The Shuttleworth Foundation

Compliance: A Baseline, Not A Goal

2022-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

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

2022-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 Definiton 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 focussed 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

2022-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

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/

Welcome Jeni and Diarmaid!

2022-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

We are thrilled to welcome our new intake to the Fellowship community and would like to offer our gratitude to Nicole Wong, our Honorary Steward for the 2022 round, for her thoughtful guidance and input throughout a selection process that included a compelling shortlist of candidates.

Nicole works at the intersection of law, emerging technologies, and public policy. She is a powerful voice for human rights and justice, and an advocate for freedom of expression and digital democracy. Her knowledge and experience of designing and supporting systems at every level makes her an ideal Honorary Steward in these challenging times.

The pandemic has been tragic and disastrous. It has also shone a light on the deep-rooted issues in our global systems and their failure to produce widespread, collective gains. We need to fix or replace them, and quickly: many people feel a lack of control and sense the unfairness. They are disengaging - or, in some cases, uprising - as they realise the systems and structures are not working. As we emerge from the pandemic, there has never been a better time to embrace new approaches and build new, sustainable and equitable systems.

Nicole has selected two new Shuttleworth Fellows who are engaging and activating people around new ideas and alternative systems and structures. Jeni is working on a new approach to data governance while Diarmaid’s focus is access to medicines. While they are in very different fields, both new Fellows share the significant challenge of shifting thinking against a deep-rooted consensus and powerful, dominant narratives.

Jeni is bringing open values to the field of data governance. She is encouraging us to move away from the narratives of privacy as a pre-eminent human right and personal data as personal property. Her Idea is ‘Connected by data’ - an open, participatory model of data governance that puts community at the centre of decisions about data. Read more

Diarmaid is scaling Just Treatment, a patient-led campaign group fighting for access to high-quality healthcare. He is exposing the myth of innovation that’s created and maintained by the political influence of big pharma, big data, and healthcare corporations, and exploring a more open and socially just model of healthcare. Read more

We are incredibly excited to welcome Jeni and Diarmaid to the Shuttleworth Fellowship. This is important work with the potential to lay the foundations for a better future as we emerge from the pandemic. We look forward to exploring their ideas and learning from them as much as they learn from the wider Fellowship community.

Thank you Nicole, and welcome Jeni and Diarmaid!

Introducing: Diarmaid McDonald

2022-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Introducing: Diarmaid McDonald

Background: An activist, organiser, and advocate for access to medicines.

Idea: Just Treatment - a patient-led campaign group fighting for fair access to high-quality healthcare

The Problem

Who benefits from the privatisation of our healthcare and monopolisation of our medicine? It isn’t the untold millions who are denied access to life-saving treatment. It isn’t the grieving families of patients whose anguish for their dying children, partners or parents is accentuated by the knowledge that treatment is available but unaffordable. Neither is it society as a whole: our misguided approach to intellectual property systems and policies impede medical innovation, contribute to inequity, and exacerbate and extend our health crises.

The real winners are those who exploit the weaknesses of our current IP model to hoard life-saving knowledge for financial gain. It is pharma companies securing billions from government contracts to the delight of their shareholders and top executives while withholding vaccine know-how from developing countries. It’s the big data companies vacuuming up our health records and using our vital statistics for financial gain. And it’s the industry lobbyists accelerating the privatisation of our healthcare and shaping national and international policy, enshrining their rights to profit while desecrating our rights to health.

The Idea

Diarmaid has spent his career fighting against the injustice and real-world consequences of this inequitable, monopolistic, and closed system. As founder and lead organiser of Just Treatment, he engages affected people, trains them and empowers them to become campaign leaders. This patient-led movement is growing and is incredibly successful, securing access to life-saving medicines for people with Hepatitis C, breast cancer and cystic fibrosis. More recently, Just Treatment mobilised over 35,000 people to campaign for investment and democratisation of the NHS and helped force the UK government to backtrack over its plans to give corporations access to citizens’ personal health records.

Now, Diarmaid wants to scale Just Treatment’s work and build momentum across the UK, Europe and beyond. During his Fellowship, he will train new patient leaders, establish global networks of affected communities, and challenge the dominant narrative with language and stories that explain this incredibly complex issue in ways that resonate with everyday people. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, he believes there has never been a better time to mobilise patient power and push against the financial might and political influence of big pharma, big data, and healthcare corporations.

There is a real sense of urgency to Diarmaid’s work. The same forces denying access to COVID vaccines are currently establishing a new health sector centred on proprietary control of health data. We have to disrupt the current dynamics of the status quo and gain broad support for a more open and socially just model of healthcare.

