NEWSBYNATHANIEL WHITTEMORE

"What, after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities and courage to advocate them."

-Jane Addams

After two wonderful years, we're formally announcing that there will be no more regular posting on the Social Entrepreneurship blog on Change.org. It's been quite a ride.

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About half way through college, I began to hear a new term all around me. It was "social entrepreneurship," and the idea, at least according to this book "How to Change the World," that everyone was reading, was that there was a new group of changemakers who were not wedded to the dogma of the past and were finding innovative ways to combine business and nonprofit know-how to tackle the world's biggest challenges.

The concept was like a brilliant spark for many of my peers. We were part of an incredibly lucky group who had had the chance to see the world up close much earlier than generations before us. Social entrepreneurship felt like an approach to change that could learn from the failures and successes of past development strategies to create something more scalable and more sustainable.

Of course, social entrepreneurship was not, in 2004, new. The field had decades of history, and heroes who were building an infrastructure long before there were any cover stories to reward them. But if the groundwork was laid in the past, it is in the last half decade that the field has really come into its own.

For the last two years, this blog has been covering the accelerating cultural importance of "social entrepreneurship." We've covered the brilliant innovators who are reshaping fields as diverse as health and access to finance. We've looked at the trends shaping investment and the development of new metrics. We've watched the Obama administration's foray into the social innovation space. And we've always tried to cover the critics and skeptics who wonder about the hype and efficacy of this nascent movement.

If one theme has stood out more clearly than any, it is just how young the field remains. However exciting or alluring it seems in print, the social entrepreneurship space is growing in fits, kicks, false starts, flops, failures, and improbable successes. It is messy, chaotic, incomplete, and still wonderfully full of possibility.

One of the joys of covering the field from Change.org has been that this company is, itself, an embodiment of the challenges and opportunities of startup social ventures. What began as a Facebook for social change advocates evolved into a media hub for important causes and continues to develop as a platform to coordinate the most important collective action campaigns in the world.

Over the next few months, Change.org will be increasingly focused on its mission of channeling people into high-impact collective action campaigns. We've seen how powerful it can be to get 1,000 people to email a local mayor or business, and learned how to help our readers enact change in real time. Yet with this evolution, the time is right to refocus on actions and specific cause areas, and end our more general coverage of the social entrepreneurship field.

There is still much to accomplish in this movement. While I've loved working with our writing staff to build this community, my belief is that to truly unleash the power latent in the growing network of social entrepreneurs, we need better tools to help people harness their social capital.

My full time focus will be on building Assetmap, a platform designed to transform the way individuals and teams use the resources in their networks to support one another. I'll be moving my writing under the company blog, and covering topics like social capital, the psychology of teams and giving, and more.

I believe wholly and absolutely that we've barely scratched the surface of the importance of social entrepreneurship. This field carries with it not simply innovative organizations, but also an entirely new way of conceptualizing value and organizing business and society. For champions of a world in which companies and nonprofits are partners in enabling equality, opportunity, and human rights, our story is just beginning and time is on our side.

I'm glad to have spent the last two years sharing some parts of that story with this community of readers, and I can't wait to see what the future will hold. Thanks to all the writers and Change.org staff who have made this journey possible.

To follow my next steps, visit http://blog.assetmap.com or sign up to be the first to know when Assetmap is available.

(Ed. note: This is a guest post by Yury Lifshits. Yury is a Research Scientist at Yahoo who has done extensive research into market models. We're thrilled to republish this piece on the changing nature of public goods, which was originally published on his blog).

There is a new trend in the tech industry: making money on public goods. Until recently, public goods were viewed as an area of philanthropy. Now entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders see the business opportunity there. This essay gives a basic tour around the market of public goods. We cover the definition, core business models and future areas of growth.

What is a public good?

