About once a week, GuideStar’s President and CEO Jacob Harold writes a note to staff that tackles a variety of topics, most notably updates on the organization’s mission, vision, strategy, and results; insight into analytics, tensions, and trends across the nonprofit sector and philanthropy; and articles and think pieces that impact our world and our work.
As we dive into 2014 head-on, I thought I would do a recap of the latter two categories for you, dear blog readers. Personally I can attest to the broad learning and deep analysis of the social sector that Jacob’s recommended reading list provides, so I hope you find this helpful as well.
The list below is pulled from 33 staff notes and encompasses Jacob’s suggestions from June 18-December 23, 2013. I’ve listed them in reverse chronological order, and included Jacob’s comments to staff when possible. Enjoy!
Data Visualization
- Check out this collection of data visualizations of culture - everything from the historical influence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant to the nested plotlines of the movie Inception.
- A beautiful new book of the year's best infographics with an intro by David Byrne.
- Here's a list of tricks for making infographics in PowerPoint.
- This powerful visualization of the evolution of poverty in the world.
- A rich and sophisticated discussion of the rise of infographics, "This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros of the Infographic".
- Here's a nice Pinterest board of infographics.
- Visualizations of money in politics.
- This is a simple thing, but check out the simple graphics describing the work of the corporate social responsibility consulting form Volans.
- I have to admit, I hate clip art, and I'm not alone.
- A famous data visualization, a map published in 1869 by French engineer Charles Minard that tells the story of Napoleon's march on Moscow, is a masterpiece of communication, called by Edward Tufte "probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn" and subject to all sorts of analysis and modification.
- Google Flu Trends is a very interesting example of the automated extraction of meaning from data.
- "100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design"
Insight into Philanthropy
- Check out F.B. Heron Foundation President’s Clara Miller brilliant piece, "The Looking Glass World of Nonprofit Money."
- A powerful argument for nonprofit leaders to stop creating new structures and instead build on the existing ones.
- An exciting new initiative to apply lean/Agile principles to social change, Lean Impact.
- A very well done video on income inequality.
- A major report on the international anti-poverty agenda as we approach a key date for the Millennium Development Goals.
- The Cultural Data Project (for arts and culture nonprofits).
- The CARS project (for community development financial institutions).
- Lucy Bernholz on the fight over the charitable tax deduction - this political battle is a reminder of our need to justify our role as nonprofits and the advantages we have.
- The Millennium Development Goals, a set of shared goals used by many US-based nonprofits.
- Google launched its nonprofit knowledge panels.
- If you have not seen his TED talk, "The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong," make sure to join the 1M+ people who have already watched it.
- We call private organizations organized for the public good "nonprofits." Should we call them for-purpose?
- Check out David Evan Harris’s great work with the Global Lives Project.
- Charity Navigator just announced the next iteration of its rating system, what they call "CN 3.0."
- A piece from the Foundation Center on the intersection of "network" thinking and philanthropy: "Philanthropy in the Age of Networked Intelligence".
- Among donors, there's often concern about helping a grantee avoid "dependence" on a given foundation's funding - here's an alternative view from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, "When Dependency Is Not a Bad Word".
- The FB Heron Foundation has a radical new approach to foundation strategy.
- Mark Kramer, Co-Founder of FSG, and the FSG team have been among the most important thinkers in philanthropy. You may have seen their writing on collective impact, measurement, and "creating shared value."
Data
- The open culture movement continues apace, with the British Library putting more than 1 million images into the public domain.
- The man often known as the "founder of the World Wide Web," Tim Berners-Lee, created a five-level ranking system for open data.
- The White House's proposed 2014 Fiscal Year Budget was released and included two potentially transformative shifts: (1) mandated e-filing for nonprofits and (2) a requirement that the IRS then release that data for free in a structured format. Here is my post on the GuideStar blog about the announcement.
- A useful summary from my old friend Lee Drutman, an "investigative political scientist" at the Sunlight Foundation, "Two principles to avoid common data mistakes."
- "Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data," pushed by the White House, commissioned by Aspen and written by two scholars, Beth Noveck and Daniel Guroff. Here's a video of the event announcing the report plus some of the many tweets.
- Consider rogue archivist Carl Malamud’s passionate defense of open-data activism at the memorial service for Aaron Schwartz.
- Data about gun licenses is public (like the Form 990) but attempts to aggregate and organize it are meeting with resistance.
- Data has a reputation of being the opposite of emotion, but I think they're quite connected. I was asked to do blog post for Arabella Advisors and I wrote about this - it's here if you're interested.
