http://www.prepressblogs.com/blog/entry.php?w=lions&e_id=213

By no means am I proposing the replacement of more traditional, expert-directed philanthropy by open source alternatives. Nor should bloggers replace the WSJ, or Wikipedia replace traditional encyclopaedias, Linux replace Vista (or should it!). Western democracy works by balancing dictatorship and the rule of the masses. What’s interesting is when formal and open source systems coexist.

You’re absolutely right that the voices of the knowledgeable are important. When designing any open source system (philanthropy or otherwise), we have to be careful that specialists should be recognised as such and listened to.

Generally, I think there’s a lot more than meets the eye to the power of diverse (non groupthinking) crowds and their ability to get it right. They don’t always (especially when they aren’t diverse and independent thinkers), of course.

There’s a lot more than meets the eye to truly open platforms. Firstly, when you give people the ability to self-organise around the esoteric issues they care about (the Long Tail effect) you get a wonderful diversity of causes and projects catered for - on any level, local to global. That’s just not possible at present - it’s just too difficult for well meaning individuals to set up (or even just find!) specialist foundations that particular esoteric issue. The way people understand and do philanthropy could be revolutionised as ordinary civilians, self empowered by open source initiatives like these, collaborate for local embellishment, citywide homelessness eradication, national arts promotion, and global poverty alleviation. We go from an age where people ‘do’ charity by setting up a £5 direct debit (which they then forget) to a single charity for a cause they barely care to follow, to one where they see a problem, find like-minded people, and do something about it.

Prize philanthropy is just the most convenient mechanism I can think of for that - the non-experts are presented with ‘faits accomplis’ and merely have to judge output (not have to be involved in the day to day running of the project or the commissioning of work - they wouldn’t know where to look). You also get a multitude of solutions to the problem (set out in the prize). They may not win (even if they are the best but got ignored by the panel of amateurs), but they won’t die quietly - they exist, and will in their own way benefit the world, once made public.

It’s (perhaps) not about the winning - it’s about the taking part…

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In terms of long term implications, this reminds me a lot of James Frey’s debacle with A Million Little Pieces. He lied, then lied about lying, then suffered the wrath of Oprah.

After this, the publishing and autobiography world was all a frenzy. A witch hunt went out to find similar perpetrators before the media could find them first. If anything was learned from Frey’s faux pas, it was that making the mistake wasn’t nearly as unforgiveable pretending not to have made the mistake in the first place. A number of autobiographies were tagged after that, but about a year and a half later, the hoopla has died down, Frey’s newest book is on display at Borders (likely with a disclaimer attached this time) and all is right in the world of Oprah again.

So what does this mean for the world of Philanthropy? Probably very little in the long term. We’ll all “ooh” and “ahh” over it for a while more on the blogs. Nonprofits will highlight their own examples of transparency and upfront-ness for a while, and then everything will settle again…relegating Karnofsky to nothing more than a pop culture anecdote and staff meeting story for what NOT to do.