Posted 2 years, 4 months ago in the wee hours by oso
Last week the Salzburg Global Seminar organized two back-to-back meetings which brought together passionate enthusiasts in the field of new media for three days, and then traditional funders of media development for another three days. Josh Goldstein of UNICEF Innovation and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi each blogged about the gathering. There has also been a flurry of blogging by Anne Nelson and Susan Moeller on the Strengthening Independent Media blog.
During the first meeting I gave a presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years. I have posted the full presentation over at Idea Lab, but a couple excerpts:
This is the point I want to emphasize today. Citizen media is still a new field and most funders don’t like to invest in a new field until they feel that they have sufficiently researched it. The research is costly. Big-name academics like Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Zittrain and are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with self-evident (though barely comprehensible) conclusions, including that there is an online participation gap and that generative technologies are good.
This money can be and should be invested more effectively.
At Rising Voices the micro-grants we award are so small (between $2,000 – $5,000) that we are able to easily invest in high-risk projects that may seem doomed for failure. One such project was “Think Build Change Salone“, which aimed to develop an internship program to place Sierra Leonean youth (including ex-combatants) at select development NGO’s and then pay them a small stipend to blog about their experiences. It would have been an ambitious project anywhere in the world, but we must remember that at the time of the project Sierra Leone was ranked the least developed country in the world, and is still recovering from a brutal decade-long civil war.
In the end, the project did no pan out. But from a funder’s perspective, Vickie’s fascinating report about what went wrong and what went right during the project is absolutely worth the $2,000 we invested. Rather than funding costly research (almost always by western academics) about the challenges to local development, it is better to invest in high risk, local projects and learn from the challenges they encounter.
(As a brief aside, I’ll mention that three other high-risk projects we have invested in are 1) Ceasefire Liberia, which has trained avid bloggers in Monrovia, 2) Nomad Green, which has established a committed group of environmental citizen journalists in Mongolia, and 3) Drop-In Center, which has helped give voice and credibility to Ukraine’s nascent harm reduction movement. All three should have failed, but succeeded because of the passion of their coordinators and participants.)
9) Have fun
Mikel Maron works on international outreach for OpenStreetMap, an open-source Wikipedia-like version of Google Maps. He organizes events in Palestine, India, Kenya, and elsewhere to show citizens how to use basic GPS devices to build open-licensed maps of their communities. But he calls these events “mapping parties” rather than “workshops” our “capacity building events.” The point is to have a good time, and to develop some valuable information in the process.
I know this sounds like something a young person feels compelled to include in his presentation, but the reality is that the return on investment for fun is extremely high and under-recognized by funders. One of the most difficult activities to fundraise for at Global Voices is our annual summit where our tireless volunteer authors and translators from around the world come together once a year for discussions, strategizing, workshops, and most importantly, to have fun. A couple years ago we asked our volunteer authors what incentivizes them to work so hard on Global Voices without receiving pay. A few of them mentioned the importance of giving greater voice and representation to the citizens of their countries. Others pointed to the benefits of belonging to a global, supportive community which values free speech and tolerance. But just about everyone said they hoped to be invited to the annual Global Voices Summit. If a funder is willing to invest in three days of fun, the return on that investment is a year of valuable content from volunteers based all over the world.
As a constant confrencer, do you find it hard to...
Using
I think these are some great points, and I’d be curious to hear what sort of reactions you got from the Salzburg crowd (particularly from the funders).
However, I’m worried that you’re creating a false dichotomy. In my opinion, the best projects (and the ones that are the most fun) incorporate both theory and practical implementation. It doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition, and I think what will be most valuable will be for researchers and implementers to be informing each others’ work. While funders should definitely look at different models and create different metrics for measuring impact, the empirical research that’s the foundation of good policy is still important.
On a selfish note, I’m most in favor of point #5 (though I think you sell yourself short saying that all you do is act as a buffer btwn projects and bureaucracy). I’m quite familiar with and frustrated by the bureaucrazy, as I like to call it, that makes it so hard to do the stuff that’s going to make a difference. Unfortunately, it’s not going anywhere. Reporting requirements are imposed on foundations by the government (and if you think foundation reporting requirements are obnoxious try dealing with a federal grant) so I’m afraid there’s not much convincing of foundation officials that can be done, even if they’re on board with you, that’s going to alleviate that issue very much. It helps to have professionals around who are a) committed to the causes you’re working on, and b) willing to do the admin work so that people like you can focus on the important stuff.
You can also try and make the reporting process work for you. For example, at Berkman we’re thinking about making the grant reports more of a reflective process as the project is ongoing so that we can document our mode, our decision-making process, what works for us and what doesn’t, etc. That way we’ve got something at the end that hopefully helps us refine our practice rather than just an afterthought list of all the stuff we did over the course of the project (which I’m sure no one at the foundations read before it goes into some file somewhere).
Anyway, I’m curious to hear what reactions you got in Salzburg and whether you know of any foundations who are already doing the innovative funding that you’d like to see more of.
(Oh, and one small clarification, which I feel I should point out since I’m in a position to do so: Jonathan Zittrain didn’t receive any foundation funding to write the paper you’ve linked to above, and the projects he is focused on now–Herdict and StopBadware–are practical applications of his theory, not strict research projects (though there are academic elements to both); unfortunately, neither one of those projects are funded by foundations.)
Using
Hey David, thank you for sharing this and the whole presentation!
Using
(Yeah, the Canada thing is weird, maybe I unwittingly downloaded Psiphon or something)
You said: “In my view funders have so far spent disproportionately on research rather than implementation.” But again, you’re pitting one against the other. I guess I only have anecdotal evidence and can only speak for the Berkman Center so take that for what it’s worth, but we rarely get funded just to write a paper. A paper might be one output of a project, but we’re also building and deploying tools, making policy recommendations, building and sustaining human networks, spinning off organizations (like Global Voices, for example) fostering collaboration, etc. The Jenkins paper you link to comes out of a larger project that has many more components than just that paper. From my interactions with funders, I don’t get the sense that they want to be funding simply research, but they recognize that it’s a necessary component of understanding the problems they’re trying to address and is therefore valuable.
It sounds like we agree on the basics here, so I guess the question is how do we influence funders to incorporate some of your suggestions (starting with #5!), or at least get them to notice it’s a problem? The first thing would be, I’d imagine, talking to them about it. I’m not sure if you have. I suspect they’re more on board with you than you give credit for. (Begs the question: did you raise this with any of them in Salzburg? Why wasn’t the presentation made to them instead of the people who are already on board?) In your opinion, what’s the single-most important actionable thing they could do today to help alleviate this problem? How do we connect on-the-ground implementers with researchers to share experiences, etc? Maybe we pitch more hybrid projects incorporating diverse partners? Dunno, just thinking out loud.
PS: After just enduring an audit of a federal grant where I literally got nickel and dimed (“why is this person’s salary off by 10 cents?”) I gotta say: God bless Troy from USAID. Talk about tilting at windmills. He and I should get a beer.