Lev Rickards's blog

Trying to improve accountability and practice within philanthropy. (Role for information professionals?) We all live and work in a new ecology. Within the world, philanthropies and nonprofits exist. Within them you have an organization. The world is changing re: social, technology, economics, environment, politics. Waves of influence driving that change: privatization, connection, acceleration. Some realness to social enterprise, some vapor to it as well. (It's rhetoric.)

WIN women in need:

They have a lot of information coming in about their clients, but it doesn't get where it needs to go, and they need to be able to classify their clients based on some of this information. Needs to find out how they're keeping information right now, and things aren't getting recorded/or there's a backlog. Donors have requirements for information gathering. There is some kind of IT office. Try to hire their clients.

technology for supporting organizations that do good work. guidestar - online listing of theoretically all US nonprofit orgs. define a very reasonable scope. pick out a very small subproblem in order to get into the nitty gritty details of what a solution might be. maybe the org is ready to say 'this small thing will help us the most' or it could be that they need someone to help map out the whole process. that can be more valuable, because you can go to contractors after the mapping to do the mop up work.

Multi-Ethnic Information Exchange (MIX) & The School of Information cordially invite you to:

ExercSIing the Right to Vote: The Potential Impacts of the MCRI Faculty Panel

(Q & A Session to follow presentations) Friday, November 3, 11:20-1pm Ehrlicher Room (411 West Hall) LUNCH PROVIDED Panelists include: Patricia Gurin: Nancy Cantor Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women's Studies and Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women's Studies. Professor Gurin was an expert witness in the University of Michigan’s defense of its undergraduate and law school admissions policies. She will provide a background on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative and present her research on the educational value of diversity. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pgurin/

Libraries and community informatics - within the catalog: space for community news, community comments about books. Continuous partial attention - continuing to pay attention all the time to the best of our ability.

Ann

The ideal DFE opportunity: "You can only contribute value; you can't hurt them." -Paul Applying Wikipedia's NPOV to producing issue books/background materials for framing issues in deliverative democracy forums.