One can classify goods by the following two criteria: rivalry and excludability. A good is rival if its usage by one consumer reduces availability to others. In contrast, non-rival good can be used by every consumer in parallel. If a producer manages access for every user individually, the good is called excludable. Non-excludable goods are available for everyone interested. Thus, we get four groups of goods:

• Private good (rival and excludable): iPhone, Toyota Prius.
• Common-pool good (rival and non-excludable): Customer support, water in a river, conference rooms in an office building.
• Club good (non-rival and excludable): Cable television, Windows 7.
• Public good (non-rival and non-excludable): National defense, roads (excepting toll roads), GPS Satellites, Wikipedia.

In this essay we use the term public goods more broadly than in classic economics settings. Namely, we consider voluntarily non-excluded goods and nonrival-before-congestion goods to be public. Public goods are produced in a number of areas: city infrastructure, education, law enforcement, peace, safety/security, energy, environment, health, food safety, social security, employment, transportation, tourism, mass communications, and financial systems. In this essay we will have a look at the concept of public goods enterprise (PGE) - an organization that produces non-rival non-excludable goods at profit.

The conference is the tip of the PopTech iceberg, and what lies under the surface is a series of "unconventional collaborations" in which the organization staff find creative ways to bring dissimilar and disparate actors together in order to see how their different perspectives and resources can amplify and augment one another. They've announced two more of their collaborations during the event, demonstrating some of the best experimental impulses of the network.

PeaceTXT: Violence is rampant in urban areas like Chicago. A few years ago, epidemiologist Gary Slutkin began to wonder if the spread of violence looked like (and could be stopped in similar ways to) the spread of infectious diseases. The result was an organization called CeaseFire, which uses a network of community members as "violence interrupters." These community members are usually people with a sorted past who have seen the long-term results of violence, and can speak from experience that it just isn't worth it. The organization has produced amazing results, reducing homicides in some places by more than 75%.

The challenge for CeaseFire is to figure out how to meet the incredible demand for their services, successfully scale up, and even think about how to apply their model in new settings, such as combatting international terrorism. To explore whether there is a technology opportunity to help them, PopTech connected CeaseFire with the folks behind FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi. The teams have spent the last few months getting to know one another and brainstorming ways that technology can improve CeaseFire's work. If they figure something out, it would truly be a radical collaboration -- CeaseFire could hardly be more focused on real, local relationships and credibility.

Own Your Future: Again coming out of the PopTech Accelerator program and anchored by organizations from the Social Innovation Fellows program, Own Your Future is a collaboration between PopTech and the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media (BCAM) high school. BCAM is a highly innovative school that uses creativity and digital multimedia to engage students in a more significant way.

Own Your Future is a program that will help students make money from the creative works they produce. While the exact mechanisms haven't been figured out yet, the core of the program will be a one year experience that includes entrepreneurship training and financial literacy. Money that students make from their works will be put in savings accounts that they gain access to upon graduation.

These sort of collaborations are the hallmark of the PopTech network. I think both of them have huge potential not just for the actors involved, but as demonstrations of broader opportunities.

Photo credit: kk+

One of the opening sessions of PopTech was entitled "How (Not) to Change the World," and featured speakers like Mulago Foundation director Kevin Starr and Water for People founder Ned Breslin discussing the failures of development, and how to do it better. One of the things that I was struck by was how much of the problem was a failure of design, yet at the same time, how few people in the development space would label it as such.

Almost any organization working towards local or international development is in the business of designing products or services that are designed to change or amplify some behavior towards a certain goal. New diagnostics technologies are designed to shift how diseases are discovered and stopped. Sports for youth programs are designed to shift young people's perspective about team work and their ability to achieve. Agriculture support programs are designed to give rural farmers new tools or strategies to increase their crop yields. And the list goes on.

While these are all very different contexts, each of these programs require a design process in which the organization in charge figures out what behavior they're trying to change, which levers for change to focus on, and which resource, cultural or other constraints dictate the boundaries of the designs they can use.

