Tag: Open

Compliance: A Baseline, Not A Goal

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

Discussing compliance will not make you a popular guest at parties, but perhaps it’s a subject more deserving of an audience. It is a vital part of the plumbing of functioning societies, impacting and influencing everyone. Organisations must comply with industry and government regulations to avoid censure and investigation. Employees must comply with codes of conduct to keep their jobs. Social compliance keeps us all in line with the behavioural expectations of our peers, neighbours, communities, industries and governments.

Broadly, this is a good thing. Without rules, there is chaos, and without shared values and common goals, there is no glue to hold us together. But that glue starts to melt when regulations and laws enable injustice.

Today, we see compliance allow corporations with revenues equivalent to the GDP of a small country to pay no taxes. We hear of individuals hiding their immense wealth of dubious origin in offshore hideaways while millions of citizens cannot afford healthcare. We read about cost-cutting, profit-chasing multinationals allowed to poison our rivers, lands, and people or exploit cheap labour abroad.

Compliance is meant to protect people and the planet, but it’s also a shield for the perpetrators of injustice. When challenged on harmful and morally, ethically questionable practices, they hide behind it, shrug their shoulders, and say, ‘well, we followed the rules.’ But these are often rules they helped design in the first place.

Big business has a long history of camouflaging the risks of everything from alcohol and asbestos to sugar and cigarettes. The ‘tobacco playbook’ of yesteryear is still widespread today, sowing doubt and undermining the consensus with questionable science. Industry representatives are unknown to the public but familiar faces in government lobbies, where whispers of light touches and cutting red tape echo loudly and are influential in diluting the potency of new regulations. Citizens and activists call for change but are rarely invited to the table when decisions are made; industry, of course, enjoys permanent, cosy seats. And it wields such influence that regulations are often timid in design and application. This is administrative injustice, with hugely damaging outcomes.

As funders, we have seen this influence first-hand with many of our Fellows working at the regulatory level. Ugo Vallauri is co-founder of The Restart Project and a leading figure in the Right to Repair movement, a coalition of organisations championing the rights of consumers and ensuring everyone has the right to fix the products they own. After successfully petitioning the UK government and the EU to introduce new legislation, the right to repair is now a part of the legal landscape. But the new regulations are significantly watered down after lobbying from the technology industry and will only make a small dent in the vast mountains of electronic waste we produce every year. Ugo and the Right to Repair movement will continue to push for more responsible action, but it will take time, resources, and tremendous energy to deliver the regulations our environment urgently needs.

Shannon Dosemagen also sees the need to move beyond compliance. She is working on the Open Environmental Data Project to develop an open data repository and improve data interoperability for the public good. Access to essential, open data could inform communities of local public health issues and industry polluters. But despite the US government’s shift to publishing data openly, much of it is unfindable and unusable. Important information is buried on obscure pages of a website and exists in a multitude of formats that cannot be integrated with anything else. The combination of data segregation and asymmetric information infrastructure means no one can identify simple problems, let alone solve them. In this case, compliance does not create the value, justice, or innovation it was meant to bring about.

“We create intentional or unintentional boundaries that make things really difficult for people,” explains Shannon. “A decade ago, we made a case for governments and agencies to publish their data openly – and won. But now we have open data sets that are unfindable, inaccessible, and unusable – or usable beyond the original intent, which I think is vital for innovation.

“The onus is on citizens and residents to fit into these totally opaque and complicated systems of law, regulation, enforcement and compliance in the environmental world. It is an impossible system to wade through because it doesn’t have a singular framework. The complexity means people are unwilling or unable to engage with or question those systems, which results in a lack of political will or compulsion to go beyond that baseline. It is an injustice and a complete disservice to the people who are supposedly being protected.

“We have to start thinking more about how things could be better. People want to access environmental data or contribute data that would give us different angles and insights. But agencies can say they can’t, won’t or don’t need to change because they follow the rules. And in some cases, industry is allowed to self regulate, so it’s unlikely we will see the introduction of rule changes beneficial to the environment if they are not in the industry’s immediate interests.

“This is what we are trying to change with the Beyond Compliance Network. We want to enable greater data sharing across public and private boundaries and bring more U.S.environmental data up to FAIR standards – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. I’ve experienced ten years of agencies saying they don’t have the capacity to take community data or the data from sensor readings that exist outside of their standards. It is reactive behaviour that doesn’t allow dialogue or conversations or different approaches to a community’s environmental problems. So, we want to break down those barriers around data accessibility and introduce a diversity of experiences and approaches around environmental governance to unlock new insights and innovations.”

Shuttleworth Fellow Delphine Halgand-Mishra is also shifting our thinking about compliance. As founder of The Signals Network, she supports whistleblowers and helps coordinate and disseminate international media investigations into wrongdoing. Whistleblowers do not comply. They refuse to follow orders and break gagging orders to expose corruption and abuses of power. And they do so at significant risk: they are often destroyed by persecution, prosecution, and punishing psychological and economic consequences.

“I do not encourage anyone to break the law,” says Delphine. “But we must accept that if the law can be used to silence people, it must be changed. And when regulations are changed for the better, it is often initiated by someone breaking the law or a contract.

“My work is necessary because legal frameworks do not protect whistleblowers wherever they are in the world. If you’re a whistleblower, you are fragile. Your employer has many ways to punish you for breaking an NDA for defamation. Your government can put you in prison for exposing its corruption. Even if you are the source for breaking a huge story with huge public support, you have little protection because what you are doing is illegal.

“We need compliance to work as a society, but we also need to change our mindsets. I would encourage people to focus less on the limits of compliance and more on questioning its boundaries. Laws and regulations are not static and are subject to trends. We all have limited time and busy lives, but if we just stepped back and took a moment to think or even dream of a different approach, we can change those unfair laws and regulations and start moving in a better direction.”

Compliance also poses an issue for philanthropy. It creates enormous burdens for grantees, especially those who cannot access funds in countries identified as high-risk by financial institutions. It encourages funders to avoid risk and play safe; in a field where playing safe rarely delivers real progress. Compliance makes philanthropy more controlling and less trusting. And it encourages conformity: funding strategies are informed by a top-down insistence to meet regulatory requirements rather than a bottom-up desire to make a good idea work.

Our drive to make philanthropy better started with a deep antagonism for the ever-present, unnecessary box-ticking exercises in the funding world. Years ago, we hired a monitoring and evaluation firm to give insight into the effectiveness of our projects, but there was an immediate problem: they could not measure what we were looking for with their own methodologies. So, we changed the metrics to adapt to their needs, and when the results came back, we had hit them successfully. This was surprising. We could see our projects were not leading to dynamic, positive outcomes at scale and were failing to make real change in the world.

It became crystal clear that when metrics – or regulations, laws, statistics – are employed, they inevitably become the goal. And this is how most people in society think about compliance. Meeting regulation requirements is seen as an end-of-game achievement rather than a platform to build upon, test, or explore further.

We should not be surprised. In business, regulations are a burden and an imposition. In governments, compliance is part of the bureaucratic machinery and the cause of delays to decision-making. The average citizen does not have the time or inclination to navigate and engage with the complicated, dry, multifaceted nature and minute detail of compliance, even when the rules are so obviously stacked against their interests.

Instead, it falls on activists, whistleblowers, and rebels with vision and tenacity to stand up against injustice. They do not comply. They perform ethical disobedience on everyone’s behalf. They are often belittled, harassed, surveilled, targeted, and imprisoned – or worse – by those with power and resources. It is philanthropy’s responsibility to support them.