- Captricity is working with Carl Malamud, who and last week released a bulk data feed of 6 million Forms 990 (here's a Boing Boing article on it: http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/tax-returns-for-6461326-tax.html).
- If you don't know about Creative Commons, it is definitely worth checking out. There are about 500 million works under CC licenses around the world.
World Tensions and Trends
- The turn of the year is always a good time to think about the future, so here are ten big predictions, from Big Data to algae farms.
- On the application of Lean/Agile methodology to hardware manufacturing.
- How to explain the current troubles in American democracy in terms of game theory.
- The Simplicity Thesis: "The only companies or products that will succeed now are the ones offering the lowest possible level of complexity for the maximum amount of value."
- A funny - but sobering article about how even politicians at public events can't beat their smart phone addiction.
- This video about designer t-shirts is a reminder that price and quality are not always correlated-and that brand is powerful (sometimes worryingly powerful) shortcut for the human psyche.
- See a compelling article from Clay Shirky, "Ontology is Overrated" about cheap storage and new ways of categorizing like tagging and metadata.
- Two articles on Microsoft's tough market position: one telling the story in three charts and one through the TV masterpiece, The Wire.
- A cheeky attempt to clean up the NSA's graphic design.
- Take a look a terrific article about the unavoidability of ignorance and the value of humility.
- Macroeconomic decisions in the billions of dollars were made based on a paper in which the researchers failed to drag their formula all the way down the column. There is, as usual, nuance on all sides.
- There have been a number of small towns in Europe that have eliminated all traffic signs - and seen a reduction in accidents.
- The Institute for the Future recently released their regular "10 Year Forecast."
- The Economist, "Counting Couch Potatoes," on tracking TV viewership.
- There's an old, short, good article in Foreign Policy on how it is time that society moves from a "sustainability" frame (let's keep things as they are) to a "resilience" frame (let's ensure we have to capacity to respond to a changing world).
- A frantic but entertaining argument for transparency from beat poet/philosopher Jason Silva.
- A Yahoo! SVP wrote what famously became known as "The Peanut Butter Manifesto." It's worth reading, as is his recent reflection on it where he says he was wrong, it's all about culture.
Communication Theories
- The power of the word "yet."
- The seven deadly sins of storytelling.
- The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges , perhaps my favorite author, said, "poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book." Now the Form 990 is not known for its poetry. But I wonder how we can think about the "encounter" of our users with our data. What is that moment like for them? Not to get too distracted into the "reader response" theory of literary criticism, but this gets to what I said earlier about communications: it does not matter what you say, it matters what your audience hears.
- Here's a very handy guide if you have any questions about the proper use of apostrophes. And, of course there's the Apostrophe Protection Society (in the UK, where else?) which has an amusing collection of apostrophe abuse.
- This just in from The Onion, the word "innovate" has been said 650,000 times at SXSW so far.
- This article argues that every nonprofit should be able to explain its mission in only eight.
- The interesting case of the logo of the University of California - and how logos deeply connect to people's sense of identity.
- A piece on effective writing by legendary ad man David Ogilvy.
Technology Trends
- Two great pieces as we all continue to figure out how to deal with the new reality of our technology-infused work day. First, one on "hyperemployment" in The Atlantic. And, second, a piece in Harvard Business Review on strengthening your attention span.
- A piece in Forbes very relevant to us, "Solving The Tragedy of the API Commons."
- A bonus list of the "25 smartest things Jeff Bezos has said."
- A client-centric software program like the Efforts to Outcomes tools built by Social Solutions.
- A couple great comics on the pace of technology change and in favor of the GuideStar IdeaLab's approach.
- A grumpy but provocative critique of Internet guru Tim O'Reily. It includes the memorable line, "memes are for losers, the real money is in epistemes" - or, put another way, launching a few viral fads is not nearly as powerful as setting the framework in which people understand those fads.
- Some have spoken of Google's "single towering obsession….to build the Star Trek computer."
- You've probably heard about how Facebook describes all of its interconnected information about people as the social graph - and that's why they call their new search tool, Graph Search. This is the kind of data representation you can't jam into a two-dimensional structure like a spreadsheet. Instead, the data is represented by a network structure, showing interconnections across different data categories. In other words, it shows things how they really are.
- There's a terrific article in the Atlantic Monthly which I'd recommend, "The Web's New Monopolists."
- An overview of Internet trends (especially around mobile) from Mary Meeker, a partner at what many consider Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins.