These processes tend to be shared across just about all the domains of social change. Determining a theory of change, or more prosaically a desired shift in behavior. Understanding the array of constraints that face any environment in which a service or product will be deployed. Looking at the models that exist and the opportunities for innovation that could shape the product or service to be designed. While the manifestation may be different, together these questions and considerations comprise a design discipline.

Yet most nonprofits and international development organizations don't think of themselves as designers. And they certainly don't think about themselves as potential clients for design firms. There is an extreme lack of knowledge and recognition of "design" as a field of managerial and creative consulting that could dramatically reshape social impact outcomes.

I think part of this gap is simply the newness of "design" as a management discipline in general. It has really only been in the last couple decades that firms like IDEO have demonstrated that major companies can employ external design services to advance their offerings. This is still diffusing across the commercial world, not to mention the nonprofit world.

But I think part of it is an implicit or explicit feeling of possession on the part of nonprofits that leads them to believe that they should be able to do all of this on their own. After all, its their experience right? Their connections. Their ideas. Their approaches. What this fails to understand is that the function of design services is about helping organizations apply the discipline of thinking through product and service design to those things they already know, have and understand.

There is some hope that lack of understanding of design services for development are changing. Catapult Design, Project M Lab, Project H Design and more are blazing the way. But there's still a long way to go, and I hope the market for these services grows.

One of the central questions in the growth of the field of social entrepreneurship is whether the term and framework of "social entrepreneurship" will persist, or whether we will look back and see it instead as an intellectual and organizational movement that influenced other fields without becoming one on its own. The annual PopTech conference in Camden, Maine suggests that the question might be a "both/and" rather than an "and/or".

PopTech is a network of cross-disciplinary thinkers and doers with a creative problem solving and social innovation. Throughout the year, PopTech convenes actors from different fields to work together on significant challenges, and the community is anchored by their annual conference in Camden, Maine.

The conference, which I'm attending this week, runs four days and is replete with talks, performances, and unexpected social encounters. While content appears king from the outside, however, the conference is also the seat for two of the most innovative parts of the PopTech platform, their Social Innovation Fellows program and their Science and Public Leadership Fellows program, a new partnership designed to help give brilliant scientists the media chops and savvy they need to better share their work with the public at large.

The Social Innovation Fellows program is in its third year, and is distinguished by the seriousness of its curricular program. For a full week before the larger conference begins, the selected entrepreneurs live in Camden and receive basically nonstop training, mentorship and support from designers, public speaking experts, social impact measurement folks, and more. The program has included social ventures like Global Citizen Year, Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, and Samasource.

In many ways, the program demonstrates why having a "social entrepreneurship" field is so valuable. The projects represent an extremely diverse set of problems and approaches to change, but benefit from a curriculum that is overarching and reflects the needs of early stage socially focused ventures.

Yet at the same time, what happens after the Fellows program ends shows why the social entrepreneurship field shouldn't shirk it's overlap and potentials to integrate with the larger fields of business and science. Throughout the four days of he Maine conference, the Fellows give five minute presentations to the entire audience which end up being some of the best content of the event. This sparks conversations and partnerships with senior execs at well established companies that simply wouldn't come from an event purely focused on social entrepreneurship.

The lesson, I think, is that the field is young, but perhaps at the exciting moment where its beginning to have enough of sense of itself that it can interact with the larger fields that drive business and society, not with fear of assimilation but of excitement of mutual influence.

Photos: whiteafrican

(Ed. Note: This is a guest post from SoCap10 by San Franista author Emily Goligoski)

There are two things to be expected from startups, if you follow IDEO’s Jocelyn Wyatt’s thinking: they’ll change their names and business models.

And, if that second or third name sticks long enough for people to know the organization, it’s likely that the founders have learned a bit about early non-success and making the wrong choices. Enter FailFaire, an open forum for attendees of this week’s Social Capital Markets conference (SOCAP) to share stories about their failed projects and social business undertakings.

