Open Sourcing Philanthropy

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

While the private sector has developed a broad range of business models and financial instruments over the past 150 years, Canada’s community sector is limited to a narrow range of tools for achieving its objectives: grants and donations, fee-for-service, and a low level of entrepreneurial activity. No bonds, few bank loans, and with the exception of co-operatives, no access to share capital.

As innovations like micro-lending or the Registered Disability Savings Plan (RDSP) have shown, financial instruments can have a big impact on social problems. By adopting approaches already proven in the US and the UK, we could be doing a great deal more to build low-income housing, improve school completion rates, and reduce healthcare costs. On November 30 at MaRS in Toronto, the Task Force on Social Finance will present several recommendations to spur fresh approaches to complex social and environmental challenges. Provided regulatory support follows, we could be looking at a period of unprecedented innovation and creativity in and around Canada’s community sector. Full details will be available shortly on socialfinance.ca, the must-read blog on financial innovation.

For the sector to attract new resources - to warrant the trust of patient investors, and to meet the scrutiny of public and private boards - it will need to demonstrate higher degrees of transparency and accountability for results. Unlike private sector companies whose profit and loss statements can be used to compare performance and attract investment, the community sector generally lacks social impact measures, or even the means to compare one organization with its peers. Well meaning but misguided efforts to simply compare “administration costs” obscure the fact that social change is complex and demands measures that take this into account. Pioneering efforts in this space include Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) – used by a growing number of blended value (financial+social or environmental) investment funds, such as Acumen.

Together, philanthropy and the open source community have an important role to play in this unfolding scenario. The Knight Foundation’s support for the Drupal platform is a good example of what core funding, shared learning, and collaboration can do to make open source tools available to those who work for the public good. We need similar support for accessible (low cost, easy to learn, open source or at least open architecture) operating platforms that provide access to suites of compatible tools. Take a look at the Framework Foundation’s technology and operations portal at it.timeraiser.ca to see what one leading Canadian organization is doing. By making its policies and practices visible and open to comment, Framework is contributing its tacit knowledge about cloud computing tools to anyone who can use it. Imagine what an expanded platform of this kind could do to save time and money for community agencies.

Other platforms could aggregate data from organizations working on similar issues and share promising practices among them. At Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, work is proceeding on a set of metrics that will allow its member clubs to track progress on dozens of operational and programmatic variables, eventually enabling sophisticated analysis of individual clubs and the entire association. When these kinds of metrics are adopted across a sector - say "youth-serving agencies" - and the results are shared openly along with the learning that accompanies social innovation across levels of scale, the result will make our work in the social sector today look two-dimensional.

The Task Force on Social Finance is about to propose a set of lenses for seeing past the restrictions of the grant economy. One of the next things to appear should be open operating systems for social agencies. Together, they would accelerate the rate at which we accomplish beneficial change in society, through continuous social innovation.

Under the Volcano: Social Actions and Canada's Digital Future

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

Last April, on his way back to Canada from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford, Peter Deitz ran into a roadblock in the form of Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano that halted flights over Europe. As a result, he spent a few days cooling his heels in London. He wasn't going anywhere and neither, he realized, was his plan to turn Social Actions into an independent and sustainable social enterprise.

As detailed in the July 2009 issue of the OSBR, Social Actions hosts an open source database that aggregates opportunities for people to make a difference on social and environmental issues. It draws content from over 60 online sources, including Canada Helps and Kiva. Its application programming interface (API) enables third-party developers to build web and mobile applications, such as the Related Ways to Take Action WordPress Plugin

Since its launch in 2007, Social Actions has achieved an impressive string of accomplishments. In 2008, it was a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge and won the Case Foundation's Donate Now Challenge. In 2009, it collaborated with NetSquared to host the Change the Web Challenge, a global competition that attracted over 30 new fully developed open source applications for improving the philanthropic content of the internet. Monthly "click-throughs" to actions are running around 20,000 and there are 100+ members in the Social Actions developer community.

However, despite the acclaim and the growing number of users, Social Actions didn't have a business plan. Over lunch recently, Peter reflected that, "for the first eighteen months, I avoided the whole idea of this being a business. If I were doing it again, I'd sort out the business model early on." In January, he and close collaborator, Michigan-based Christine Egger, realized that to keep going, they needed a reliable source of sustaining revenue.

Opportunity, or at least a way forward, came in the form of a personal encounter with author Nilofer Merchant, who gave Peter a copy of her book, The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy. Peter reviewed it in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and then he and Christine set about applying its framework to open sourcing an integrated funding strategy for Social Actions. They created a wiki to document the process, and discussed it on BlogTalkRadio.

Then the volcano spoke. While stranded in London, Peter realized that building a stand-alone institution was going to be a lot more difficult, and probably less impactful, than finding a permanent home for Social Actions within another organization.

A mentor, Allen Gunn of Aspiration Tech, advised Peter not to abandon the core values of Social Actions while looking for its new home. In Peter's words: "Gunner told me that he'd seen too many people walk away from their dream projects only to regret it. He also said that I should remember that, in the open source world, when everything is running smoothly, there are fewer opportunities for others to get involved. He helped me see the challenges of a transition as yet another chance for Social Actions to fulfill its mission of making the web more philanthropic."

A call for proposals was issued, and expressions of interest came in from major media companies, philanthropic institutions, and organizations already represented on the Social Actions platform. A shortlist of three finalists has emerged, and an announcement will be made soon. None of them is Canadian.

