Grantmaking foundations are being taught an important lesson, but most of them don't seem inclined to learn it. The Tea Party movement has shown that building political power is of much greater consequence to the causes foundations care about than is their support for innovative and scaled-up programs in the nonprofit sector.

Although foundations desperately want to be "more impactful" than current practices allow, they generally settle for becoming more effective at what they already do. Rarely does any truly fresh approach to grantmaking get serious consideration. And in spite of this being a "teachable moment," too few funders fully recognize the importance of government and even fewer are willing to talk about power. Unfortunately, that has become the essential conversation.

The import of government for foundations has long been clear to some funders, many of whom have pushed themselves and their peers to provide greater support for critical public policies and programs. Today's challenge to philanthropy, however, goes far beyond its support for advocacy and an often narrow focus on parochial interests.

Indeed, what is at stake today is nothing less than who has the power to define government's role with respect to the common good. The lesson being taught foundations is that without the power to implement advocated policies, problems of concern to philanthropy will rapidly grow more complex and intractable.

Most of the troubles we face as a society, and that foundations seek to address, reflect failures of government to effectively moderate the forces that created those problems in the first place. Whether those problems originate in the failures of the market and the sometimes-destructive behavior of corporations, in the poor performance of public and private institutions, or in the dysfunctional conduct of individuals, governments can and should do something about them.

Markets and corporations need effective regulation to ensure the orderly conduct of business and to provide public protections. Institutions need leadership, accountability, and resources to promote the public interest. And individuals can both be encouraged and helped to behave in their own and society's best interests. Government is a critical player in each of these realms and an essential partner to philanthropies that seek to address problems in all of them.

The current arguments for smaller, cheaper, and weaker government are, at least in part, a response to the perceived inadequacy of the public sector's efforts to provide effective protections and deliver programs and services efficiently. Yet, while some believe that the scope of laws, regulations, social programs, and taxes exceeds acceptable limits, the majority of Americans continue to want better safeguards and services; many are even willing to pay higher taxes to make sure that appropriate regulations and programs are available.

Simply advocating for that position and/or improved government responsiveness isn't sufficient in our current political reality. The momentum in the pro-/anti-government debate has swung toward the latter -- a development that hasn't happened spontaneously. It is, instead, the result of some funders, even a few foundations, understanding that it's all about power.

In funding citizen-engagement work and by using sympathetic media outlets, uber-wealthy conservatives like the Koch brothers, the folks at the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and many other like-minded philanthropists have helped build the Tea Party movement into an important force in our democracy.

The anti-government ideology advanced by those donors and activists holds profound negative consequence for most of organized philanthropy and its causes. But few foundations have come to a recognition that they ought to support a counterbalancing power, one that serves aggregated interests across the nonprofit world.

Because foundations and charities are prohibited from partisan political spending, some content themselves with efforts to strengthen democratic participation. Few, however, really focus on it. But while electoral politics appropriately remains a forbidden zone for tax-exempt entities, foundations are free to encourage robust civic engagement and to support and develop social movements in pursuit of the common good.

Unfortunately, most of philanthropy steers clear of such efforts, even though the exercise of political power today is undercutting work long championed and supported by foundations.

[...]

We might not like to admit it, but the momentum behind tax cuts and public-sector retrenchment is unlikely to fade unless foundations undertake a new kind of grantmaking, one that goes beyond funding services and advocacy and aims explicitly at building power in support of a government committed to, and capable of, taking action on the myriad problems that confront us -- including rational and humane approaches to deficit reduction.

This will require direct organizing as well as efforts to educate the public about vital government programs and regulations that work. We need significant investment in projects that mobilize the grassroots. To support such movement-building, we also need additional funding for public policy work, for advocacy, for mass media, and for social networking campaigns.

Even though they provide less than 2 percent of total nonprofit sector revenues, foundations can play a unique, some might even say a heroic, role in energizing and mobilizing the millions upon millions of Americans involved in charitable work to stand up for their concerns through greater engagement in our democratic process. It is time for philanthropy to step up and help build popular political power for the common good.

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For the past two years, innovation contests have swept the country in a contagious craze, from Washington, D.C., to New York City, from San Francisco to Portland. Even first lady Michelle Obama got in on the action in March when she launched Apps for Healthy Kids as part of her campaign aimed to end childhood obesity within a generation.

In the age of Government 2.0, these catchy contests thrive due to a simple concept: To improve transparency, governments release hundreds of public-sector data sets, which developers then use to create Web-based applications. The best apps win big prizes. The public reaps the rewards of new apps that help them get around New York's subway system or navigate historical sites in the nation's capital.