Thirty entrepreneur participants were greeted to the first West Coast FailFaire with the words “it is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures” by host and humanitarian design firm Catapult Design. The format for stories about mistakes and going belly up allowed presenters ten minutes each to introduce themselves, explain what they tried to do and where it went wrong, and ponder what they’d do differently next time.

Catchafire founder Rachael Chong described her struggle to find the right developer to build Catchafire Beta. It took her almost one year, two developers and spending most of her seed funding before she found and recruited former Hulu VP of Technology to build a site that was aligned with her vision for Catchafire. Chong’s takeaways: be selective in picking technical partners (even if it means taking part in founder match events) and ensure that there’s a trial period before a new teammate can become vested.

Rules for the open-source Failfaire, which operates under a Creative Commons license, include no livestreaming. After events in New York and DC hosted by Mobile Active and the World Bank Institute, respectively, the SOCAP event was the first to feature talks that weren’t prepared in advance. Instead, a third of the participants spoke off the cuff about their experiences—and presented on their own behalves, not their organizations, per FailFaire guidelines.

Other recommendations from those who have been there? Don’t expect the first launch effort to be a commercial success. Make sure your goals are in line with your partners’. And ask yourself “is this something I’d want to work on for the next five years?” before jumping in--a good question from Skillshare that might have prevent future fails.

Photo credit: hans.gerwitz

(Ed. note: This post was contributed by Amie Vaccaro, who writes about social innovation for Triple Pundit and other publications.)

At Socap I sat down with Nigel Waller, Founder and CEO of Movirtu to learn more about his work. Movirtu has created a way to dramatically reduce the cost of cell phone access to the 1 billion living below the poverty line who both use mobile services and don't own a phone. And they've done so while maintaining a strong business case for their immediate customers, cell phone carriers. Designed in collaboration with Frog Design, Movirtu's Cloud Phone enables an entire family to share one phone while maintaining their privacy.

At the Y Combinator seed stage web venture accelerator program, there is a famous graph about the hype cycle of emerging technology that former participants and mentors show new program members to help ground them in the ups and downs of startups. The graph starts from launch, goes up and to the right as big media and the buzz machine takes hold (the peak of inflated expectations), and then crashes into the ground as the startup gets into the messy business of turning an idea into a business. As I hang out at the Third SoCap, I wonder if our field is in the trough of disillusionment.

For the last five years, few things in the social change space have had the buzz and cache as "social entrepreneurship." Part of it is a generational thing: Millennials have seen the failures of the pure-business and the pure-activism mindsets, and are attracted to the blend. But part of it is simply that this is an idea whose time has come. People have been working for decades to prove the basic models that bring financial value and social good together, and those experiments have converged into knowledge and hit a cultural zeitgeist that is simply ready to supercharge them into the mainstream.

And supercharged the field has been. Social entrepreneurship has been exposed. Muhammed Yunus' win of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work building the microfinance field; Kiva's bringing online opportunities to get involved in the social entrepreneurship field to people's living rooms; the list goes on. The point is that there have been incredible expectations -- perhaps a peak of inflated expectations, to use the hype cycle terminology.

Yet in the two years since the financial world collapsed, and the prognosticators claimed that now was the time for social entrepreneurship and social business, the reality is that the field hasn't gone mainstream. Most investors still do not think primarily in terms of social and economic value. Most entrepreneurs continue to create businesses outside this space. Even the high expectation of the Obama Administrations' much-vaunted embrace of social innovation have been somewhat flubbed.

And there has been some disillusionment. I've seen many young entrepreneurs veer away from the field rather than diving deep because of it. The good news is what comes after the trough of disillusionment. It is the "slope of enlightenment," when the new technology begins to have figured out enough about how it intersects with the real world -- outside the hype cycle --  to actually get traction and change things in a meaningful way.