“I want to re-establish the primacy of health as a global common good,” explains Diarmaid. “So far, our campaign successes have been individual wins, and we know these strategies can save lives. But when new medicine comes out, you have to fight for access drug-by-drug, country-by-country, and company-by-company. We will never solve these issues when you’re fighting on a case-by-case basis.

“The real challenge is to think about how we fix this entirely broken system. We are led to believe that intellectual property rights are doing good for the world. But, in reality, it’s a system that is not serving humanity in any kind of equitable or just or efficient way. If we can build a movement to help people to understand the consequences of this system, we can build political and public pressure to steer the direction of travel towards openness and equity.”

The Fellow

“So many of the problems we have in the pharmaceutical industry are replicated elsewhere. You see it in climate change, housing, racism, and colonialism. The behaviours, tactics and business models are really similar. They prey on public systems and generate profits for tiny numbers of people with externalised costs for the rest of society and humanity. We need to act now if we want that to change. This is not just about saving lives in this pandemic, but making progress on much more profound, systemic reforms for the future.

“I feel really privileged to be given this opportunity, but there’s also a huge sense of responsibility. The Fellowship gives us space to experiment, but more importantly, it means we can help more people and develop more leaders that can take this work to the next level. I’m really excited about working with and learning from the Fellowship community, and I’m hopeful I can bring a personal perspective that’s interesting and useful to others.”

The Foundation

We are thrilled to welcome Diarmaid to the Fellowship and looking forward to working and learning with him. Broadly, the general public is unaware of the morally bankrupt practices of the pharma industry and private healthcare corporations. People are persuaded by the current narrative around IP laws, which remains heavily - and quite deliberately - tipped in favour of the patent and profit model. By shifting the debate away from inaccessible, dry policy forums and towards mainstream TV and radio, there is a real opportunity to build momentum for change.

Diarmaid is a highly experienced and effective campaigner who knows how to win popular and political support. His previous work has given him an exceptional palette of tactics and strategies to take on this huge challenge. The pandemic provides a perfect backdrop for saving lives now but, also, for making a compelling case for an open, commons-centred approach to global healthcare in the future.

Welcome, Diarmaid!

Introducing: Jeni Tennison

2022-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Introducing: Jeni Tennison

Background: A data expert bringing open values to the field of data governance.

Idea: ‘Connected by data’ - an open, participatory model of data governance that puts community at the centre of decisions about data.

The Problem

The current framing of data protection has convinced us to see privacy as the pre-eminent human right, and personal data as personal property. Rules and practices are modelled on the concept of individual consent and assume we are all free-thinking individuals applying personal choice to take full control of our digital lives. This narrative flatters us at an intuitive level. It feels right to take ownership and good to be empowered as sovereigns of our personal data.

But have we converged around the wrong consensus? The narrative of personal choice and ownership of our data is an illusion and an impossibility, not a reality. Data-related problems such as exclusion, exploitation and surveillance will not be solved by the current model. Its individualistic approach fails to take the broader context and needs of our communities into account.

Jeni has been championing open data for well over a decade and has a unique understanding of the barriers holding back data’s potential for society. She is convinced that the consensus around individual consent is the key issue. At an intuitive level, if you consider data as property it becomes something to look after and something you can lose. Your data becomes a risk. The obvious consequence is an understandable distrust of openness and sharing.

The Idea

Not only is the current model problematic, but it’s also a story of missed opportunity. Your personal data has value when it informs behaviour; far less as a commodity that is bought and sold. That information could be powerful, usable and effective if we aggregate it - together, as communities - but to do so we have to move beyond the model of individual consent towards a more collective, participatory approach to data governance.

Jeni is exploring an alternative model of open and participatory governance with Connected by data. She will engage citizens, organisations and legislators with a new, compelling narrative, underpinned by best practices and legal frameworks. The first step is to help people understand the benefits of deliberative and participative decision-making. But also, to recognise the harms of our acceptance of the status quo.

“It’s important to recognise how organisations influence us through the way they present with choices about data,” says Jeni. “Choices are limited - and deliberately limiting - because the vast majority of people aren’t going to change the default choices they make. There’s a very real element of consent as blackmail: you won’t get to access a service if you don’t agree to the terms and conditions.

“The second piece is to work on practical tools and techniques,” she continues. “I am looking at areas that are already involved in community decision-making - such as citizen juries - and will take inspiration and apply it in the context of data. The aim is to develop a whole menu of tools and techniques to share with organisations and let them choose the most appropriate. This will be interesting and challenging: if you are a small business with limited resources, for example, how will you start building this model into your operations?

“Then, there’s the law. Organisations need encouragement to take these more participatory, collective decision-making approaches to data; legal guidance and policies will give them that. The UK government is looking into data protection law at the moment, which presents an opportunity to develop some legal frameworks around the idea.”