So, for funders, it is not enough to just comply. Compliance is a representation of the status quo – or, more accurately, the status quo’s terms, conditions, and expectations – designed to maintain the systems we rely on to serve us. But if those systems create inequity, then it is our role to help change them. And that means thinking differently about compliance and how it affects our grantees and shapes our strategies, whether subconsciously or deliberately. The history of social movements, after all, tells us you can’t change the world by following the rules.

Drifting & Grifting From Open to Fauxpen

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

The Internet is one of the shining examples of openness benefiting the world. Its open infrastructure lit a touchpaper for mass participation, vast knowledge transfer, species-wide behaviour change, and the emergence of a digital economy estimated to be worth well over $10 trillion. All of this happened because the Internet is open at its core.

Yet the open Internet is also an example of how openness is not a permanent state. It is always under attack, regardless of whether we apply its concepts and values to the web, data, software, hardware, science, or publishing. As advocates of an open knowledge society, we should celebrate how far the open movement has come in just over a couple of decades. But equally, we can never take our progress for granted.

Some threats are obvious. Censorship, surveillance, monopolistic practices, and intellectual property zealotry are in clear opposition to our aims and ideals. Their proponents lurk in the shadowy recesses of government lobbies and have ideologically supportive influencers on attractive retainers and speed dial. But at least we have an implicit understanding of their end goals. Other threats are far more opaque and insidious.

When open is fauxpen

Social movements are often watered down and assimilated by the status quo as they grow in popularity. The rules of engagement are no different for open. Open’s advantages are attractive – the speed at which community and collaboration can reap results, for example – and there is a lot of mileage and support to be garnered by presenting yourself as transparent and full of integrity. Which brings us directly to fauxpen.

‘Fauxpen’ means fake + open. It describes being invested in the image of openness but not the spirit or intent. ‘Fauxpeners’ are now rife, attracted to the benefits of community and sharing when it suits them but rather less strident in their support when it doesn’t.

At its core, openness is about sharing knowledge because giving people knowledge gives them power. But if knowledge is power, then control of knowledge is the ultimate power. So when we talk about open, we also mean open in terms of mindset and behaviour. We are open in everything we do not because it feathers our nests but because we believe behaving openly will change the world for the better. We believe open creates the optimal conditions for social change by empowering others and builds the foundations for future innovation.

This makes fauxpen cause for concern. We need to become more adept at seeing it. We need to start calling it out when we do see it. And we need to be better at doing so as a unified movement, not from our individual silos of open science, open source software, open knowledge and so on.

Fauxpen in practice

The Open Definition in its simplest form is:

“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.”

This definition is useful and covers a lot of ground. It is also focused on the practical mechanics: the what and how of open. But the problem with mechanics is that they can be tampered with and changed to do something else by the introduction of new behaviours. The biggest distinction between open and fauxpen is the why. And this is where fauxpen has found a foothold.

At best, fauxpen is a submission to the status quo. Some people drift away from radicalism and shift their efforts to appeal to the system rather than changing it. We get it. Life gets in the way. Being open is hard and wearing in a world so structurally closed that arguing the merits of waiving vaccine patents – during a pandemic – marks you as a wide-eyed idealist.

Open has also become confusing, and many examples of fauxpen stem from ignorance rather than duplicity. Open Access is a case in point, with its dizzying colour scheme defining almost every conceivable point between open and closed. And while it is often praised as the next big success story for open, its name – open access – offers a clue to its defaults and intentions. It is not open – as in defaulting to allow reuse, remake, remix – unless very specifically signalled. It’s not much of a surprise that newcomers to open access are often confused by what they find, because it is fuzzy, complex and, quite frankly, a bit of a mess. Many people genuinely and mistakenly believe that CC-BY-NC-ND is open, for example.

Honest mistakes are one thing, but at worst, fauxpen is sleight of hand by the status quo. It’s sheer self-interest, or for the benefit of a select few over everyone else. This is the polar opposite of why we are open in the first place. And we can see this egregious and deceptive practice manifest in many different, quite intentional ways.

  • The high priests – Open is for everyone, not just self-appointed guardians armed with checklists, purity lists, and codes of conduct that demand non-commerciality and 100% academic exclusivity. As SF Fellow Peter Murray-Rust says: “‘Non-commercial’ is especially damaging. There’s nothing holy about not making money.”
  • Colonialism and the white saviour – Curated filters that exclude Global South authors are designed by the West for the benefit of the West, often under the pretence of openness. This is nothing short of colonialism. We don’t need to protect Western authors from plagiarism so they can parachute in and save the Global South. With the right knowledge, shared freely without restriction, the Global South can and will look after itself.
  • Walled gardens – Every business, organisation or institution has the right to impose limits on access, use, and reuse if they choose. But unless they are open, they should not claim to be open. In many cases, walled gardens – which are especially widespread in commercial academic publishing websites – are put in place for highly dubious reasons, which Dr Murray-Rust refers to as ‘snoop and control.’
  • Non-standard licenses – Many standardised, perfectly acceptable open licenses exist already. If you encounter a new one, be wary. There is every chance it hasn’t been road-tested properly and, most likely, hides some sort of intention that is far from open.
  • Administrative injustice – If you have to look hard for something, it isn’t open. This could be governments dumping important information in an obscure, unsearchable pdf file or a corporation forcing you through a specific (often closed) portal to access information. Hiding something in the reeds is administrative injustice, plain and simple; whether it’s your intention or not.
  • Hypocrisy – We are all guilty of do as we say not as we do to some extent – we recently ‘came clean’ ourselves. It is hard to take the more difficult, open approach, but it is also necessary. Open is not just about sharing knowledge, it’s also about sharing our frustrations. This way we get better products, better open ecosystems and better open infrastructure.
  • Marketing speak – Claiming openness but relying on closed infrastructure is – as Shuttleworth Fellow Adam Hyde points out in his Fauxen Publishing Platforms piece – simply a ‘type of branding exercise.’ Infrastructure is absolutely critical when thinking about fauxpen, because you simply cannot be open when the infrastructure is closed.

A Fauxpen Definition

Sincere adherence to openness is for the benefit of as many people as possible; fauxpen is cynical and protects the interests of a select few. Open is a commitment to the notion of a greater good and a good faith intention; fauxpen is empty promises. But because the creep towards fauxpen is born sometimes of ignorance, sometimes a need to survive, and sometimes pure deceit, it can be difficult to clarify or point fingers. Ultimately, we must make judgement calls.

Regulation can help with identifying fauxpeners, but not every field of open is covered. Open source software has the watchful eyes of EFF, FSF and others who actively monitor the field and pronounce upon it. But open access and open science – just two examples – do not enjoy similar oversight. Additionally, while there are legal definitions to protect the integrity of openness, we are dealing with ideals, here. Legal language cannot suitably cover ideals. The motivation behind open is that you want people to re-use and redistribute your work and ideas.

So now we know the behaviours and acknowledge we are talking specifically about behaviours, we propose a Fauxpen Definition. In its simplest form:

“Fauxpen is any behaviour that signals openness while not committing to its ideals.”

Our intention is not to create a witch hunt or a naughty list. We get it – life is hard when you go against the grain and commit to open – but we do expect sincerity and honesty. It matters, because open helps good ideas spread and actively encourages others to experiment. And it allows others to hold us accountable, to develop trust. We want to establish new norms, but already, they are being corrupted.

Our movement is a broad, diverse church but we must come together to challenge fauxpeners if open is to become the default paradigm of the future. Coordination, not fragmentation, will be essential. We should also cast our eyes further afield, to areas where the principles of our open philosophy are also applied, albeit without the term ‘open’ – the commons movement, for example. We are keen – and ready – to take this conversation further. Please feel free to get in touch…

With thanks to Adam Hyde and Peter Murray-Rust for giving up their time and sharing their insight.

