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aightforward and well structured be cautious about creating an insider culture this is a tough one because inside jokes and shared history and assumptions foster a sense of belonging but every in group requires an out group and having a lot of shared lore is unavoidably exclusionary it makes it harder for new people to join a strong culture will also inevitably move you towards demographic attitudinal narrowing rather than the reverse publish early publish often if you are building a plan or a proposal don t wait until it s flawless and polished to publish release it while it s still raw and half baked for folks from a non community background this will feel dangerous like you re leaving yourself vulnerable to criticism but in a community context it builds trust and empathy and will be understood as an invitation to collaborate do tons of signposting explain what you re trying to do and why sketch out how you imagine it may work be aware that volunteer time is different from paid time staff need to begin their public work as soon as they possibly can sooner and to build in lots of elapsed time for community discussion community members have other priorities school jobs families you can t expect them to make your work their top priority so you need to give them the biggest possible window in which to contribute write and publish a greater volume of stuff than you think you should this feels counter intuitive for people who ve been execs in traditional contexts because in an ordinary executive context the scarcest resource is time and so we get used to providing summaries bullet points upshots and key takeaways succinct good in a community context though comprehensive beats succinct this is only logical if you re writing for a wide diversity of stakeholders they re going to want to know a wide variety of stuff manually asking and answering questions is slow and laborious and splinters the information so you can t get it all in one place it s faster and better as much as possible to anticipate questions and answer them in your original communication assume good faith this is so easier said than done but for real assume good faith when someone asks a question and you think they are trolling it s entirely possible they are not maybe they are 15 years old or their english is imperfect or they have an impairment of some kind even if they are trolling there will always be onlookers who don t know it and who whatever the provocation will recoil if you are curt or unkind trolling also gives you an opportunity to equip onlookers with reasonable arguments that they can go on to use themselves bias towards transparency way way way more than you think you should i remember being taught change management back in the early 2000s our instructor beat into us that wherever there is a communications vacuum it will be filled by gossip and fear that is a million percent true and even more so in online communities gossip and fear grow out of power imbalances and information asymmetry which are to some degree unavoidable in distributed and voluntary groups and you need to compensate for that publishing everything also scales well because it equips everybody not just you and your inner circle to help explain what s going on note that if you re the boss it s insufficient to ask your staff to be transparent because as long as there is any risk of penalty for over publishing they will do the opposite you need to make it clear that nobody will ever be punished or shamed for being transparent then you need somebody to publish something they shouldn t have and then you need to not punish them only then will people begin to take you seriously about transparency when you change your mind say it publicly and explain why this is another one that s tough for execs from a non community context where we got trained to express more confidence than we felt but for real in a community context changing your mind and explaining why will not erode your credibility it will earn you more pay attention to people you disagree with in an ordinary work environment executives get insulated and protected from honest disagreement this is bad for them and for their company community work is different there is no shortage of people who will disagree with you loudly and repeatedly in public it s natural to avoid or ignore those people but if you do you re wasting an opportunity consider instead that they may occasionally be right categories collaboration consensus decisionmaking leadership social movements wikimedia foundation wikipedia workplace culture why i m working with tor and first look may 20 2015 so a year ago i left my position running the wikimedia foundation and began the process of figuring out what to do next spoiler not yet complete i had eaten slept and breathed nothing but wikimedia for seven years in effect i had embodied it that may sound unhealthy but it really wasn t there was lots of overlap between me and wikimedia and i didn t mind parking the stuff the job didn t need but it did mean that afterwards it made sense for me to do some self scrutiny and a kind of reset what had been actually me versus what was just the job and therefore what did i want to keep doing to discard or maybe revive the first thing i did was spend a month in iceland looking at volcanoes and lounging in hot springs that was glorious and i recommend it to anyone i d guessed by the time i got back i d be ready to dive into something but i was wrong and so i spent many months in a kind of lazy exploratory mode making risotto playing board games collecting together and synthesizing everything that is known about the gender gap in tech yes for real it s here travelling reading giving talks advising friends and simultaneously trying on possible futures like they were hats did i want to run an important cultural institution whose influence was starting to wane no how about a campus speaking tour no a start up with a difficult business model and some tough marketing challenges ha no my goal has always been the same i want to work on stuff i that s aiming to make the world better for ordinary people ii that is actually making the world better not just trying and failing and iii where i can personally be most useful i care about impact and scope and scale and effectiveness and so the question for me was pretty simple where were the biggest and most important problems that need help from someone like me gradually that answer started to come at least provisionally into focus by now we know that the internet shakeout is well underway with power and money increasingly consolidated among a tiny number of players as bruce schneier has famously said the internet s business model is surveillance most of the industry makes its money by tracking and stockpiling and monetizing information about its users of those who don t many have no obvious business model at all which is not reassuring that mountain of user data has turned out to be irresistible to state actors and other authorities who now find themselves able to know vastly more about the habits and activities of ordinary people than was ever previously imaginable this all sucks initially it looked like the internet would rebalance the scales and empower ordinary people but what s actually happening is the opposite so here s what i m going to do starting now and supported by the first look organisation i m beginning two projects related to anonymity privacy and free speech the first is