On the surface, it seems like a win-win situation for all. But local buzz only lasts for so long, especially when a winning app doesn't always lead to a long-term government contract.

...the contests let city officials advertise transparency efforts and collaborate with citizens to address local issues. But because applications submitted in the competitions don't go through normal procurement channels, [Jay] Nath [manager of innovation for San Francisco] said, cities cannot use them as "official" apps. That means the shelf life of the winning app is left in the hands of the developers.

Just ask Brian Sobel, one of the three developers of the website iLive.at, where users can learn about a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., by plugging in an address. After winning the top individual prize for the district's first Apps for Democracy contest, he remembers meeting the mayor and attending press conferences. But eventually the hoopla died down. And without any incentives to keep the data up-to-date, he said, the free site has "gone kind of stale."

"We produced something, and we were part of this whole to-do," he said. "That was great. But there was no next step, so we all went back to our gainfully employed ventures. They could have asked us to buy a next phase of the project, but they didn't because they didn't have the infrastructure set up for that."

At the time, I left this note in Google Reader:

Are these contests done in concert with other initiatives (like CDBGs)? Are they engaging horizontally (community groups and social orgs) or just vertically (coders)? I'm at the periphery of the pubdata movement, but I fail to see broad engagement (tongue in cheek: as measured by nobody asking me about it)

Are these contests structured (do a funding round of engagement, then coding, then deployment and evaluation)? Do the contest questions/project descriptions talk about how the project was designed and the structure for which it will be completed or is the focus just on the final product? As someone who designs and evaluates capacity building grants, I've found greater success by scrutinizing the workplan more than the impact statement. Of course, overpromising and underfunding is no surprise in the social sector.

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The City of Boston uses a Lagan CRM system to create and track tickets and cases. To feed that ticketing system the city offers constituent services in person, via telephone (the meeting was held next to the call center which had ~10 agents active at the time), via the web, and through the smartphone apps. The Lagan system tracks 150-170 types of tickets, but Boston currently exposes only 6 of them through Open311 API (streetlights, potholes, graffiti, 2 types of snow removal, and other); this decision was explained as being driven by the UI needs of the official smartphone apps. The Open311 system is only a data bridge into the Lagan CRM and thus won't support any additional metadata or external decisioning (this dismissed a Code for America fellow's suggestion of voting on tickets).

The API is not currently available. The city estimates 2 - 3 weeks until they have a test server up, and from there they will evaluate whether to give applications access to the live system. The test server will be a sandbox that is either refreshed every 24 hours, has new data streamed to it, or may simulate workflows (e.g. submit, review, comment, close)---it was still in discussion.

In addition to the Open311 API, the city also offers data dumps of its entire ticketing system, offset by 24 hours. Unfortunately, those data dumps don't include the channel through which they were inputted, e.g. it's not recorded whether the ticket came thru Open311, telephone, web or in person. This is allegedly through the city's Data Hub / Data Dashboard, but I can't find it.

The City of Boston is taking a more deliberate and restrictive approach than MassDOT/MBTA in opening up their data, though CRM tickets are clearly different than bus/train route and dispatch data. The university researcher's (Ben Clark) use case for the data was spot-on: determining who is utilizing these smartphone tools, and importantly who isn't. Time will tell how the influence of outside software developers will push the city's implementation---and how will it effect less-technology focused solutions.

I was really excited to meet the Code for America crew as they are bringing a lot of excitement and energy to the gov data scene. I did get the impression that they were unprepared for managing institutional forces: there was a question about why the city couldn't devote more IT resources to the project that were answered with some allusions to Dilbert (without acknowledging that the current capital budget was probably set 14 months ago). Open311 doesn't seem like CfA's primary focus in Boston, but if this was their first City of Boston meeting, I think they learned a lot.

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All three deficit reduction proposals from the blue ribbon panels would eliminate the deduction in its current form.

One of the panels, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform would give taxpayers a tax credit worth 12 percent of their donations — but only if they contributed 2 percent or more of their adjusted gross income to charity.

Another plan proposed by a panel of three liberal-leaning organizations — Demos, the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation — is similar, suggesting a 25 percent tax credit for all charitable gifts.

The plan philanthropic experts find the most intriguing, however, comes from the Bipartisan Policy Center panel, which suggests borrowing a system of subsidizing nonprofits similar to the one used in Britain, called Gift Aid.

Under that proposal, nonprofits could claim a tax credit worth 15 percent of any charitable gift they received, effectively giving the donor a partial match. For instance, if a donor makes a charitable gift of $100 to a charity, the charity could apply to receive an additional $15 from the government.