20 Years On: Reflections From the Frontier of Philanthropy

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

Last year, The Shuttleworth Foundation turned twenty!

Our experiment to re-imagine philanthropy has made the Foundation a very different organisation from the one it resembled in 2001. It’s been a long, sometimes bumpy, but mostly positive journey into maturity. As individuals, we have – hopefully – gained a little wisdom to accompany our wrinkles and wanted to collect our thoughts to pause and reflect on our story so far. We hope you will find something useful in Field Notes From the Frontier of Philanthropy and find it thought-provoking, helpful or adaptable in some way.

But mostly, we hope it inspires you to think differently and, maybe, take action. The world must change substantially and urgently. Even without the unknown, long-tail impacts of the pandemic, we live in an era of damaging social unrest, rising levels of inequality and rampant environmental destruction. It is a far cry from what technology promised in 2001.

We share a birth year with the launch of the iPod, iTunes, Wikipedia and the world’s first 3G network. Computerphobia of the ’80s and ’90s was peaking with the dot-com bust and the Y2K Bug, and entering remission as Web 2.0 emerged. Broadband was beginning to replace dial-up. A revolution was happening in our pockets as mobile phones became smaller, then smarter, changing the way we organise our lives and interact with each other in almost every conceivable way. Looking back, they were heady days. Technology was going to be the saviour.

But the opposite has proven true. In the post-9/11 world, our physical movements are tracked aggressively, more than at any other time in history. Surveillance capitalism is dining out at The Savoy on our private thoughts and personal data. A mix of extraction, exploitation and artificial scarcity remains the business model of our times. We bought smartphones in abundance, then just threw them away for the next upgrade, creating mountains of electronic waste, leaking batteries, and never-to-be-recovered precious metals in the process. And it’s not even fun anymore: social media was meant to engage us and bring us all together, not enrage us and rip us apart.

There is hope, however. New political, social and economic models are emerging during this period of global and technological disruption. Some are beginning to gain traction. People are turning their backs on the status quo as they realise its systems and power structures – designed and optimised for yesterday’s industries – do not and will not work in today’s context. Philanthropy must do the same if globalisation’s discontents are not to become its malcontents.

There couldn’t be a better time to start forging real change, despite the chaos and fear and trepidation about the future. That is why we will continue to fund individuals brave enough to introduce new ideas and innovations and build new systems for a more open and equitable world. Of course, we can’t guarantee a better future in the next twenty years, but we will spare no effort to get there. And we hope you will come along for the ride.

https://readme.shuttleworthfoundation.org/

Thou​ ​Shalt​ ​Scale​ ​Sustainably

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

The​ ​Ten​ ​Commandments​ ​of​ ​Scaling

Crowdsourced in Vancouver, Canada, from the assembled Shuttleworth Fellows, alumni and staff of 2017, and transcribed (with bad jokes) by Gavin Weale.

In the world of social innovation and making change, we are continually barraged by the imperative to scale. In every funding bid, in every set of objectives, it is an impossible dynamic to escape if you are trying to seek support. But what does scale even mean? And why do you even want to scale? More importantly, if you do end up going 100X, will you know how to handle it without turning into a hot mess of anxiety and remorse?

Following a Come-to-Jesus confessional about my scaling pains with Livity Africa, in which I described an attempt to scale in 2016 that ended in tears, heartbreak and debt, we discussed and shortlisted the top ten lessons I and others should draw from the combined hivemind-megabrain of the Shuttleworth Foundation macro-institutional memory.

That is to say: here is the shit you might benefit from knowing, in ten Biblical directives. In short: you can believe in God, but do remember to tie up your camels.

1)​ ​Cash​ ​Flow​ ​is​ ​king

Whatever your P&L or balance sheet says, if you see minus signs in your cashflow then you have to take action, and quickly. This may mean painful decisions like reducing headcount. You need to grasp those nettles as early as you can to avoid greater pain down the road when you can’t afford to pay people’s salaries. Which, for those who have never experienced it, creates a sensation something akin to what I imagine having a fork inserted into one of your eyeballs would feel like.

2)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​be​ ​true​ ​to​ ​thine​ ​mission

Success can breed success, and, especially in the funding world, zeitgeists come and go. You may be the cock of the walk today, but if the whims of funders change, you could be tomorrow’s Kentucky Fried Leftovers. When scaling fast, you can protect yourself by defining and adhering to your mission with almost laser precision. If you and your team are clear on the value you want to create, you are less likely to sleepwalk into bad funding relationships.

3)​ ​Blessed​ ​be​ ​the​ ​incrementalist

There are hares. There are tortoises. And there are lemmings waiting to throw themselves off of the Cliff of Scale through sheer stupidity. If I could talk with my younger self, the one with a full head of hair and a six-pack, I would tell him to approach big opportunities with an attitude of incrementalism, both in terms of the targets he takes on, and the team he builds. And I would tell him to stop being such a dick.

4)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​not​ ​covet​ ​thy​ ​neighbours​ ​scale

Your growth and your scale is your own business. While it may be tempting to think that the Silicon Valley model of scale is the only true benchmark, in the context of a social enterprise, the scale is relative to your impact. If you train a million people, is that truly “scale” if the training is not impactful? What even is scale? Why is it important to you? How do you define it? What’s the meaning of life? Who am I? What year is it? Who’s the President? (Actually, on second thoughts don’t answer that last one…)

5)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​not​ ​take​ ​whopper-bucks

Who is going to say no to being offered a squillion dollars by a funder? But if you do… What happens when that contract ends? Large funding wins should be greeted with celebratory fizzy drinks or other non-alcoholic victuals, and then treated with extreme caution and scepticism. Your approach to scaling up will be key here. How will you crew up and then potentially crew down if the contract is relatively short? Whopper money with a whopper target tastes better on the way down when the funds hit your account, but not so good when you are vomiting blood with anxiety trying to hit an astronomical delivery target. Make sure your funder target is achievable and delivers scale of impact too.

6)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​be​ ​modular

If you are to stray from your mission in the interests of, say, generating a ton of cash from a commercial opportunity, then you should try and think modular. That could mean sectioning off products or revenue streams to be delivered in a way that they can be grown / spun-off, or killed and forgotten without spilling too much blood. Never look a gift-horse in the mouth. Just make sure you can humanely shoot it in the paddock if it leads you in the wrong direction.

7)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​document

Sustainable growth will only happen through continuous learning. Documenting mistakes and learnings, as well as recording values, mission and strategic / operational principles, is best captured along the way – although some of the most critical learnings will inevitably be internalised by the sheer agony they cause you. In a way, defining your scale in terms of your business model could be treated as a product or experiment of its own.

8)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​have​ ​stretchy-pants

Cashflow will fluctuate, especially if your model is heavily funder-based. How are you going to keep your voluminous under-trousers stretchy enough to take up the slack when your coffers grow, but not fall to your ankles when your pockets are empty, leaving you dangerously exposed? It is worth having scenarios in mind for both worst and best-case scenarios, and considering how your operations and team would cope with either. This will force you to think about the best way to scale up or down in an agile way. An outsourced / freelancer model may help.

9)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​put​ ​time​ ​and​ ​effort​ ​into​ ​your​ ​financial​ ​forecasting

If you do not understand your numbers you will die. Make sure you know, or pay for someone who knows how to help you know. Reading a cashflow forecast and profit and loss sheet is a basic human need for a social entrepreneur. Cigarette-packet budgets and thumbsuck forecasts will get you through a couple of years of helter-skelter growth, but if you want to really ride the Big Wheel, you better invest in the time or cost of a bad-ass beancounter. And if that is not a clusterfuck of metaphors in one sentence, I don’t know what is.