I'm not sure whether we're through the trough of disillusionment or not. This field feels like its starting to get past its own hype, there's more and more doing (although also still a lot of talking) and I think that's positive. Only time will tell where we go next, but if there is something of a diminished hype, I think it's a positive and necessary step toward a field fully unleashed.

While I try to look at everything I cover on this blog from many angles, when it comes to coverage of the Unreasonable Institute, I am completely biased. I think that they are filling a vital education gap (and hopefully, increasingly, a funding gap) in our sector with panache and joie de vivre and if you're an early-stage social entrepreneur who wants a significant competitive advantage and amazingly supportive community, you'd be nuts not to apply.

For those who haven't read about the Unreasonable Institute, the program was founded in 2009 and held its first summer incubator in 2010. The program is an 8-week live-in program in Boulder, Colorado. During that time, entrepreneurs live together and learn from one another, and are treated to daily sessions with mentors who are experts in topics ranging from branding to business development and beyond.

In addition to that support, they have the opportunity to come away from the summer with a meaningful dose of new funding. The Unreasonable Institute hosts one of First Light Venture's Village Capital programs, which means that the entrepreneurs actually make the decisions about funding, as well. Last year, funding went to mobile money gateway Kopo Kopo, direct trade coffee company Liga Masiva, and ethical toilet paper company Who Gives A Crap?

Something I think will be different than last year will be an emphasis on curricular trajectory. The program is anchored by the relationships between the Unreasonable entrepreneurs and mentors, but last year, there wasn't a clear, linear path through the content that the mentors we're providing. This coming year, the program will be divided into 5 weeks for business development and 3 weeks on execution and outreach.

The application process -- which has just opened --  involves a first round written application, a second round of interviews, and most interestingly, a third round fundraising battle royale. The program costs $10,000, but entrepreneurs aren't allowed to pay. They have to fundraise it all online in a test of entrepreneurial mettle.

I can't say enough good things about the program and the people behind it. Stop reading now and go apply.

And if you still need convincing, watch the first of ten episodes of Unreasonable TV from the 2010 institute.

Unreasonable TV: Episode 1 - Unreasonable Beginnings from Unreasonable Institute on Vimeo.

Photo credit: Daniel Epstein

Last year, First Light Ventures stepped into the seed stage social venture funding void in a big way with their innovative "Village Capital" program. Now, they're teaming up with the Hub Bay Area to pour three-quarters of a million dollars into social ventures over the next two years. Of course, the money is delivered with a twist.

First Light is the seed stage arm of Gray Ghost Ventures, an Atlanta-based firm that cut its teeth innovating with capital for microfinance. Founder Bob Pattillo and his team quickly wanted to move into the seed space, but weren't sure of a cost effective way to perform due diligence on such unpredictable young companies.

The solution they came up with was to invest social entrepreneurs themselves to vette their peers and make the investment decisions on behalf of the firm. Inspired by the village associations that provide collateral and risk mitigation for microfinance loans, the so-called Village Capital funds brought together cohorts of 10-20 social ventures who got to know each other over the course of a ten week program, and who at the end would be in charge of making the decision about who would get investment dollars.

The Village Capital programs were tested in four settings, in India, New Orleans, Boulder (as part of the Unreasonable Institute) and in the Bay Area. Between the programs, First Light invested around $900,000 in 12 ventures. The process was so successful that they're growing the number of Village Capital programs over the next couple years.

First Light's partnership with the Hub will create the Hub Village Capital fund. The program will fund three entrepreneur cohorts for 12-week programs, and invest $750,000 in up to ten ventures. Like before, the funding decisions will be made entirely by the participating entrepreneurs. In addition to having a set of space assets to contribute to the project, the Hub has a built in community that it can draw upon both to populate the program and provide community for new ventures. What's more, the Hub is run by the folks behind Good Capital, and I'm sure is thinking about creative additions to the financing platform.

This program literally cannot scale fast enough. I'm glad to see its success and its growth.

To learn more, check out the website. Startups can begin applying next week.

Photo credit: The Hub Bay Area