I'm partial to this proposal from the Partnership for Philanthropic Planning (via Gift Hub):

For many years, PPP has suggested a conceptual alternative to the charitable deduction. PPP’s plan addresses the current goal of simplifying the tax code, while supporting a robust nonprofit sector that can compensate for reduced government services. Rather than a deduction from income, we propose that charitable contributions be treated as an adjustment from gross income. Since the donor never receives the benefit of income which is contributed to charity, the amount contributed should be considered unavailable for taxation at all. Far from the “tax expenditure” that the [National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform] suggests, allowing charitable contributions as adjustments to income would provide a fair and accessible incentive for charitable giving to all Americans.

And of course, don't forget the background context of rising inequity, a lapsed estate tax, and the models of individually-determined giving versus democratically-determined (ostensibly) government grants and earmarks.

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Even those sympathetic to subsidies do not grasp just how prevalent they have been in American history. From the days of Washington, Jefferson and Madison through those of Andrew Jackson to the mid-nineteenth century, enormous printing and postal subsidies were the order of the day. The need for them was rarely questioned, which is perhaps one reason they have been so easily overlooked. They were developed with the intention of expanding the quantity, quality and range of journalism–and they were astronomical by today’s standards. If, for example, the United States had devoted the same percentage of its GDP to journalism subsidies in 2009 as it did in the 1840s, we calculate that the allocation would have been $30 billion. In contrast, the federal subsidy last year for all of public broadcasting, not just journalism, was around $400 million.

The experience of America’s first century demonstrates that subsidies of the sort we suggest pose no threat to democratic discourse; in fact, they foster it. Postal subsidies historically applied to all newspapers, regardless of viewpoint. Printing subsidies were spread among all major parties and factions. Of course, some papers were rabidly partisan, even irresponsible. But serious historians of the era are unanimous in holding that the extraordinary and diverse print culture that resulted from these subsidies built a foundation for the growth and consolidation of American democracy. Subsidies made possible much of the abolitionist press that led the fight against slavery.

Our research suggests that press subsidies may well have been the second greatest expense of the federal budget of the early Republic, following the military. This commitment to nurturing and sustaining a free press was what was truly distinctive about America compared with European nations that had little press subsidy, fewer newspapers and magazines per capita, and far less democracy. This history was forgotten by the late nineteenth century, when commercial interests realized that newspaper publishing bankrolled by advertising was a goldmine, especially in monopolistic markets. Huge subsidies continued to the present, albeit at lower rates than during the first few generations of the Republic. But today’s direct and indirect subsidies–which include postal subsidies, business tax deductions for advertising, subsidies for journalism education, legal notices in papers, free monopoly licenses to scarce and lucrative radio and TV channels, and lax enforcement of anti-trust laws–have been pocketed by commercial interests even as they and their minions have lectured us on the importance of keeping the hands of government off the press. It was the hypocrisy of the current system–with subsidies and government policies made ostensibly in the public interest but actually carved out behind closed doors to benefit powerful commercial interests–that fueled the extraordinary growth of the media reform movement over the past decade.

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“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly,” the [Federal Supreme Court noted in Mapp v. Ohio], “than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.”

I also just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (which you can download free under Creative Commons).

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There is an additional paper size, to which the name “government-letter” was given by the IEEE Printer Working Group: the 8 in × 10½ in (203.2 mm × 266.7 mm) paper that is used in the United States for children’s writing. It was prescribed by Herbert Hoover when he was Secretary of Commerce to be used for U.S. government forms, apparently to enable discounts from the purchase of paper for schools. In later years, as photocopy machines proliferated, citizens wanted to make photocopies of the forms, but the machines did not generally have this size paper in their bins. Ronald Reagan therefore had the U.S. government switch to regular letter size (8½ in × 11 in). The 8 in × 10½ in size is still commonly used in spiral-bound notebooks and the like.

An alternative explanation in the past for the difference between “government size” (as government-letter size was referred to at the time) and letter size paper was that the slightly smaller sheet used less paper, and therefore saved the government money in both paper and filing space. However, when Reagan prescribed the change to letter size, it was commonly stated that U.S. paper manufacturers had standardized their production lines for letter size, and were meeting government orders by trimming ½” each from two sides of letter-size stock; thus the government was allegedly paying more for its smaller paper size before Reagan abolished it. The different paper size also reportedly restricted the government’s ability to take advantage of modular office furniture designs, common in the 1980s, whose cabinets were designed for letter size paper.

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