10)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​define​ ​the​ ​value​ ​you​ ​want​ ​to​ ​create​ ​in​ ​the​ ​world

I will say it again: scaling numbers does not equal scaling impact. The value you want to create in the world is up to you to define, based on your ambition and the things you think are important in your theory of change. If you know you are creating true value and changing things, it should be fairly clear to you, and you perhaps should not even worry about scale if you haven’t got that bit clear. If you have, then go forth: you are ready to make like a lizard and get scale.

With thanks to all Shuttleworth Fellows who took part in this Gathering session in 2017:

Peter Bloom, Sean Bonner, Tiffiniy Cheng, Peter Cunliffe-Jones, Alasdair Davies, Isha Datar, Kathi Fletcher, Adam Hyde, Seamus Kraft, Tarek Loubani, Aaron Makaruk, Peter Murray-Rust, Luka Mustafa, Mad Price-Ball, Anasuya Sengupta, Astra Taylor, Ugo Vallauri, Jesse Von Doom, Gavin Weale, and Johnny West.

Prison Philanthropy Sucks: A Reality Check For Funders

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

The discussion chimed with much of our thinking about the imbalanced power dynamics at the centre of traditional funding models. We invited them to join our CEO Helen Turvey and Dan Meredith of Reset.tech to discuss our Flash Grant programme and share ideas about how philanthropy can do more for its grantees.

In both sessions, Kelsey, Michelle and Christina illustrated the reality of prison philanthropy for the many people it claims to serve. It does not paint a pretty picture for anyone engaged in the distribution of charitable funds. They describe a wasteful funding system rife with elitism and a philanthropy that refuses to engage with the messy and complex reality of effecting social change, choosing to poke around at the periphery and court high-profile publicity instead.

These brilliant women have deep insight into incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people’s challenges and a long-accumulated understanding of what it takes to change lives. They do phenomenal work on shoestring budgets. With their immense expertise and experience, they could do a lot more if enabled with the power and necessary resources. Philanthropy should be taking notes. Instead, it questions their credentials, imposes rigid demands and asks them to jump through a million hoops just to be in the running for a grant, let alone in receipt of one.

Prison Philanthropy Sucks is a wake-up call for funders. Its message applies far beyond the prison sector and echoes many of the conversations we have with our own fellows. Simply put, we must all do better.

Hopelessly misguided

Kelsey Kauffman is a former correctional officer and has worked within the US prison system for fifty years. She understands its complex, chaotic and damaging outcomes more than most. In 2012, she created a highly successful volunteer-run college programme at Indiana Women’s Prison, operating with an annual budget of only $5,000. In 2015, Kelsey received a Shuttleworth Flash Grant for her work.

“It was the best grant I ever got in my entire life,” she says. “I’d take it over a traditional grant many times its size. It took none of my time. I didn’t have to apply for it, I didn’t have to explain how I spent the money, and I didn’t even have to track it. And that $5,000 paid for a whole year of our college programme.”

“But our programme was replaced, eventually,” she continues. “The new initiative is donor-funded at the cost of $500,000 a year, in the same prison with the same number of students. That money could have funded our work for 100 years, or more importantly, run our programme in 100 different prisons.

“Prison funding has become very trendy for philanthropies over the last five years. But it’s hopelessly misguided. Funders are spending hundreds of millions of dollars and pouring most of that into a few, high profile, extremely expensive programmes run by elite colleges.”

Where elite education goes, elitism usually follows. Kelsey’s higher education programme welcomed over 20% of the Indiana Women’s Prison population via open enrollment. It was hugely successful, incredibly cheap, and had the potential to be replicated anywhere else in the country – the perfect environment to build momentum for a funder with a smart strategy and a keen desire for real change.

Yet, the vast majority of today’s philanthropic dollar is spent in the opposite direction. Big foundations fund selective prison programming where only the brightest get the opportunity of earning an education and reducing their sentence time. These programmes are excellent, stresses Kelsey, but wildly expensive for their overall impact.

“If I had $50 million to give to prison programming, I would endow a fund at a regional college,” she says. “It would allow them to provide oversight and accreditation to all prison college programmes in that area for the next 10 years. All those programmes would be modelled on what we did at IWP and rely entirely on volunteers. You could have programmes in hundreds of prisons, serving thousands of students.”

Instead, philanthropy directs its fortunes to support the education of a few hundred graduates. From a prison population of over two million, it is not a shining example of system change in action. And while a new administration promises significant change to the United States prison system, Kelsey’s experience keeps her from getting overexcited.

She explains: “US prison college programs are about to change radically now that Congress has approved reinstating Pell Grants – the most common form of funding university studies in the US for low income students – for all prisoners, something they withdrew in 1994.

“That means that higher education programs in prisons will now become very lucrative for colleges and universities throughout the country, and they will rush to start programs in hundreds if not thousands of prisons and jails. Until, of course, Congress reverses itself once again, at which point most of them will once again rush for the exits.”

Excluded from the process

Michelle Daniel-Jones is currently a doctoral student at New York University and was formerly incarcerated at Indiana Women’s Prison, where she studied under Kelsey. Along with Christina and several other students, she became a founder member of Constructing Our Future, an idea that eventually grew out of the classroom and prison to become an organisation helping women manage their post-release lives. Today, Michelle sits on the board as President of this worthwhile and effective project that serves a growing network of over a thousand.

Michelle is one of many success stories to come out of IWP, despite the prison education system working against her. She has a thorough understanding of prison philanthropy’s abject failure to fulfil its promise of achieving impactful change.

“Incarcerated populations are excluded from the table when programmes are created, or funding decisions are made,” says Michelle. “But if you have a desire to help people who are incarcerated, then incarcerated people need to be part of that process. They need to be there crafting, distributing, and receiving the grants. The beautiful thing about the Flash Grant was that we actually got to talk about what we could do with the funds.

“We are hugely appreciative of our generous funders,” she continues. “Without them, COF would cease to exist. But I would like to see other donors start to privilege the grantee’s experience. We know where the funds should go because we’re down here in the muck of it, as opposed to the funders who use stats and academic reports to determine who gets what and why.”

As Michelle implies, it is philanthropy that holds the cards and is very much in control of its relationships. This top-down approach is hugely problematic across many interactions with grantees, whether applied consciously or unconsciously. Unhelpful criteria, funnels and processes restrict the grantee and leave them feeling more like the obligated subject of a master-servant relationship than a visionary agent of social good. Far from creating fertile ground for real progress, philanthropy stifles it.

Of course, foundations have the right to choose who they support financially. But once that decision is made, treating grantees as customers must be the norm instead of leaving them hanging on every whim, begging for scraps, and distracting them from the mission. And that includes redistributing some of the power we have as funders and sharing it with the real changemakers. They have the most profound understanding of where support should be directed, not us. Share power with them, and they will be more effective with it.

“Ultimately, there’s a disconnect,” Michelle continues. “Lots of small organisations are doing great things at the grassroots level. But they end up looking for a larger entity and sliding their project underneath its banner just to be seen, understood and accepted by philanthropy.

“You need money to get money. Sometimes it feels like philanthropy measures your legitimacy by how much cash you have on hand and in your bank account. Startup organisations who have amazing ground support can’t meet that standard because they’re right at the beginning of their journey.”

Chasing funds

Christina Kovats also studied at Indiana and became Kelsey’s clerk to run the higher education programme full-time. Today, she is Director of Development at Consulting Our Future and works closely with its network of formerly incarcerated women. It’s an incredibly demanding role, made harder by the interlinked complexities of the challenges faced by women as they navigate their post-release lives.