narrowly focused on tor where i ll be developing a strategic plan for and with the tor project i m doing that because tor is important it s the most secure and widely used anonymity supporting software that we ve got tor is controversial because like phones and cars and banks its users include criminals but what matters more to me is its use by people like chelsea manning and edward snowden i want the organisation behind tor be as strong and effective as possible and so i am going to put some energy towards helping make that happen my second project will be to research the broader state of freedom tech all the tools and technologies that enable free speech free assembly and freedom of the press i want to figure out from a user centric perspective what kinds of freedom enabling technology products and services people have access to today what impediments they re running up against in trying to use them what functionality is needed that s entirely missing from the current landscape and what kinds of interventions would need to be made in order to start getting it built do we need easier faster funding and or other forms of support for individuals and tiny teams or bigger better funded organisations with expertise the space currently doesn t have what would move the needle that ll be my focus i m extremely grateful to pierre omidyar and first look for funding this and to the tor project for being so fabulously welcoming to me this is important work and i m super pleased to embark upon it tags anonymity first look free speech internet privacy surveillance tor wikimedia wikipedia categories internet what s wrong with restricted grants november 30 2014 i know a lot of people who re starting up new nonprofits and most don t have any prior experience with fundraising that was me back in 2007 when i took over the wikimedia foundation and so the purpose of this post is to share some of what i learned over the past eight years both from my own experience and from talking with other eds and with grantmakers i m focusing on restricted grants here because they re the most obvious and common funding source for nonprofits especially in their early stages of development restricted grants can be great grantmaking institutions fund work that s socially important that s coming out of organizations that may have no other access to funding and that is often risky or experimental they take chances on people and organizations with good ideas who may not yet have a track record that s necessary and important but restricted grants also pose some specific problems for the organizations seeking them this is well understood inside nonprofitland but isn t immediately obvious to people who re new to it here are the five main problems with restricted grants restricted grants can be administratively burdensome at the wmf we actively sought out restricted grants for about two years and afterwards accepted them only rarely we had two rules of thumb 1 we would only seek restricted grants from organizations we knew well and trusted to be good partners with us and 2 we would only seek restricted grants from organizations that were roughly our size by staff headcount or smaller why because restricted grants can be a lot of work particularly if the two organizations aren t well aligned big institutions have a big capacity to generate process forms to fill out procedures to follow hoops to jump through they have lots of staff time for meetings and calls and email exchanges they operate at a slower pace than smaller orgs and their processes are often inflexible people who work at grantmaking institutions have a responsibility to be careful with their organization s money and want to feel like they re adding value to the work the nonprofit is doing too often this results in nonprofits feeling burdened by expensive process as they procure and report on grants time that you want to spend achieving your mission instead risks getting eaten up by grantmakers administrative requirements restricted grants risk overwriting the nonprofit s priorities with the grantmakers priorities at the wmf we didn t accept grants for things we weren t planning to do anyway every year we developed our plan and then we would sometimes with funders we trusted seek funding for specific components of it with funders we trusted we were happy to get their input on our priorities and our plans for executing them but we weren t interested in advancing grantmakers goals except insofar as they overlapped with ours too often especially with young or small non profits i see the opposite if an organization is cash strapped all money looks good but it s not here s a crude example let s say the wmf knows it needs to focus its energy on mobile and a funder is interested in creating physical spaces for wikipedians to get together f2f for editing parties in that context agreeing with a funder to take money for the set up of editing cafes would pose a distraction from the mobile work the wmf would need to be doing an organization s capacity and energies are always limited and even grants that fully fund a new activity are necessarily drawing on executive and managerial attention as well as the organization s support functions human resources accounting admin legal pr if what a restricted grant funds isn t a near perfect fit with what the organization hopes to accomplish regardless of the funding you risk your organization getting pulled off track restricted grants pull focus from core work most grantmakers want their money to accomplish something new they re inclined to see their grants as seed money funding experiments and new activity most successful nonprofits though have important core work that needs to get done at the wmf for example that core work was the maintenance and continued availability of wikipedia the website which meant stuff like hosting costs costs of the ops team site security work and performance optimization and lawyers to defend against censorship because restricted grants are often aimed at funding new activity nonprofits that depend on them are incentivized to continually launch new activities and to abandon or only weakly support the ones that already exist they develop a bias towards fragmentation churn and divergence at the expense of focus and excellence an organization that funds itself solely or mainly through restricted grants risks starving its core restricted grants pull the attention of the executive director i am constantly recommending this excellent article by the nonprofit strategy consultancy bridgespan published in the stanford social innovation review its point is that the most effective and fastest growing nonprofits focus their fundraising efforts on a single type of funder e g crowdfunding or foundations or major donors that s counter intuitive because most people reflexively assume that diversification good stable low risk prudent those people though are wrong what works for e g retirement savings is not the same as what works for nonprofit revenue strategy why because organizations need to focus they can t be good at everything and that s as true when it comes to fundraising as it is with everything else it s also true for the executive director an executive director whose organization is dependent on restricted grants will find him or herself focused on grantmaking institutions which generally means attending conferences serving on juries and publicly positioning him or herself as a thought l...
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