A Lesson from P2PU’s Digital Journalism Mashup: Treat For-Credit and Not-For-Credit Participants Differently (And How Someday, Maybe We Won’t Have To)

My first guest blog post on Open.Michigan and I'm already critiquing the work of Creative Common's CEO. Yikes! I hope I manage to start a good (and in my opinion, much needed) conversation in the OER community without offending anyone.

Measuring Contributions of Joy: An In-the-Moment Logic Model

My roommate from my first year of college, with whom I haven't spoken in person since but who, I gather, now works with some sort of youth-serving nonprofit, recently crowdsourced the PR objectives of her fundraising department on Facebook:

If you were deciding to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program, what would you most want to know about the program or the agency providing the program?

The responses were the typical relatively ungrounded concepts: measurable results, effectiveness, impact, maximized efficiencies...

Having worked at a major granting institution focused on youth-serving programs, I figured I probably had some ideas to contribute. I prepared to ponder it for a couple minutes, as is my custom with serious FB surveys. I looked up from my computer and propped my head to one side, but by the time the comment box was open, I was off typing an idea I'd never heard before anywhere, and certainly not at WKKF.

Well, to be honest, I did manage to pull it around and relate it to their logic model (inputs, outputs, outcome). And, I think the initial inspiration came from the pictures the Foundation had hanging in their stairwell. But generally speaking, what I had to say was not the talk of bureaucracies. After all, she had asked what I would want to know, not what Kellogg would have wanted to know. But then again, I thought, they're probably the same.

What I would want to know, and what I think other people might consider wanting to know, is how much joy the youth add to society.

Too often we think of youth-serving programs as exactly that: youth-serving. We wise and well-researched adults serve the kids what is best for them, the aim being to make them into wise, well-researched, serving adults. But is that really what we want our communities to be about? Today's world, both youth and adult, is permeated with depression and loneliness. Too many kids grow up seeing themselves as a burden: expensive, distracting, and service-requiring.

It seems to me that what we really need is to let youth serve us. With their abundant energy, curious spirit, and fun-loving nature, I can't think of a demographic that could better help us slog through the day with a smile on our face. Really, it's such a perfect pairing, you'd almost think our species evolved with generational interdependencies as habit.

Okay, so, maybe my idea is completely obvious, but that doesn't make it bad.

So, in case you haven't gotten it yet, what I'm saying is that we should measure the value of youth programs by how much good they allow kids to do. It's good for the kids; makes them feel appreciated, which is absolutely imperative for them to grow up continuing to do good. And it's good for the rest of the world. Good is good.

To balance out the equation (don't want to get carried away with all the good), we subtract what the youth take out of the world: the inputs in the logic model. Namely, of interest to me in our current agricultural climate, is what they eat - hopefully sustainable harvests that add good jobs to the economy. Also, maybe I'd want to know what kind of space they consume. Do their buildings inspire awe or do they make parents want to run to the outskirts as blindly as freeways will let them?

Well, hmmm, maybe it's okay to get carried away with the good afterall. Or maybe it's just that when we don't have to look so far into the future to find it, we make sure that that which we take from the world gives back. Win-win, they call it, and, no, I don't think it's too optimistic a thing to aspire to. Unfortunately, future-looking assessment systems that focus on one subject over a process don't even have a mechanism for measuring themselves against that aspiration.

The older I get, the more I think the idea that we should be enduring hardship for the future is fundamentally flawed. I don't have near the philosophical chops to explain it, but I think we want to be adding more in-the-now analyses of value, and it seems to me the most clear-cut place to start with that is recognizing that youth have something to give, now, as youth; it's pretty darn hard to argue with the fact that youthfulness is too great a thing to keep locked away in receipt of service.

We need to start demanding that nonprofits measure their value to society as a whole, in terms of joy, in the now. The way the math works out, the amount by which their youth are actively making the world a happier place is going to factor into that calculus significantly. And for the time being, as long as I, misguidedly, I suppose, have a chunk of happiness stored away in some cold, hard cash, that calculus is going to be what I approximate when I decide "to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program."