“Funders think they understand these challenges,” Christina explains. “They really don’t. When we get grants, they often come with a particular focus. It gets put in a box, and you can only use the money for that purpose. So if it’s housing, you can only spend it on housing, and so on.

“But there’s a wide range of issues that people face after incarceration, and sometimes they are impossible to see or understand. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, are easy to navigate, or aren’t interlinked. You have to manage all this through rigid outlines and expectations set by funders with no connection to the individuals they are supposed to serve and no idea of the challenges people face.

“We often end up trying to fit our programmes into the criteria of these grants just to keep them alive. In many cases, we were chasing money and drifting away from the core of our mission towards the requirements of the grant.”

Christina is neatly describing one of the fundamental issues we need to fix in philanthropy. She has a deep understanding of the complexities affecting the environment. She shares her knowledge with a growing community, and the community grows with implicit trust at the centre of the relationship. Combine that shared knowledge, trust, and community together, and you create an infinite source of power to build momentum and effect change. The only resource Christina lacks is money, which she seeks from philanthropy.

Yet from the application process onwards, funders are the disruptor, not the enabler. Their money is the goal and quickly becomes the centre of the relationship and the measure of success. Funding comes with extensive and inflexible terms and conditions that often corrupt the purity of an idea. It takes valuable time to apply for money, which small organisations on the frontline can ill afford to lose. And it leaves large, successful nonprofits employing grant writers to win funds, part of which is spent on hiring those grant writers to win more.

This is systemic in traditional philanthropy. It is also archaic. Funders may want themselves to look and sound modern, innovative, and progressive but squint your eyes a little from a particular position, and you might recognise the gruel-serving master from the workhouse in Oliver Twist. As a grantee, you’re expected to beg for more, dance to someone else’s tune, close the door on the way out, and be very thankful for the opportunity.

Shameful publicity

Ultimately, significant donors place more importance on protecting and growing their organisations than identifying individuals and projects or solving problems through creative collaboration. Nowhere is this more apparent than in prison philanthropy. Ploughing hundreds of millions into high-profile and successful prison college programmes isn’t hard if you have the money. And, as Kelsey says, it isn’t even all that smart. However, it is excellent for attracting publicity, which is hugely problematic and exclusionary in itself. Not only is philanthropy failing to improve the American prison system, but it is also dehumanising the population it serves.

“Philanthropies and colleges want lots of publicity for their programmes,” she explains. “They turn to mainstream media, which insists on revealing the crimes of conviction of people on the programme. We consider that to be real shaming.

“At IWP, we made a blanket rule that journalists must agree not to identify crimes of conviction. Journalists called this censorship and that it was their obligation as journalists to identify crimes of conviction. Well, that’s too bad. If they wouldn’t agree to treat our students with the dignity and humanity they deserve, they couldn’t come in.”

As a result, the IWP programme sacrificed publicity from the media for the good of its students and put more focus on empowering women to self-publish in papers, articles and books. To Kelsey’s knowledge, no other programme in the country employs a similar rule or philosophy – certainly not the high-profile college programmes supported by major donors.

As funders, we have an enormous privilege. At the very least, we must match that privilege with support for our grantees and enable them to succeed. We also need to be bolder and embrace risk, not run away from it. Despite philanthropy’s best efforts and collective resources, persistent social challenges remain unchanged. It’s time to discuss new ideas.

A way forward

The Flash Grant programme that prompted both FlashForward and this conversation is one such experiment. Through it, we are attempting to reimagine the funder/grantee relationship and move towards a more decentralised, trust-based form of funding. It addresses many of the issues that Kelsey, Michelle and Christina describe, albeit only on a small scale. It is not the solution, but there is something there to pick at and build upon.

Philanthropy needs more conversations like this if we want to hack the traditional funding model and explore more effective strategies. We do not have all the answers and must embrace uncomfortable conversations with the individuals we support – and even the individuals they support.

For example, Kelsey’s praise for our Flash Grant programme came with an interesting caveat. She asked the fellow who nominated her if we would award a fellowship to an incarcerated person or share it amongst several incarcerated people. She was told we would probably refuse.

Whether we would or wouldn’t is irrelevant. This is our fellow’s perception of us. It’s their truth. And without opening the door for this frank and honest discussion, we would have been none the wiser. As funders, how we are seen by our grantees – subconsciously or otherwise – is actually a barrier to change. It is entirely on us if the people we serve feel they cannot approach us and express their thoughts and ideas.

It’s not good enough to continue believing we always do things the right way or that our actions always have positive repercussions. Our money is not a proxy for wisdom or knowledge; it’s simply a resource. Social change and behaviour change are incredibly messy. We should recognise that real change happens gradually and support the individuals who know best, helping them iterate towards that change in their own way. It is not our place to map out their every move, or judge them on the criteria we set – they should be the judge of us.

*With thanks to Kelsey Kauffman, Michelle Daniel-Jones, Christina Kovats and Dan Meredith.

IP Is Killing People, Your Government Can Stop It

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

“These extraordinary times and circumstances call for extraordinary measures. The US supports the waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic… ”

– US Trade Representative Katherine Tai

Joe Biden’s decision to support India and South Africa’s patent waiver proposal is a monumental moment in more ways than one. These are extraordinary times and this is an extraordinary message from a nation that built its constitution, economy and way of life around property rights.

We welcome the announcement, albeit with cautious optimism. US support only opens the door for talks at the WTO, not immediate action. It could take the best part of a year or longer before we see vaccines produced openly where needed and can deliver more shots in arms. And it might not happen at all. The pharma industry and its supporters will be voracious in their arguments. They already have significant backing, and deep-rooted motivations to keep the status quo intact.

Shuttleworth Fellow Achal Prabhala has worked tirelessly on access to medicine issues across two decades. His fellowship work demonstrates how Western-designed global intellectual property rules harm millions of lives in the Global South and describes the way corporations exploit overly-broad patent laws to re-patent drugs and preserve their monopolies. He is one of a small band of global researchers, activists and scientists who have been instrumental in building the wave of public pressure that influenced Biden’s decision.

It is critical that we do not allow that momentum to dip. Achal’s work reveals the truth behind the purposefully-complex IP landscape and allows us to deconstruct the pharma industry’s arguments. It’s time to make the case for open vaccines and access to medicine, and not only for the duration of the pandemic.

Public money, private profits

Taxpayers have already paid for the vaccines, twice. Public money funded the research and our governments guaranteed payment in advance for production of every vial. The companies have already been compensated. No ifs, no buts: the vaccines belong to the people. They are a public good, and should be open and accessible to all of us.

If companies have been paid, why is there a need for IP? The pharma industry claims it is an accelerator of vaccine innovation. But as more people die and threats of mutation increase, patent protections and knowledge restrictions look increasingly like tools of industrial-strength self-interest. The patents-first, people-second approach has proved both absurd and disastrous.

Government obligations

Governments are meant to keep their citizens safe. The best pathway to safety during a pandemic is to end it quickly by ensuring global vaccination. The quickest way to treat everyone is to share knowledge and enable tech transfer.

This waiver should have happened – in full – right at the very beginning. But world leaders are heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry’s loud and influential proponents and have been slow to connect the dots. Their widespread, narrow-minded belief in an inequitable patent system has curtailed the global response with a horrific cost to human life.

IP is the problem, not the solution

Which is more important: saving lives, or maintaining a proprietary knowledge system designed, optimised and protected by the pharma industry, behind closed doors at the WTO and in the lobbies of governments? Pharma is worried the waiver will destroy the current IP system and limit financial rewards from cutting-edge drug developers.

