how the systems they build and maintain can either help us live better lives, or be used to commit repeats of history’s most horrifying atrocities. But as Holocaust history also shows us, engineers and hackers can use their skills to take direct action too.

During that same Nazi-punching era of WWII, ordinary people used their abilities and access to proprietary systems, data, and information security knowledge to refuse to be complacent, and instead sabotage the Axis to save lives. It’s my hope that sharing some stories of those who “hacked” the systems that were meant to execute the atrocities of the Holocaust will help us remember that there are always more ways to resist.

René Carmille — was a punch card computer expert and comptroller general of the French Army, who later would head up the Demographics Department of the French National Statistics Service. As quickly as IBM worked with the Nazis to enable them to use their punch card computer systems to update census data to find and round up Jewish citizens, Rene and his team of double-agents worked just as fast to manipulate their data to undermine their efforts.

The IEEE newspaper, The Institute, describes Carmille as being an early ethical hacker: “Over the course of two years, Carmille and his group purposely delayed the process by mishandling the punch cards. He also hacked his own machines, reprogramming them so that they’d never punch information from Column 11 [which indicated religion] onto any census card.” His work to identify and build in this exploit saved thousands of Jews from being rounded up and deported to death camps….(More)”.

Does protest really work in cosy democracies?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Crawshaw at LSE Impact Blog: “…If it is possible for peaceful crowds to force the collapse of the Berlin Wall or to unseat a Mubarak, how easy it should it be for protesters to persuade a democratically elected leader to retreat from “mere” bad policy? In truth, not easy at all. Two million marched in the UK against the Iraq War in 2003 – and it made not a blind bit of difference with Tony Blair’s determination to proceed with a war that the UN Secretary-General described as illegal. Blair was re-elected, two years later.

After the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017, millions took part in the series of Women’s Marches in the United States and around the world. It seemed – it was – a powerful defining moment. And yet, at least in the short-term, those remarkable protests were water off the presidential duck’s back. His response was mockery. In some respects, Trump could afford to mock. A man who has received 63 million votes is in a stronger position than the unelected leader who has to threaten or use violence to stay in power.

And yet.

One thing that protest in an authoritarian and a democratic context have in common is that the impact of protest – including delayed impact – remains uncertain, both for those who protest and those who are protested against.

Vaclav Havel argued that it was worth “living in truth” – speaking truth to power – even without any certainty of outcome. “Those that say individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.” In that context, what is perhaps most unacceptable is to mock those who take risks, and seek change. Lord Charles Powell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, for example explained to the umbrella protesters in Hong Kong in 2013 that they were foolish and naive. They should, he told them, learn to live with the “small black cloud” of anti-democratic pressures from Beijing. The protesters failed to heed Powell’s complacent message. In the words of Joshua Wong, on his way back to jail earlier in 2017: “You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds.”

Scepticism and failure are linked, as the Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz made clear in a powerful video which helped trigger the uprising in 2011. The 26-year-old declared: ‘”Whoever says it is not worth it because there will only be a handful or people, I want to tell him, “You are the reason for this.” Sitting at home and just watching us on the news or Facebook leads to our humiliation.’ The video went viral. Millions went out. The rest was history.

Even in a democracy, that same it-can’t-be-done logic sucks us in more often, perhaps, than we realize….(More)”.

Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Summary from an independent review, carried out by Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti: “Increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring major social and economic benefits to the UK. With AI, computers can analyse and learn from information at higher accuracy and speed than humans can. AI offers massive gains in efficiency and performance to most or all industry sectors, from drug discovery to logistics. AI is software that can be integrated into existing processes, improving them, scaling them, and reducing their costs, by making or suggesting more accurate decisions through better use of information.

It has been estimated that AI could add an additional USD $814 billion (£630bn) to the UK economy by 2035, increasing the annual growth rate of GVA from 2.5 to 3.9%.

Our vision is for the UK to become the best place in the world for businesses developing and deploying AI to start, grow and thrive, to realise all the benefits the technology offers….

Key factors have combined to increase the capability of AI in recent years, in particular:

  • New and larger volumes of data
  • Supply of experts with the specific high level skills
  • Availability of increasingly powerful computing capacity. The barriers to achieving performance have fallen significantly, and continue to fall.

To continue developing and applying AI, the UK will need to increase ease of access to data in a wider range of sectors. This Review recommends:

  • Development of data trusts, to improve trust and ease around sharing data
  • Making more research data machine readable
  • Supporting text and data mining as a standard and essential tool for research.

Skilled experts are needed to develop AI, and they are in short supply. To develop more AI, the UK will need a larger workforce with deep AI expertise, and more development of lower level skills to work with AI. …

Increasing uptake of AI means increasing demand as well as supply through a better understanding of what AI can do and where it could be applied. This review recommends:

  • An AI Council to promote growth and coordination in the sector
  • Guidance on how to explain decisions and processes enabled by AI
  • Support for export and inward investment
  • Guidance on successfully applying AI to drive improvements in industry
  • A programme to support public sector use of AI
  • Funded challenges around data held by public organisations.