He bound his soul to his music, and what a good soul it was

The comeback tour was scheduled for early July in London, with expectations of endazzlement beyond what the world has ever seen. But instead it came Thursday afternoon, in tight black pants and white socks moonwalking their way across impromptu vigils the world over.

My generation, and maybe yours too, was bombarded with Facebook posts, "MJ is dead, and so is a part of my childhood." "The soundtrack of a generation," the media calls it, and they're right. The white glove and the crotch grabbing made both MTV and our own garage band experiences the memorable joys that they were, feeding hungry little souls across the nation's suburbs with the energy and ingenuity every child needs to grow. So in the stunning hours after the King of Pop was pronounced dead, there was really nothing we could do but unite in celebration of the music and dances that had come of his talent, hard work, and relentless pursuit of innovation.

It was a party the likes of which the world will probably never see again. A global economy, doubled over in self-doubt and insecurities, stretched gloved hands to the sky and thrust belted hips to the future, focusing rampant neuroses, for a moment, on the realities of physics and the uniforms mankind can wear to bamboozle them. From one street corner to the next, shrieks of Michael Jackson's signature "Ow!" flushed away the pain and stress of an economy that seeks to but cannot yet appreciate the contributions most of us have to make.

It was in those hours and the days that followed, spent huddled around ancient technologies broadcasting Michael Jackson marathons, that the public, for the first time it seems, discovered the true contributions of the person behind the music. The soul Michael had worked so persistently to bind to his music, that had been branded and marketed so successfully bit by bit, finally took on a holistic shape that even most Americans were willing to welcome into their living rooms.

YouTube views of the world's best selling album skyrocketed, and so did views of a lesser known and almost unbearably sensitive 26 year old in the making of "We Are the World" and also of the reclusive and reviled Wacko Jacko in "Leave Me Alone." For those who have grown accustomed to being spoonfed their worldviews between ninety second commercial breaks, back-to-back tributes on all the major networks drew the conclusion: the super-star who had reconstructed himself so many times, through his music, his image, and through plastic surgery, was, in fact, one coherent loving, caring, and incredibly unique human being.

Only that he is no longer. Michael Jackson, the man, will never have the opportunity to show his children how he can defy gravity in a live performance. His brilliant ear and creative eye can no longer push without encumbrance at the boundaries of sound and video. And Michael, to the relief of his attorneys, can no longer share his bed and home with the young boys he so sweetly and philanthropically read stories to and tucked in at night.

But the soul we all heard in little Jackson's soaring voice - that love and spirit that never had a chance to play ball with the other kids, that was instead bottled up into perfect performances and fantasy lands and sent out to the world and its children, tragically, to be ridiculed into shopping and prescription drug addictions - that love and spirit has found a new home: in the hearts of a generation that can now, for the first time, understand what a truly good man the world has lost.

So while MJ's B-rated horror movie, along with the hundred million copies the soundtrack souled, will forever remain ingrained in the dance moves of the ten-year-olds each of us usually keeps tucked calmly away, we can now also appreciate a deeper contribution from the Man in the Mirror. Dead at 50, the Lost Boy, who had too much love and spirit to ever grow up, forces us to ask ourselves in what ways are we bottling up our own souls for export. Have we been working all these years, negotiating demands on our resources and reputation, in order to bind our souls to our work? And even if we have, is that enough? Can the people of the world really live in peace with each other if they can't figure out how to drink from the source?

In these past few days, we have drunk of Michael Jackson's sincerity. When the beating stopped, the world turned to a man who spent his life trying to win our love through his music, and we gave it to him because of who he was - an offering his upbringing probably never even let him think to wish for. Hidden to most of the world behind shimmering costumes and scary masks, his sincerity, and the discovery of our love for it, will forever remain an inspiration to those who have come together to mourn the pop icon in recent days. But it's now up to us to defy the personality-imploding laws of society in order to structure our surviving brilliance to shine outwardly into a bastion of appreciation.