Frankly, that’s the point. IP and its monopoly-based model is the problem, not the solution. It creates barriers by concentrating production in a few areas and restricting it elsewhere. The system is fundamentally broken. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen states that waiving intellectual property patents will “not bring a single dose of vaccine in the short- and medium-term”. She is right, but 18 months into a pandemic we are already in the long-term. If IP had been waived at the beginning, where would we be now? We must grasp the opportunity offered by this waiver to make the case for faster, better, more open and equitable approaches to solving global health challenges.

Working for shared interests

Without a healthy society, economies suffer, education systems suffer and populations suffer. Now is the time to look holistically at how economies are organised and plan them around equity, justice and fair rewards instead of around the interests of Big Pharma.

The pharma industry has been incredibly successful in lobbying governments around IP matters, and is a model for the creative industries’ adoption of a copyright-first approach. Upsettingly – and unsurprisingly – movie studios, music bigwigs and publishing giants are already expressing concerns about the TRIPS waiver. Their intervention – effectively: ‘we support defeating the virus unless it harms our margins’ – is both grim in sentiment and utterly tone deaf to the needs and demands of the moment.

The market is not the answer

The market cannot solve global health issues of this scale. Healthcare capitalism is failing the world now, has failed the world before, and will fail it again in the future. We need different thinking around intellectual property for medicine, diagnostics and infrastructure. Access to research and lifesaving drugs must be at the heart of any future plans.

If the market cannot or will not deliver lifesaving medicines, we need to embrace alternative approaches. Public money has always played an important role, and state-supported innovation is something to celebrate. Let’s recalibrate the message around public spending as an investment rather than a cost. And let’s be better at philanthropy. Fund research and commit to publishing it openly. And if you say you are open, mean it.

Closed Gates, Opened Gates

Bill Gates stepped back from his suggestion that intellectual property underpins innovation and does not present a barrier to equitable vaccine access. It’s quite a U-turn. He has a religious zeal for proprietary solutions and an IP system that made him unimaginably wealthy. And when Oxford University researchers wanted to make their vaccine formula open and more widely available for further study, Gates talked them out of it.

So while we applaud this decision, it’s important to remain critical. It only applies temporarily, and his perverse unwillingness to consider alternative ways of managing IP has a long and damaging history. He has a highly persuasive voice in the corridors of power, and has undoubtedly influenced the months-long delay in support for the waiver proposal. Hundreds of thousands have died in the meantime.

Shades of imperialism

Gates’s initial response to the waiver proposal also exposes another troubling issue. Vaccine research is published by the West and vetted by the West, for vaccines licensed by Western corporations to be manufactured for the West at great profit. While wealthy countries sat on vaccine stockpiles, developing nations went without. There is also a belief that countries with fewer resources are incapable of making treatments safely, despite the fact India is already at the centre of global vaccine manufacturing.

Another prevalent attitude is that knowledge exchange with countries like China, Cuba and Russia – who have all developed vaccines – is a national security issue rather than a solution to the pandemic. Surely it’s time to shake off the superiority complex, end the imperialistic prejudice, and give credit where it’s due. If solving global challenges involves working openly with the West’s traditional ‘enemies’, so be it.

This is just the beginning

Patents are only a part of the story. Although the US supports the temporary lifting of IP protections for coronavirus vaccines, it is less enthusiastic about sharing knowhow and tech transfer. Pressure is needed to ensure the world gets what it needs. Enabling the capacity to deliver vaccines everywhere is challenging but potentially achievable within months.

Once this pandemic ends we cannot return to the norm. Monopoly-based IP models that create artificial scarcity are not the answer, even when judged on their own terms. If patents are an incentive to innovation and medicinal progress, why is most of the world still excluded from access to treatments for diabetes, cystic fibrosis, or cancer?

We can do better. Let’s use this opportunity to reimagine global intellectual property rules and build a better, more open future that puts people over patents and profits.

System Change is the Real Treatment for COVID-19

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

Simply put, these systems have failed us. The global supply chain struggles to balance significant shocks to both supply and demand, the effects of which will last for long into the foreseeable future. We’ve seen the procurement process turned into a grizzly competition, with states and countries bidding against each other for PPE only to have their orders cancelled when the US Government buys everything.

Elsewhere, governments are guilty of wasting valuable resources and time by awarding ventilator and PPE contracts to headline-grabbing engineering companies and ‘old boys’ networks. And while Big Pharma makes soothing noises with promises to open up their research and help deliver affordable and accessible treatments, companies are quickly reverting to type. Testing is still restrictively expensive for low-income countries, and the latest treatments are arriving on the market with eye-watering price tags. Without significant change, it is unlikely the eventual cure – if we see one – will be any different.

We believe open science, open medicine and an open-knowledge society are part of the solution and must be part of the change. Despite efforts by the incumbents of power for a return to ‘normal’, it is striking how much more open the world suddenly became in the face of a global threat. It is essential to celebrate and build upon that momentum, but also for the West to recognise the problems manifesting in the world right now are life as normal in poorer nations.

Shuttleworth Fellow Jenny Molloy is building tools and systems for an open, sustainable bioeconomy and increased participation and innovation by companies, individuals and communities in under-resourced areas. Researchers in Africa, South America and economically similar regions across the world struggle to access the expensive reagents needed to make scientific breakthroughs. Part of the issue is affordability, but distributional problems also play a significant role. It’s only now that we see similar troubles occurring in the West.

The vast majority of labs use testing systems built by only a few companies, all of whom require chemical reagents to be housed in branded, proprietary cartridges. These are simple, plastic devices. Anyone could make them given the opportunity, but their patented design prohibits it. The proprietary nature of testing cartridges also stunts progress, offers no clinical benefit and causes significant access issues. As global demand went into overdrive, pressure on the few licensed companies making cartridges increased significantly. Supply could not keep up.

This highlights the need for an alternative. We must do better. Jenny’s work to create open systems and tools will be critical if we are to overcome similar challenges in the future, and ensure scientists have access to the basics, enabling them to work for the greater good in their communities and the broader world.

Jenny is also working with a group of scientists, lawyers and entrepreneurs on the Open Covid Pledge. This programme encourages intellectual property owners to offer their pandemic research, designs, and knowledge to others – free of charge – to act faster and minimise the impact of COVID-19. The pledge grants community groups, businesses, technologists, and individuals access to academic and design papers to build their own versions of limited equipment and devices, without fear of breaking intellectual-property laws.

Other fellows are joining in with the relief effort to significant effect. Tarek Loubani is continuing his drive to give the world low-cost, high-quality, life-saving medical equipment by adding 3D-printing face shields for medical workers to his impressive catalogue of work. He is also working with researchers and private companies to create non-invasive ventilation masks. Luka Mustafa is working with Slovenian companies and Fab Labs on designing and producing a variety of PPE including masks and visors. Both projects contribute documentation to the world, ensuring other Fab Labs – there are almost 2,000 on the planet – and private citizens can replicate the high-quality designs for their local communities and adapt them to meet local regulatory requirements.

With regards to treatments and vaccines, it is possible – perhaps likely – that a large, global pharmaceutical company will come up with the eventual vaccine for COVID-19. What remains to be seen is how much they will charge for it. When under the spotlight Big Pharma sometimes blinks, as evidenced by the lowering of extortionate prices of antiretroviral drugs after the enormous public outcry during the African AIDS plight in the early 2000s. And in this current crisis, even companies like Pfizer – usually a fierce champion of proprietary medicine – are committing to sharing their tools, learnings and data on an open-source platform with the global scientific community.

