Oct 29, 06:17 pm: [tagcamp] the hallway session

Today’s morning session, for me, was a hallway conversation with Lee Iverson. Lot’s of meaty information—feels like my brain is clogged, in fact. The big thing I took away, though, was the need to describe proposed activities in terms of utility. Okay. That’s not really a new concept but I ended up with some new ways to think about it and construct arguments around it.

Basically, it has to do with the fact that knowledge is more valuable when, like money, it’s unevenly distributed. With that in mind, nonprofits are incentivized to keep their knowledge (evaluation data, reports, databases even—as an artificat of their knowledge systems) locked up. So, the idea is to create a model where trading the knowledge gives them greater value then keeping it closed. For example, keeping knowledge private gives a single nonprofit a competitive edge with funders. But, if making that knowledge consumable and shareable, creates greater utility/value by making change to mission faster (and maybe even money) it will change a nonprofit’s incentive to share information and help them to make decisions about how to share that information.

The trick, of course,—and there’s always a trick—is figuring out how to make a model that helps to measure that so that the relative values of each practice are exposed. Right now, only the first practice is exposed (via successful grant proposals).

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Marnie Webb  |