Thank you, Michael, for daring to show us our own cruelty. May you now rest in peace, for you are a martyr to a global good in which your children, and mine, will someday thrive.

Can iGoogle allow mere mortals to parent global corporations? A question from the Motherlode.

The New York Times Magazine's parenting blog has a piece on why rewarding and punishing children doesn't teach them to be good people in the long run. Referencing Alfie Kohn, it says, "research shows that the more you reward people, the less interest they come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. The more you offer extrinsic motivators, the more intrinsic motivation tends to decline."

So first off, of course, we have to wonder about capitalism. We ask, "Have we just given up on adults becoming good people?" And then we get sick of asking the same depressing questions about the dehumanization of capitalism, and we ponder instead the recent shift to a carrot and stick model of government.

An NGO wants private companies and nonprofits to build start-ups in Africa; they'll incentivize it. A local government wants developers to stop putting gates around neighborhoods; they'll punish it (assume a nexus). Like bribing children, this approach works wonders. But is there really no way to make companies, organizations, and agencies learn to do the right thing on their own?

It does seem that the success of shareholder accountability and grantee evaluatory approaches have paled in comparison, at least since the tables the players sit at have reached orbitable circumferences.

I like to believe that the information revolution's greatest gift will be to deliver local transparency to a world dependent on global accountability, such that the intervals of reward and punishment become infinitesimally small, turning its extrinsic nature intrinsic. Suddenly, the fairy tale goes, groups start being good because they want to.

Psychologically, I'm not sure this is really what happens, but it seems a pretty mathematical model, doesn't it?

The interesting bit of this, I think, is to try to understand how individuals the world over can possibly review sufficient amounts of data to allow for this global accountability, thereby, essentially, eliminating the middle man, or at least shrinking him. I'd always assumed it wasn't possible, but if you combine the upcoming interfaces of iGoogle (or, surprisingly, the present interfaces of Windows Live) and the trainable and socially networked Digging processes with humankind's Matrix-scrolling ability, it seems both potentially feasible and potentially very, very good.

Silence on California's setback for civil rights sets back Obama's claim to change

My baby sister has a three year old son named Sincere. In modern American lingo, Sincere is black, but my family has always known him to be multiracial - black and white. My sister and I don't talk all that much, but when we do, I often realize that I'm frustrated by something that excites her and that I had thought excited me. That's what happened today when my sister's bubbling enthusiasm for the president elect interrupted my reading of the mass email an offended friend in California had just sent me. To me, the glaringly antithetical outcomes for civil rights of the US presidential election and California's vote on Prop 8 are what they are, but the failure of the Obama campaign and the media that cover it to grab both issues by the balls and try to make sense of them while they are center-stage is a huge disappointment.

Yesterday morning, my sister chattered, she and Sincere had been heading out to the parking lot of their apartment complex, each carrying with them the hopeful spirit of a child, on account of limited exposure to the world's injustices and the previous night's election of a president for change, respectively. As they approached the car, Mohammad, their forty year old neighbor whom they barely know, came skipping up to them, clearly overwhelmed with similar sentiment. He shook Sincere's little hand, looked him in the eye, and said, "Congratulations, son."

OK. So I'm the kind of person who turns off the radio when the topic turns back to race. The color of one's skin strikes me as interesting only when it comes to choreographing artistic dance pieces. The same goes for sexual orientation, although my interest there has less to do with dance and more to do with sex and orientating.

I didn't try to remind my sister of this, but I did mention that I was glad to be in Michigan so I could appreciate this win for change instead of being stuck in California with my depressed friends. She was clueless and sufficiently enthralled with her own outcome to sidestep curiosity.

Don't get me wrong. When Barack Obama took the stage Tuesday night, I cried. And when he walked off, I quickly turned to scanning major news channels for historic civil rights clips that would pull on my heartstrings the way singing "We Shall Overcome" had back in second grade music class. Then I stayed up another hour to watch people around the world celebrate in the streets.

It's taken me a couple of days to sort through my election-night emotions, but with the help of the glumness my sister's ignorance left me with today, I think I've got it figured out.

