Philanthropy for Hackers

My advise: Try to not murder everyone while you build your tehno-utopia? Pretty please?

As the executive director of a tech nonprofit (https://www.stellar.org/), this is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about. Certain problems need scalable, open, global public infrastructure, like global open system for identity, money, healthcare, energy research, climate data, etc. Unfortunately, the current model of foundation philanthropy doesn't fund these kinds of solutions well because the current charity funding model focuses on funding "programmatic services" (programs that service recipients directly). To put in more familiar HN terminology, foundations prefer to fund front-end services rather than back-end infrastructure. But Wikipedia cannot exist without http. And who funds the development of http-like projects?

With the growth of the Internet and the open-source movement, we, the tech industry, understand why open protocols and technology are crucial to providing access and opportunity to more people. I am a big believer in for-profit companies too, but there are certain things in tech that should be executed with a more philanthropic bent. When asked why Stellar.org is nonprofit, decentralized and open-source, we reply, "Can you imagine if the Internet had been owned by a for-profit company?

The thesis of Parker's post in the WSJ really struck a chord with me. There is a unique role that technologists can to play in philanthropy. We understand infrastructure and we should be funding the big tech bets that the world needs. Our industry is full of the unreasonable optimists - let's take that optimism and invest in an unbelievable future:)

Of possible interest: Students Helping Honduras http://ceciskids.org Organization takes kids off the streets of one of the most dangerous countries in the world (highest murder rate according to UN report released in 2014; ~90.4 homicides per 100,000 people) and gives them a home, proper food and education.

Also, org. is always looking for teacher volunteers. Please feel free to pass this along to anyone whom you think might be interested in helping. Cheers!

Disclosure: I was born in Honduras and am a sponsor/donor

It is a good article. I particularly relate to the focus on “hackable problems”. The approach we took when we started was identifying areas in the international development sector where the combined expertise of a team of software hackers and people working in international development could make a real difference, working as a non-profit social enterprise.

Initially we focused mostly on knowledge sharing and transparency on how funds were spent, where the sector was deeply into paper report publishing as an acceptable output of major investments. We call these “cover your ass reports”, as they are primarily an instrument for the project owner to give to the donor/investor to show that they didn’t squander the money and used in an audit. Often the reports show no such thing, but the metrics used and the way people use data is often so poor that the only thing you can show is the money was spent.

As an extent of this we saw that we could make a big difference in providing better data collection and presentation systems. We took over a prototype field data collection system from a US NGO working in water and sanitation. They wanted to open source the software, which we helped them do, and we took over the continued development and running of it as a service. Our first work was primarily with western NGOs working in countries in Africa and South Asia, but soon our systems started becoming part of the infrastructure management of these countries. Projects to implement this is often a collaboration between a UN organisation, like UNICEF or UNDP, the country government and a number of local and regional NGOs. We have the whole rural drinking water supply systems for several countries mapped using this now, and a dozen or so in the works.

This is where the open source aspect what we do becomes really important we think. We are being asked to implement infrastructure and resource tracking systems for things like a country’s bridges, fishing stock, drinking water supply and schools to name a few. We believe that these IT systems will become nearly as important infrastructure as the things they are tracking. We have started to see that this is understood by some of the countries we work with, as they are asking for the data to be housed in their jurisdiction. We think also that it is important that these are open source systems, as when these systems are successful they are going to remain for decades in production. And many of these countries have no governmental IT infrastructure to talk about at all at this point and we think that by having governmental infrastructure running on open source software you have better control of it. You can choose where it should be run, by whom and you have the possibility to have control over it.

In the article he talks about getting political. Actually building software systems for governments to use, based on open source principles, trying to build the best thing we can offer them, is in my experience a way more politically powerful tool than anything else political I think we could have ever engaged in. With a dozen countries investing heavily with us in our systems and dozens more knocking on the door I think it is safe to say that open source software can be both deeply politically engaging in a positive way, satisfying to work with and have a real world impact which is impressive.

Well put. I'm happy to face the frailties of old age if I can just spend the hear-and-now trying to do something that matters for people less fortunate than me.

If we ever got to a point where some people had greatly extended their lives and/or eliminated death for themselves whilst others still faced premature death from a basic lack of the necessities of life, well then, we'd be an even more narcissistic race than I originally thought.