Philanthropy for Hackers

I thought the same thing, 35 times...

Im not advocating sitting by idling. I just think it reflects our innate priorities when we put so much effort into extending our own lives when it doesn't take as much effort to greatly extend someone else's life who is less resourced than I am.

Um? Of the hundreds of millions suffering due to aging, most are desperately poor. Of the 100,000 who will die today, most are desperately poor. The wealthier people of the world have access to better palliative treatments, better support networks, or even treatments at all; they are marginally better off as they head towards a death they do not want. Aging is very much a health concern of the poor, and the poor suffer more from it. Doing something about that starts with creating the treatments.

Treatments to repair the root cause cell and tissue damage that leads to degeneration will be mass-produced infusions when realized, since everyone ages due to the same underlying reasons. They will not be very expensive, their price trajectory looking like that for drugs today, assuming the regulatory environment remains consistent over the decades ahead. Ultimately they will be as cheap as older medications are today. But to get to that point you have to start by creating the treatments.

As the CEO of a human rights and tech non-profit startup (https://www.secfirst.org) I've spent a number of years looking at the issue. I think the possibilities for applying technology to philanthropy are very high (we are currently doing that for the physical/digital security of activists, journalists and aid workers in high risk countries with our app Umbrella).

However, I would caution against an automatic rush towards techno-centric approaches. I've seen it happen so often that people get overly excited by the technology itself rather than really understanding what the end goal of it's use is. (I think one of the most common conversations I hear these days in the non-profit sector is "How do we build an app?" and "Let's run a weekend hack-a-thon and build a very complex piece of software" - without any concept of what problem they are trying to solve and what the real value added would be). I hate to say it but in reality, most non-profits are really, really bad at building and implementing technology - their structures, people, mission, goals, experience etc does not allow that aim. Often you find people paying way too much money to build tools that essentially end up with little or no use - because even if they work, the processes to implement them (training, updates etc) are not instituted. It's the digital equivalent of the aid agency who build a water well but doesn't train anyone to fix it or leave spare parts. But it's a shiny tool that can be shown off to the donors/media/public, so that unfortunately sometimes seems to be the main output. Also, most IT people in non-profits are overworked just doing basic network admin etc - and are not the right people or in the right position to do development. In fact, these days I often find myself asking - "How can we do this without technology?"

I think Sean Parker is pretty correct in his interpretation but the non-profit sector is surprisingly very driven by "trends." So one year everyone wants to talk about X because thats what donors want to talk about, so suddenly every NGO cares about X. Next year it is Y. Also, one thing that I've noticed is that Silicon Valley funders are generally quite risk adverse in their philanthropy funding - many are happy to donate to (very worthy I would add!!!) causes like the environment or earthquake aid but most are not willing to tackle some of the more controversial stuff like human rights issues in Russia, China etc - which contrasts with the great work of people like George Soros in that area.

Indeed I wish the non-profit sector had more of the startup culture - it's extremely hard for us and other small non-profits to get funded as the sector is dominated by traditional NGOs and very conservative funders. (Can you imagine an Angel funder in Silicon Valley saying they only fund "innovative" ideas by companies that have five years of existing accounts!). There needs to be more of a competitive concept of startup/failure/merger etc in the non-profit sector but unfortunately this very very rarely happens, so you end up with a cycle of "zombie" NGOs doing very little (with high overheads) but sucking up donor money - and then new NGOs with good ideas being locked out of being able to scale. Even the processes for applying for funding can be incredibly complex and essentially in most cases require an expert in the sector to be able to go through with the applications.

I've hoped for a long time that the brain power and resources of the tech sector can be applied more effectively in our non-profit space but I still think too often people with tech skill-sets are not used properly by non-profits. Why give a software programmer a hammer to build a house when he can build you software? At Security First we've managed to try to bridge that gap by utilising volunteers for Android/UI/UX/Copywriters/Testers/Security folks etc in a way which taps into their main skill-sets. It's a much more effective and rewarding thing for everybody that way.

30. The editors boosted it to 32. The automated links to other articles added the rest.