Tuesday night, I cried out of relief for an oppressed people who have, for way too long, had no choice but to carry on in the face of nonsensical deprecation. I've long believed that the biggest gift you can give another person is the belief that he or she is capable of doing the great things that he or she is capable of doing. So when Barack stepped up to accept the country's enthusiastic confidence that a black man can do the most important job on earth, what I saw in his humble smile and deliberate wave was a reflection of that gift of confidence across a sea of white neighbors, bosses, and teachers, to every black man, woman, and child in America. It was perhaps the most awesome irrevocable contribution of goodness to the world that I have ever witnessed. But these tears had nothing to do with me.

The celebrations, however, did. As a middle-class, well-educated white girl, I'm oppressed by ignorance too. I want to help the world, and I've always felt like I had to be secretive and solitary in my attempts to do so. Obama's call to action changed that. Suddenly, the weight I'd been shouldering alone due to antagonistic societal structures and an almost complete lack of camaraderie, was being raised by shouts and chants all over the world. No longer would I feel sandwiched between the hippie's paralyzing passion for fundamental change and the ivy grad's pragmatic infliction of talent for tweaking the system towards better. The two, both handed a massive gift of confidence in purpose, would become one and the same. For the first time in eight years, my breathing was smooth and seamless.

So the fact that I soon found myself struggling with depression amidst all this goodness is no small thing. It's even more striking when you consider that I was in no way personally offended by Californians' vote to protect the sanctity of marriage. In fact, I almost agree with them. Of course, I radically disagree that marriage has anything to do with the governance of a state.

If I understand correctly, most of the rights of civil unions for domestic partnerships can be drawn up by a lawyer in any state. Streamlining the process for civil unions, as California and many other states and countries have done, recognizes that the form of unions between people can vary beyond opposite-sex romantic relationships. However, extending that recognition only so far as same-sex romantic relationships is problematic. What's the argument for excluding a sister and sister-in-law pair who lost a husband/brother in Iraq and are now raising kids together? Sure, they may someday enter into committed long-term relationships that supersede their sororal domestic partnership, but for the time being, they deserve all the rights of a family unit working to do their best in the world. Personally, as a polyamorist, I think we should extend the rights to include not only these type of platonic relationships but also the sorts of romantic relationships that would make the folks in middle of the country, save Utah, scream. I even have faith that this will happen someday, although it will probably take the form a much more complicated and clickable individualistic juggling of union rights, but of relevance here is that I believe the outcome of Prop 8 puts us on the right path for achieving this separation between religiously significant marriage and legally relevant civil rights.

That said, I strongly disagree with Tuesday night's outcome; yet I had relatively little problem with it, especially when I saw that the ads Protect the Family was running did a decent job of selling the proposition as legally nondiscriminatory. Essentially, I accept the right of people to vote to protect a religious artifact. But that vote belongs in the church. Give it to the People to decide how their government works, and a vote for separate but equal means the same thing now as it did in 1954. So when the marches of understandably offended married and potentially married gays and lesbians went unmentioned in yesterday's frenzy of congratulatory back-patting for our country's achievements in civil rights, I was pissed.

I don't expect the masses of voters who have been brainwashed to the tune of 75 million dollars to understand the nuances here, but when one side is telling folks a yes vote doesn't discriminate against the gay couple that watches their dog, and that gay couple is simultaneously crying and marching in the street because they feel discriminated against, I do expect the civil rights movement to say something. I'd also had great hope that those who will be in the upcoming Obama Administration would feel compelled by either the need to explain the discord to the people they claim to share both the victory and responsibility for change with, or the need to take advantage of a rare opportunity to leverage political emotion for a more coherent structure of civil rights. The fact that they were compelled to act by neither and that right now my sister is unaware of the contradictions the country has imprinted on itself has me worried that little Sincere will actually grow up in a world where ridiculous and degrading policies can take up to one hundred and eight years to see their cultural end - not, in fact, in Obama's promised land where an honest and no-nonsense approach to collective problem solving will reign.