The Fellow

Jeni Tennison: “I’m thrilled to be on the Fellowship and can’t wait to get started as part of the community. Starting out on my own with this new idea is quite daunting and a very different experience from having 60 people around me in my previous role with the Open Data Institute. So I’m really looking forward to getting the support of the fellow community, and also being able to contribute and help others.

“Openness has been part of my life all the way through my career. It’s such an important value. To me, it’s about attitude, how you live. It’s about doing your work openly, being open to other inputs, listening to what other people are doing and incorporating it or building it into your work. Openness is how we make progress and unlock creativity.

“But not everything can be open and not everything open is good. It depends on the circumstances. Understanding the grey areas and risks is part of our openness to other people. We have to take time to hear out their concerns and take them seriously. This is what we will try and do with this project, and bring those open values into the world of data governance.”

The Foundation

We are delighted to welcome Jeni to the Fellowship. She is taking on a challenge that is deeply exploratory in nature but has the potential to evolve into a groundbreaking change to the way we think about data. It is also a chance for her to engage and persuade new people to participate in openness - some of them perhaps for the first time - and develop a new, open framework at the governance and legislative level.

Few people have a deeper understanding of the current landscape and Jeni is exactly the right person to look under the hood, pick this issue apart, and introduce a new approach. There are a number of uncertainties lying in wait, but Jeni has already identified the key barriers to overcome. We are excited to learn alongside her as she tests her theories and develops new techniques, tools and practices to remodel data governance through openness and participation.

Welcome, Jeni!

Trials & Tribulations on the Road to Digital Sovereignty

2021-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

To paraphrase the poet Robert Burns, the best-laid plans of mice, men, and women often go awry. It is with huge regret and disappointment that our move to open source our operational technology has been beset by too many problems. So, for now, we are pressing pause…

Earlier this year, we set out our intention to reclaim our digital sovereignty from the many proprietary services we use to organise the Foundation’s day-to-day business. Moving to open source alternatives is not just the right thing to do but an imperative in terms of privacy, security and ownership; for us, our Fellows, and our colleagues.

We stand by that decision and still intend to disentangle ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech. Monopolism and surveillance capitalism are antagonists to open. There must be an alternative. But if we are to fulfil our roles as principal actors in the story of openness, we must - at the very least - be given space to say our lines. Our experience so far has been one of backstage drama, all detracting from the main performance.

We missed important meetings due to problems with sharing calendars and sending or accepting events. Sometimes it worked; others, it didn’t, and this chaotic randomness was not self-contained within the team. It caused a chain reaction and had real-world impacts on others.

Our efforts to seek out fully-encrypted email were successful, but we didn’t fully realise that our newly-found water-tight security came with a significant trade-off. We could no longer search the body text of our emails, only the sender or email header. It was a huge sacrifice in terms of usability, particularly when those emails contain your entire institutional memory dating back to the mid-2000s. Ultimately, the features and usability of the tools we rejected became a seductive and alluring Siren’s song.

This is especially true of the open alternatives we used to replace Google Suite. We struggled to collaborate on important documents and lost a lot of work in the process. A lack of real-time collaboration meant our productivity took a nosedive. And if you are constantly second-guessing a system, you will stop using it altogether, which is hugely problematic. Furthermore, if people connected to our organisation work on company files in their personal Google accounts, it has significant implications around trust, data integrity, and GDPR compliance.

Also, open source could - and should - be a lot more inclusive. For example, our instance of open source video conferencing required hyper-stable connections., and the slightest dip in your Wi-Fi meant significant judder and delay - if not complete breakdown. Yet stable connections are still a pipedream for many. Not everyone lives in California, with all that sun and all that bandwidth.

We understand the counterarguments. Maybe it is our problem and demonstrates a catastrophic failure to adapt. Perhaps we have grown too accustomed to the usability of pervasive (and invasive) proprietary tools. Yes, of course, we want to switch away from technology companies that spy on people and build trillion-dollar industries by selling their data. But we genuinely feel it shouldn’t be this hard to ‘eat healthy food’ and participate in secure, private, open technology that works.

Workarounds exist for all the issues we encountered, and we spent hours on each one to try and make this experiment a success. But ultimately, we don’t want to have to think about email, or calendars, or video conferencing. It’s the email’s message, or the meeting arranged on our calendar, or the people we meet online that are important to us, not the technology underneath it.

So, for now, we reluctantly go back to the ‘other side’ for the sake of productivity and - admittedly - restoring some sanity. We do feel guilty, but this is not a backtrack; instead, it’s a necessary pause in our journey while we map out a new route to our destination. And we are not abandoning all of our newly acquired open source tools. We are still using Cloud68 for hosting our Gitlab instance and open source web stacks. The backend of our technology is brilliant, and our infrastructure remains open. It is the front-facing services for communicating with others that are problematic, and that we - and the open source community - still need to work out.