But this is atypical. And despite assurances to the contrary, it seems pharmaceutical companies are already staking a monopolistic claim for high prices on treatments and cures that have already been heavily funded by states. Achal Prabhala’s fellowship work in access to medicine provides a worrying prediction of how this might play out without any intervention. While governments might say all the right things, each is looking after its own in terms of ordering future stock, and there is little mention of access conditions written into contracts with private companies. The reality is that when companies hoard knowledge, advancement is stunted. That translates to the loss of life.

In our ideal, open world, intellectual property standards would be designed to maximise innovation and scientific progress rather than profits. Open pharmaceutical practices would enable faster innovation. Any vaccine developed would be available and affordable to all, not just the wealthiest on the planet. Current open models for this already exist – the 50-year old flu vaccine, for example, is a successful example of ongoing open collaboration and shared knowledge between 110 countries. The COVID-19 Technology Access Pool could do the same for the global response to the pandemic. But unless we apply pressure, we are more likely to see further monopolies and shareholder appeasement rather than the widespread saving of lives.

In broader terms, vast improvements to access to medicine would already be in place, and affordable treatments for other diseases would be available everywhere. The knock-on effect would be fewer people in the hospitals of developing countries suffering from illnesses that are virtually nonexistent in the Global North. This would free capacity to deal with the aftermath of a pandemic in parts of the world where healthcare facilities are already extraordinarily stretched.

Finally, we should also recognise the impacts of tying all of this together. In an open world there is more knowledge transfer between governments, medical professionals, regulators and makers. With greater scope for interoperability comes greater opportunity for real innovation. Spare parts and replacements for critical medical equipment are created by anyone with capability in times of a crisis, without fear of legal reprisal. A larger, open hardware community is more capable of innovating at speed – one new ventilator prototype was designed and constructed within a week – as they build on all knowledge that has come before. The societal impacts are also hugely relevant, as the world recovers from a significant blow to business, employment and lifestyle. Amid a pandemic – or any other crisis of the future – openness can stimulate productivity, boost wellbeing, and break down the systemic power structures preventing speedier progress.

The system is rigged, 2020 has shown us how much

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey and Karien Bezuidenhout when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

Unprecedented losses in livelihoods along with previously unimaginable restrictions placed on the movement of goods and people have drastically increased food insecurity, among much other suffering, around the world. We imagined it would be a matter of weeks until things got “back to normal”. We were completely wrong. Things may never go back to the way they were, and that might not be a bad thing.

In the wake of the effects of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement has gained traction well beyond its origins in the US. It is becoming increasingly apparent to a much broader audience that the social and economic systems that underpin the “normal” we were so keen to get back to has not been good to many of us.

These systems are rigged to make us believe that the only reason one does not succeed is because they aren’t good enough, they don’t follow the rules properly, they don’t make the most of the ample opportunities on offer. We judge ourselves and others by our ability to ascend the capitalist ladder and avoid adversity along the way. We condemn others and chastise ourselves for not meeting the standards of these systems, established over centuries, generations, by those in power to make sure they stayed in power. This thinking has infiltrated every level of society, from internal dialogues to global governance, propped up by unjust economic, healthcare, education and justice systems.

The world is at a turning point. Business as usual has been interrupted. We can either go back to the familiar, hoping that we make it, trying our best to keep up with the rules and beat out others in an environment of artificial scarcity. Or we can acknowledge what we have learned, take the time and do the work to build towards systems of abundance, which are equitable, sustainable, open and share power.

Taking time to reimagine our world is a luxury not many have. But we are far closer than we think. There are people, projects, communities, organisations that have taken the time, taken the risks, embraced the uncertainty, and started building their piece of a reimagined socio-economic system long before others even recognised the problem. These are ready to build upon.

The Shuttleworth Foundation works with individuals brave enough to reimagine the world we live in through its fellowship programme. Fellows have a vision for a better future and a clear idea of how we might get there.

The Shuttleworth Foundation: An Open Book

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

As a small organisation operating at a fraction of the budget enjoyed by many other funders, we must continuously and closely scrutinise our work. Our philosophy remains the same, but new fellows, ideas and experiences contribute to our knowledge pool and influence where we go next – and how. We adapt our methods accordingly, weaving in best practices and weeding out roadblocks to our fellows’ mission progress. Just as our views on systemic shifts are centred in a conviction for evolution, not revolution, we believe positive, lasting organisational change is best achieved gradually and incrementally.

However, it is also vital to take stock of long-term progress. In 2018, we took a deep dive into the previous decade of our fellowship model, revisiting highs – and lows – and speaking to fellows about their experiences. We intended to uncover wrong turns and to explore areas where we could improve. There was plenty to chew on but, overall, we were pleasantly surprised: discussions with our growing community of past and present fellows revealed our alternative model of philanthropy holds up well.

We started this experimental model in 2007 with the belief that philanthropy could be better. Our idea was to instil openness, collaboration and community into our approach. We wanted to replace the hierarchical structures typically seen in traditional funding with a focus on co-ownership, agency and empowerment. There have been some tweaks around the edges since but, today, we believe those fundamental elements continue to offer our fellows greater agency to make progress and unlock more benefit for society.

Which brings us to our book. In one part, it tells our story as a community and offers hat tips to those who have contributed along the way. We don’t like to talk about success or failure and prefer to focus our thoughts on progress and learning. But on reflection, it is striking how much our fellows move their fields forward.

Consider our funding efforts in telecommunications, where we see a trend towards bottom-up connectivity and community-owned networks. Our fellows have played a significant role in this blossoming movement. Individual projects by Steve Song, Paul Gardner-Stephen, Peter Bloom and Luka Mustafa have built on each other to great effect to democratise access and empower communities, reduce costs, and shift thinking at policy level. Elsewhere, in a world dominated by global finance, Astra Taylor’s work with The Debt Collective community poses important questions about money and debt: her efforts so far helped eliminate over a billion dollars of student debt owed to predatory lenders.

These impressive examples of fellowship projects impact millions of people – even more extraordinary when you consider they were achieved on a relatively meagre budget of around a million dollars per fellow, over a three-year fellowship. In our view, it is clear this demonstrates that size of grant – often the central component of the funder-fundee relationship – is not a lone indicator of success. There is far more to consider, which is the second source of inspiration for our book.

We seek system change in our domain just as our fellows seek change in theirs. Several major funders have borrowed from our ideas, as we have borrowed from others – just as it should be. Yet our community’s frustrations with the traditional philanthropic world remain. Changemakers with vast potential are still overwhelmingly restricted by top-down approaches to funding, arbitrary metrics, short-termism, and more. If we want to live in a better, more equitable world, this must be addressed.

We aim to do this in our book and add some practical flesh to the philosophical bones of Open philanthropy to better explain the hows and whys of our working methods. It is not a how-to guide or instruction manual – our processes fit our intent and purpose, and we know they may not work for others. Instead, we hope it provides inspiration and shows the strength of openness as a foundation from which to build viable alternatives to unhelpful funding practices. We hope it makes you think. But mostly, that you enjoy it…

https://shuttleworthfoundation.org/book/

Fellowship forward

Note: the post below was written by Helen Turvey, Karien Bezuidenhout and Chris McGivern when we ran the Shuttleworth Foundation.  Whilst some of the specifics pertaining to the organisation are no longer relevant, the ideas, theories and insights still hold true.

Over the past 6 months we have dissected every aspect of this model, from recruitment to alumni, from Fellowship highs to Fellowship lows, to really understand the value and effect of every component. We have examined the arc of the programme over the past 10 years, Fellow by Fellow as well as cumulatively. What we learned has helped us determine how we might continue our Open Philanthropy experiment.

What have we learned?