Our work has indicated that action in these areas could deliver a step-change improvement in growth of UK AI. This report makes the 18 recommendations listed in full below, which describe how Government, industry and academia should work together to keep the UK among the world leaders in AI…(More)”

colony

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About Colony: “We believe that the most successful organizations of the future will be open.

Openness is not about open plan offices or ‘20% time’. It’s about how decisions get made, how labor is divided, and who controls the purse strings.

In an open organization, you’re empowered to do the work you care about, not just what you’re told to do. Decisions are made openly and transparently. Influence is earned by consistently demonstrating just how damn good you are. It means everyone’s incentives are aligned, because ownership is open to all.

And that means opportunity is open to all, and a new world of possibility opens up.

Colony is infrastructure for the future of work: self-organizing companies that run via software, not paperwork….

Infrastructure should be impartial and reliable.

One organization should not be beholden to, or have to trust another, in order to confidently conduct their business.

That’s why the Colony protocol is built as open source smart contracts on the Ethereum network….(More)”

Civil, the blockchain-based journalism marketplace, is building its first batch of publications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at NiemanLab: “Civil is an idea that has started to turn heads, both among investors and within journalism circles. .. It’s also attracted its first publication, Popula, an alternative news and politics site run by journalist… Maria Bustillos, and joined by Sasha Frere-Jones, Ryan Bradley, Aaron Bady, and other big-name reporters. The site goes live in January.

Built on top of blockchain (the same technology that underpins bitcoin), Civil promises to use the technology to build decentralized marketplaces for readers and journalists to work together to fund coverage of topics that interest them, or for those in the public interest. Readers will support reporters using “CVL” tokens, Civil’s cryptocurrency, giving them a speculative stake in the currency that will — hopefully — increase in value as more people buy in over time. This, Civil, hopes will encourage more people to invest in the marketplaces, creating a self-sustaining system that will help fund more reporting…

Civil is also pitching its technology as a way for journalists around the world to fight censorship. Because all changes made to the blockchain are public, it’s impossible for third parties — governmental or otherwise — to change or alter the information on it without notice. “No one will be able to remove the record or prevent her organization from publishing what it wants to publish,” said Matthew Iles, Civil’s founder, referring to Popula. He also pointed to the other key parts of Civil’s value proposition, which include direct connections with readers, ease of access to financing, and a reduced reliance on third-party tech companies….(More)”.

The Unexpected Power of Google-Doc Activism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Cut: “Earlier this month, after major news outlets published detailed allegations of abuse and harassment by Harvey Weinstein, an anonymous woman created a public Google spreadsheet titled Shitty Media Men. It was a space for other anonymous women to name men in media who had exhibited bad behavior ranging from sleazy DMs to rape. There were just a few rules: “Please never name an accuser,” it said at the top. “Please never share this spreadsheet with a man.” The document was live for less than 48 hours, in which time it was shared with dozens of women — and almost certainly a few men.

The goal of the document was not public accountability, according to its creator. It was to privately warn other women, especially those who are not well connected in the industry, about which men in their profession to avoid. This is information women have always shared among themselves, at after-work drinks and in surreptitious chat messages, but the Google Doc sought to collect it in a way that transcended any one woman’s immediate social network. And because the goal was to occupy a kind of middle ground — not public, not quite private either — with little oversight, it made perfect sense that the information appeared as a Google Doc.

Especially in the year since the election, the shared Google Doc has become a familiar way station on the road to collective political action. Shared documents are ideal for collecting resources in one place quickly and easily, without gatekeepers, because they’re free and easy to use. They have been used to crowdsource tweets and hashtags for pushing back against Trump’s first State of the Union address, to spread information on local town-hall events with members of Congress, and to collect vital donation and evacuee info for people affected by the fires in Northern California. A shared Google Doc allows collaborators to work together across time zones and is easy to update as circumstances change.

But perhaps most notably, a Google Doc can be technically public while functionally quite private, allowing members of a like-minded community to reach beyond their immediate friends and collaborators while avoiding the abuse and trolling that comes with publishing on other platforms….(More)”.

Are you doing what’s needed to get the state to respond to its citizens? Or are you part of the problem?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Herringshaw at Making All Voices Count: ” …I’ve been reading over the incredibly rich and practically-orientated research and practice papers already on the Making All Voices Count website, and some of those coming out soon. There’s a huge amount of useful and challenging learning, and I’ll be putting out a couple of papers summarising some important threads later this year.

But as different civic tech and accountability actors prepare to come together in Brighton for Making All Voices Count’s final learning event later this week, I’m going to focus here on three things that really stood out and would benefit from the kind of ‘group grappling’ that such a gathering can best support. And I aim to be provocative!

  1. Improving state responsiveness to citizens is a complex business – even more than we realised – and a lot more complex than most interventions are designed to address. If we don’t address this complexity, our interventions won’t work. And that risks making things worse, not better.
  2. It’s clear we need to make more of a shift from narrow, ‘tactical’ approaches to more complex, systems-based ‘strategic’ approaches. Thinking is developing on how to do this in theory. But it’s not clear that our current institutional approaches will support, or even allow, a major shift in practice.
  3. So when we each look at our individual roles and those of our organisations, are we part of the solution, or part of the problem?

Let’s look at each of these in turn….(More)”