- The top ten technology companies by market capitalization.
- Finally, whatever your politics, I'd recommend taking a look at this article from The Atlantic, "When the Nerds Go Marching In: How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection." I think there are lessons for us in how they organized their work.
Inspirational Reads
- A wise practice very likely to reduce stress, "Cathy's Wager."
- Twelve keys to effective collaboration.
- The "10 commandments for delivering bad news" for those tough moments of necessary honesty.
- From the journal Nature, twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims.
- There's evidence that smell is an essential part of experience.
- A contrarian view: you don't have to learn to code to succeed in this world.
- Here's a great set of frameworks for what it takes to deeply root innovation into your work.
- Many of us struggle with focus; it's a critical skill in our information-drenched era. Maybe we should teach attention in school?
- This great collection of visualized advice.
- The famously innovation-oriented magazine Fast Company compiled a list, "50 Reasons Why We Cannot Change" -- please take a look, get it out of your system, and then let's move forward!
- Let's hope that SurveyMonkey knows how to conduct surveys; here's their advice on how to do it well.
- One great way to increase the likelihood of success is to imagine - ahead of time - how things might go wrong. It's called doing a "pre-mortem" and is a very useful practice (first taught me by Fay Twersky, Director of the Effective Philanthropy Group at the Hewlett Foundation). Here's an HBR piece on the practice.
- Sitting all the time isn't good for us, check out this article and video for some good tips of how to stay healthy in front of your computer
- A nice compilation of "critical thinking strategies for the modern learner."
- An interesting interview of the founder of Visa on "chaordic" (chaos and order) organizational transformation.
- A sobering article on how people don't tend to finish online articles (will you finish this sentence?) The title says it all: "10 Things Really Amazing Employees Do"
- An interesting argument for learning some computer programming, "Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won't Hire You."
- Consider this piece from Seth Godin about urgency; here's what may be the essential line for us, "You don't need more time, you just need to decide."
- Empathy is actually very useful. And, frankly, empathy is the hot new thing in business (One Forbes article called it "part of the new operating system for our modern world.")
- What's the best mistake you ever made? (Best way to learn from mistakes: admit them.)
- It's worth taking a look at this piece by Bill Gates on teacher evaluation - he argues for a multidimensional evaluation approach to reflect the complexity of teaching. Sound familiar?
- GuideStar's context is complex. Complexity can be hard to deal with; so what can we learn about simplicity? The man who "wrote the book" about simplicity is John Maeda. At time he wrote "The Laws of Simplicity," Maeda was a design professor at MIT and he is now the president of the legendary Rhode Island School of Design. Of course you have to read the book to understand his ideas and images in depth - but some are (in the spirit of simplicity) self-explanatory. I'm particularly fond of the first, second, and fifth laws.
- As I was filling out my bracket for March Madness, I was struck that my picks may have been distorted by my loyalty to Duke (justified as that loyalty may be). The Wall Street Journal has an interesting solution to this challenge, what they call the "Blindfold Bracket". It hides the names of the teams - and identifying characteristics such as player names - and lets one make choices only based on the facts.
- The six potential financial situations James presented were an example of a great technique for dealing with uncertainty about the future: scenario planning. It's impossible to predict the future, but you can prepare yourself for dealing with the future if you systematically imagine a range of potential scenarios.
- There is some evidence that humans have the cognitive capacity to hold only about seven items in the mind at once.
- On Wednesday a friend and I went to see Henry V at the Folger Shakespeare Library. A rather extraordinary performance, I thought. If you ever need any inspiration, check out the sublime pep talks in it: Sublime Pep Talk ("we band of brothers").
- A piece on fighting back from too many meetings.
- A lesson about the importance of the organizational scale for accessing capital, even in an entrepreneurial age.
- But there's quite a bit of research about the importance of geographic proximity for building community, sharing ideas, and accelerating innovation.
- This article is worth a look, especially the remarkable image of how the Craiglist homepage can be mapped to start-ups trying to create specific markets: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/01/the-future-of-online-marketplaces/.
GuideStar Around Town
- Here's an article about one of the events in New Haven, CT.
- Here are some highlights from the Independent Sector 2013 conference.
- If you didn't see it before, check out this piece about the future of GuideStar on the blog of the Knight Foundation.
- You can learn more about our new board member, Sunand Menon, here and see some of his writings on philanthropy here.
What did you read in 2013 that influenced your thinking? What are your recommended picks for 2014? Share them with us in the comments below!