The fellowship programme we have today will be almost unrecognisable in its implementation to the first Fellows of 2007. What they will recognise is the essence of what we set out to do, the values that underpin that and the central role Fellows play.

We went back to basics, to the Letter of Wishes we wrote when we started this programme. The ethos described centred around fellowship “because we believe that people, rather than projects, are the true change agents.” Our Fellowship is supported by funding, openness, innovation and governance. We wanted to examine the outcomes of our programme against what we set out to do, and this provided the perfect compass.

Throughout the evolution of the model these have held up, and we believe they still do as we move forward.

1.) Individuals

The long term impact of the Foundation lies in the people at the heart of it. The Fellow (and the teams they assemble during their fellowship) take full ownership of an idea, they have the direct experience of implementing it, and they internalise the learning to take into the next phase, regardless of whether the idea proved viable.

Projects and organisations come and go. Many ideas do not result in successful outcomes upon the first try. These individuals are willing to take that risk for the greater good and if we can bet on the right people, they will succeed in bringing about positive change, over time, by building on their fellowship experience. As long as we believe in them and the change they want to make, they have the strength to get up and try again, each time adding to their knowledge, turning that belief into reality.

2.) Alone together

Each individual Fellow has a part to play in their field, and on the fellowship. While they have the freedom and agency to act independently, the relationships and interactions between Fellows provide a valuable sounding board and fertile environment for new ideas to be tested and blockages to be removed.

This is as true for Alumni as for current Fellows. Individually they are pushing the boundaries of conventional wisdom and the status quo. There is no-one who has the exact knowledge or experience they need. Bringing them together creates a space in which ideas can be tested and dissected, alongside trusted and respected peers, who share a common hope for the future but come with very different perspectives.

Diversity of thinking and experience is essential. It is not by interacting with those that have a similar set of skills and frame of reference that truly revolutionary ideas grow. It is by being challenged and inspired by others who are trusted and respected because of, not despite, their differences. Sharing their wisdom and combining expertise within the group is what enables them to take their mastery to the next level.

3.) Over time

During or directly after an intervention you can at best assess the implementation of an idea. To recognise impact, you need distance and time for the knowledge to be shared and changes in behaviour to occur.

We review the impact of each fellowship 5 years after the Fellow has exited the programme. Time allows the Alumni to settle into the next phase, for others to test and build upon the outputs, and for the true influence of the Fellow and their idea to become clear. It is actually only now, after 10 years, that we can see the broader contribution the collective Fellows have made in the world.

Each individual investment should be selected thoughtfully to make a contribution to our own thinking in a field, and then given enough time to mature in the world. Patience is key.

4.) With room to fail and learn

Whilst there are some social challenges with known solutions – vaccines for example – this is not the space we are in. We specifically look for individuals with fresh perspectives, with ideas that are not yet staple dinner party conversation, who want to tackle problems with as yet unproven solutions, and who challenge conventional wisdom.

When you know something is broken, it is easy to throw a spanner in the works of the establishment, to disrupt what exists. What is much harder is building something new. This comes with the risk of failure. To create the best environment for these ideas to be tested and honest learning to emerge, we have to accept the risk involved in trying to build something new and make sure that our behaviour within the group reflects that.

Even failing at solving a problem offers a valuable opportunity to learn more about both the problem and potential solutions. If it happens in an environment that is supportive, recognises the value of failure and captures those learnings, no investment is wasted. The outcomes will influence both theorists and practitioners in the field. The real failure would be not being deliberate about the experiments we do in the world and not paying careful attention to how it plays out, during and post fellowship.

5.) Openly

Actively capturing the outputs of each fellowship and sharing those openly, enables others to engage with the idea, learn from the implementation, build upon the progress made and expand the impact of our efforts and investments well beyond our own reach. Openness is what ensures that every attempt, whether it succeeds or fails, creates foundational assets and becomes a positive contribution to change in the world. We started by looking for openly licensed products at the heart of every fellowship. Open source was key to unlocking economic potential and self-reliance.

The next frontier for openness lies well beyond intellectual property. Individuals now produce and share more data, information and resulting knowledge than ever before, yet the centres of economic control have not shifted substantially. Privacy and security has come to dominate this conversation. We still need to find the appropriate equilibrium that balances the greater good and individual rights.

6.) Engaging with technology

10 years ago we were asking how can technology be used for good, especially if access was democratised. There was a sense of promise and opportunity associated with getting technology into the hands of everyone. Today the use of information and communication technology has become near ubiquitous, yet depth of contribution and equity in participation in the knowledge economy has not.

While pockets of constructive engagement exist, increased access has served to further divide, not create a shared sense of community, ownership or purpose. The commons is being eroded and the meanings of democracy, freedom, economic justice and human rights are being fundamentally challenged. The struggle around access to data and the resulting knowledge has been turned on its head with individuals generating more and more data while struggling to retain access to it themselves.

The mere inclusion of a technological component in an idea is no longer of interest to us. Questions on freedom, control and self-determination around how technologies and their byproducts interact are now far more important.

What questions are we asking now?

Progress means new questions and challenges.

1.) Society (Public goods)

In numbers, there has been no better time in history to be alive. At the same time, there has been no time in history for us to be so starkly aware of what we lack. At every level – individual to national, regional to global, even interplanetary – it is possible to know and try to understand the impact of each of our actions on those around us, near and far. Democracy, capitalism and the implied social contracts of the 20th century are no longer sufficient to effectively support the complex and connected societies needed to steward public goods for public good.

There is no more room for a zero sum game. Disruption is already happening. Now is the time to rebuild.

2.) Systems (Money flow)

The systems enabling the flow of money are becoming increasingly complex, and increasingly obfuscated. Controlling and tracking gives as much power and authority, if not more than, owning the money in the first place. While it has become easier to be a global citizen, moving money through the global banking system has become much harder for anyone other than standard corporations. Before we could just do a bank transfer in x currency to y’s bank account. In some instances that has now become impossible, in others innovations have emerged.

How should/could/does money move and reach those most able to put it to constructive use? What organisational structures and data measures do we need to provide adequate protection while not stifling innovation? This is a system that needs unblocking.

Similar questions apply to how we create and exchange value at every level of society, how we govern, share ownership and give agency. What new social, political or economic systems might offer a more relevant alternative? How might we test these theories as close to reality as possibly, while tracking and containing unintended consequences?

We would like to experiment with new approaches, starting small, and passing our experience on to others who have the potential to collaborate and influence across borders as we know them today.

3.) Substance (Themes)

Access to telecommunications technology has come, and will keep coming, at a monumental rate. It is a challenge which has been taken up widely, with social, public, commercial and philanthropic interventions on offer. The quality and quantity of initiatives, both top down and bottom up, and the high level of innovation, is encouraging.

Technology is also one of the spokes in the wheel of the future of education. There is general agreement on the importance of universal, quality education, especially around Maths and Science. While there is no single solution for achieving that, there are many inspiring models being explored all over the world. Uniform delivery at scale is no longer the ideal. The most appropriate, contextualised approaches will thrive.

Neither of these areas specifically need our attention any longer.

We have been experimenting on the periphery of these themes for a while. On the one hand we’ve expanded our focus on technology from telecommunications to medical devices, environmental monitoring, bio-printing, cellular agriculture, small scale manufacturing and scientific research. On the other, our Fellows’s focus started with formal education and evolved to access to knowledge and self-directed learning. Their work now includes access to the resources and enabling environments you need for self-actualisation, including open government, internet freedom, digital human rights, data driven decision-making, access to medicines, fact checking and food security.

Over the next year we would like to go even further, asking what challenges the new normal has created, and which old ones needs a fresh perspective to shift thinking.

The next round of applications opens on 1 February 2019.