Billions With Zero Knowledge

[Photo attribution: I can’t seem to find the Flickr links I used to assemble this collage last year. I used tags, Charity, Children, Giving and found these. If your photo is here, please leave me a comment and I’ll update with links to you or remove if you wish.]

This is cross posted on the About Gifter Page on the Gifter project blog.

Two years ago, two different events occurred that changed the course of my life. The first was the death of my brother Morgan, who after a two year battle with colon cancer, passed away on February 1, 2005 (He was 22yrs. old at the time). The second was attending the TED conference later that month. The TED conference is about ideas that can change the world. After setting up a foundation in honor of my brother with my family, I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of the power of grassroots generosity.

The two events occurring so close to each other, combined with a year of discussions with my friend and business partner Alex Eberts, were the impetus for me leaving the company I co-founded and starting what has become Project Ojibwe (The name is a temporary placeholder while we release our real name). Ojibwe is a company that is interested in social giving and the power of communities. We’re launching Ojibwe in 2007. Ojibwe is a for-profit company with a very large social agenda. We hope our contributions to the non-profit world and humanity will always outpace our own potential as a for-profit company. We consider ourselves social entrepreneurs.

I was recently reading of other examples of giving, and saw a commercial that reminded me of some causes that I care about. This started a few conversations with friends and we came up with an experiment that I’d like your help with for these coming weeks. Plus, this is so much more fun then sending holiday cards to all our friends

The Inspiration
I’ve been fascinated with the popularity of social phenomena like Numa-Numa, the Million Dollar Home Page and Mento’s/Coke experiments. At the same time I believe there is an opportunity to make more socially relevant memes around generosity. There have been some examples, such as BlogHer network who have been working to help families in New Orleans through blog community gifting, but I believe this is just the beginning.

There exists within our communities such power, that I believe we have just begun to scratch the surface of the potential for grassroots social generosity. If we can all come together for smart mobs, collaborate on an open encyclopedia or search for alien life with our PCs - then what happens when a large community of users act collectively to show they care about something. This is the heart of what we’re trying to explore with Ojibwe.

I was recently listening to my friend David Hornick’s podcast from the Web 2.0 conference (see exactly 21 minutes into the podcast for the conversation) , and I heard Jason Calacanis state that he would stop blogging for 1 year if someone gave $100,000 to send two disadvantaged kids to private school for a year.

Thankfully, Jason has found sponsors for his great podcast show who are paying the $100,000 without asking him to stop blogging and he is now playing media philanthropist. As a leader in the blog, Internet and entrepreneur community - Jason is leveraging his media presence to take care of another human being; to offer disadvantaged children hope and access to education that they would not have access to otherwise. Kudos - this is a great example of community leadership.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson donates all the ad revenue from his blog to charity which is another great example of someone leveraging their blog presence to the benefit of others.

Cory Doctorow recently posted the list of charities that he supports. These are great organizations that Cory actively supports through his voice, donations and his time.

Tim O’Reilly has also listed some great charities that support the Internet community, and he is supporting them.

While these are just a few examples of individual community leaders giving back, it still doesn’t demonstrate the power of our communities to all get involved and act for some common good.

Gifter.org

What if ideas could really change the world simply by people expressing their voice and sharing the idea? The million dollar home page works because someone told you about it, and enough people shared the idea that Alex Tew made a reported million dollars.

What if we shared similar ideas that benefit each other and the world?

We (the Ojibwe team) are going to host a series of experiments in the power of community and generosity in the coming weeks and months. We’ve setup the Gifter.org blog for these experiments.

Each will be an idea that could make the world a better place, but each requires your voice. With each experiment we’ll ask the Internet community to collectively express their support for the idea in simple ways; a link, a comment, or just include the idea in an email to a friend or during a dinner.

The ideas will originate from a number of sources, and have been developed through a series of conversations with like minded individuals. Each idea will rely on a number of volunteers who will be helping us spread the word. Our first volunteer is my friend Ben Yoskovitz, who graciously helped with organizing and setting up this project.

Share the ideas, spread the word - if you believe in these ideas then they will gain power. As each person shares, the ideas become stronger. We can create a self fulfilling prophecy together.

(From the Hughtrain Manifesto - Hugh Mcleod)

Can a few ideas change the world? We believe so.

We invite you to believe with us.

To learn about our first experiment, please visit the Million Dollar Blog Post.

(Note: Gifter is not Project Ojibwe. We did use Gifter to refer to it privately with a few investors, but what we are doing here is not what Ojibwe will be. I actually registered the domain almost two years ago when I started researching community based generosity. I will continue to use the Gifter.org domain for social giving experiments. Neither I personally nor Project Ojibwe will earn any revenue from the operation of this site. We won’t run advertisements, or take any fees. We will pay for the hosting as long as we can, if it exceeds our budget we will ask for help from volunteers who we will list on the volunteer section.)

On Mon 18 Dec 2006.