Thou Shalt Scale Sustainably

2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

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.

Reclaiming Our Digital Sovereignty: The Ins & Outs

2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

As a small and independent organisation, we have a lot of flexibility regarding the digital architecture we use for our day-to-day operations. But over the years, our choices have been based increasingly around convenience, while accepting the privacy trade-off in the process.

On reflection, this has taken us away from our open source roots and our unshakeable belief in safeguarding the human right of privacy. We are philosophically adamant about the importance of a free and open web. But practically, we’re reliant on services from entities with business models expressly geared towards monopolisation, surveillance capitalism, and private profit. We cannot continue with this disconnect.

With this in mind, one of our most extensive areas of focus is replacing Google’s expansive suite of tools. We are dropping Gmail and moving to ProtonMail, an open source email service that offers exceptional privacy and stops Google from harvesting and using our data for unspecified purposes. It also helps us meet our obligations to be GDPR-compliant and addresses our concerns about the potential complications of using a Gmail account as a European entity.

It’s goodbye to Google Suite, too. Nextcloud is a self-hosted productivity platform, and our open source replacement for everything Google Drive has to offer and a lot more besides. We are moving our calendars to the service, too, and Nextcloud means we no longer require Dropbox or the commercial note-taking apps we use with great regularity.

Our website coding is also striking out for pastures new. Like many others, we were saddened by Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition in 2018 but have stuck with it for convenience. GitHub is a renowned second home for programmers and an incredible curation of open source code and projects, but Microsoft’s presence is both unwelcome and concerning. Now feels like the perfect time to look elsewhere, so we are leaving GitHub and sharing the code for our websites and any other pieces of software or content we create via our own instance of GitLab.

Our last significant shift - for the moment - is to move to open source web hosting. We’re handing over the reins to Cloud68, a collective from Albania who are former Flash Grant recipients and kindred spirits who share our dedication to openness, ethics, and the commons. They are members of the librehosting network and have been influential in our decision and incredibly helpful in making this entire process a reality.

This is only the beginning of our mission, and large parts of our infrastructure will still rely on proprietary software for the moment. As our recent experiment with the open source Mattermost didn’t work out as we hoped, we communicate internally with Slack. We video call with Zoom and will still be using services like DocuSign and FormStack as there are no open alternatives of their kind that meet all of our immediate needs.

And despite our best intentions, there will be no complete escape from the far-reaching presence of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple from our lives. Technology’s ‘big five’ are so omnipresent in the world’s digital infrastructure and the web - for many people in developing countries, Facebook is the web - and the best we can do is limit our exposure as much as possible. Our hope is that through solidarity with open services, we can use our position to champion values of cooperation and openness and encourage others to embrace distributed platforms and a culture of decentralisation.

A better world is possible, but we must all do our bit to make it happen. If you care about ethics, privacy, ownership and your online freedom, we urge you to join us: with every deliberate movement towards open source, more people will contribute to the ecosystem and improve it. And it becomes easier for others to do the same.

Take control of your data and infrastructure: contact Cloud68

Find privacy-conscious, open source alternatives to popular software: Switching.Software

Tell us your story: #ReclaimingDigitalSovereignty

Prison Philanthropy Sucks: A Reality Check For Funders

2021-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

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.

The Shuttleworth Foundation

Compliance: A Baseline, Not A Goal

Drifting & Grifting From Open to Fauxpen

When open is fauxpen

Fauxpen in practice

A Fauxpen Definition

20 Years On: Reflections From the Frontier of Philanthropy

Welcome Jeni and Diarmaid!

Introducing: Diarmaid McDonald

The Problem

The Idea

The Fellow

The Foundation

Introducing: Jeni Tennison

The Problem

The Idea

The Fellow

The Foundation

Trials & Tribulations on the Road to Digital Sovereignty

Thou​ ​Shalt​ ​Scale​ ​Sustainably

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

1)​ ​Cash​ ​Flow​ ​is​ ​king

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

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

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

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

6)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​be​ ​modular

7)​ ​Thou​ ​shalt​ ​document

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

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

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

Reclaiming Our Digital Sovereignty: The Ins & Outs

Prison Philanthropy Sucks: A Reality Check For Funders

Thou Shalt Scale Sustainably

The Ten Commandments of Scaling

1) Cash Flow is king

2) Thou shalt be true to thine mission

3) Blessed be the incrementalist

4) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours scale

5) Thou shalt not take whopper-bucks

6) Thou shalt be modular

7) Thou shalt document

8) Thou shalt have stretchy-pants

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

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