The story of Social Actions has some important lessons for those concerned with open source and the community sector in Canada. The sector is undergoing transformation on a global scale, and digital platforms are an important part of this. "A robust philanthropic web is certainly emerging and a variety of initiatives – both independent as well as embedded in larger organizational homes – are making important contributions to that ecosystem," Christine wrote to me, "At the same time, we're clearly not yet at the point where this web fully surrounds and supports social change projects regardless of where they're housed. But we’re getting there and Social Actions – from its new vantage point – will continue to be an important part of that evolution."

As we await the federal government's soon-to-be-announced digital economy strategy, let's hope that it supports investments in innovative open source projects, like Social Actions, that enable the web to further the public good.

Innovate or Perish: Redrawing the Business and Social Landscape

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

"We’re at a moment when the boundaries of capitalism are being reshaped."

Michael Porter, June 28, 2010

Economist and business guru Michael Porter was in Montreal last week as the guest of Sustainable Prosperity, to speak about the "Porter Hypothesis" he developed 20 years ago. The hypothesis posits that, contrary to the naysayers who hold that economics and environment are mutually exclusive domains, strict environmental regulation of the economy generates an innovation effect that triggers the development of new technologies and improvements that confer competitive advantage on companies and countries.

For the assembled Deputy Ministers, CEOs, and researchers, plus thousands more tuned into a webcast, the evidence was clear. Governments and companies applying this hypothesis are leading value creation in the global race to build sustainable economies. They do so in at least three ways. First, on the principle that pollution + waste = inefficiency (and liability: hello BP!), they make companies more efficient. Second, they use collaborative policy development to foster market-leading technology clusters. Third, they preserve natural capital.

So, what about the next 20 years, a period when futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts as much change will take place as occurred in the last 100? Just as businesses now compete to reduce environmental impact, Porter says that the next wave of innovation will occur as private, public, and non-governmental organization resources are directed to solving social deficits that condition economic performance, in areas such as community economic development, employee health, and gender equity. Addressing these deficits reduces operating costs and enables quantifiable increases in productivity.

Porter illustrates the point with worker safety, where its absence indicates poor process design and lack of training. Address those issues and business is both more competitive and humane. Consider what this means to any number of other pressing issues and soon it becomes possible to imagine a future you wouldn’t mind leaving to your grandchildren. Sustainable Prosperity and others have already taken Porter's Hypothesis to its logical conclusion on the environmental side, by making the case for a carbon tax. Porter supports it because it is simple and transparent - better in his view than complex cap and trade schemes. But we all know what happened to that idea in the last election: a key reason for the Liberals' defeat was their support for a carbon tax that proved unpopular with voters. Another good example of how not to solve a complex social challenge is the government's plan to reduce crime by building more prisons and removing judge's discretionary sentencing powers. Perversely, this kind of thinking only exacerbates the underlying problem, while reducing the resources available for prevention and remediation. Compare this approach with the UK Social Impact Bond - which enables innovators to raise funds to introduce proven innovations that do things like reduce recidivism rates and thereby reduce the burden on taxpayers. The point to highlight is that the bridge from injustice and vulnerability to sustainability and resilience is built with a sustained commitment to innovation (technical, social, and regulatory), rapid learning, and open collaboration.

In a recent talk presented by SiG@Waterloo, MaRS Discovery District CEO Ilse Treurnicht made the point that addressing the social context of technological innovation presents Canada with a unique advantage. With a diverse, well-educated population that generally gets along together across a wide geographic area, we can position ourselves as leaders in developing technology that is socially sustainable. So, not the next expensive medical machine for the privileged few who can afford it, but the disruptive technology that improves population health. By hosting events like the Business of Aging MaRS is demonstrating that cross-sectoral collaboration on complex challenges is at once socially innovative and economically advantageous.

It is up to us - innovate this way or fall further behind in the global race to compete on productivity and and sustainability. Undoubtedly, Mr. Porter would agree.

Open Everything

Today's columnist is Jason Cote from Freeform Solutions. He writes:

The underlying focus of my career is a belief in leveraging the benefits of technology to serve people, organizations, and networks working to better the world.

In the beginning, this was not a conscious intention. My participation in an international network of bulletin board systems, first as a user, then as a SysOp (system operator), opened my eyes to a larger world of possibilities. I willingly released the fruits of my programming labour, long before I truly understood what public domain, shareware, and free software meant. Certainly, the Internet has helped to usher the concept of open source into today's mainstream, even if the term is now so overloaded as to be confusing. Still, I wonder how many of us know how long this concept has been around.

Eventually I came to understand how my preference for starting, leading, or otherwise engaging with not-for-profit and charitable organizations was related to me giving away for free the software and other artifacts I produced. It is becoming increasingly clear that the parallels between open source and the not-for-profit sector are many. There is the obvious use of free (as in beer) software by organizations which are least able to pay. More importantly, there is a sense of community. In particular, there is a voluntary engagement in disseminating information, increasing awareness and accessibility, collaborating, building networks and ecosystems, and producing social innovation.

Through many interesting ventures that produced a variety of social innovations – including a network of accessible science programs for youth, high performance computer networks for international research, and online donations to any charity – my consulting practice has ebbed and flowed. Today, I am engaged with a number of kindred spirits and together we are striving to bring increased consciousness and intention to our work. Freeform Solutions is the embodiment of this work, and provides an enduring vehicle for supporting our mission: help not-for-profit organizations use technology to build their capacity and increase their effectiveness in pursuing their own mission. We are a not-for-profit organization ourselves, and we're also quite actively engaged in using and developing open source software.

We were recently contacted by a prospective volunteer, whose interest in free software and the not-for-profit sector lead her to our website. Our invitation to work with us prompted her contact. As a participant in several open source communities, the lead developer of Formulize, and being a not-for-profit organization, we certainly rely on volunteers. Our prospect said she was glad to see that granting organizations are supporting the potential of free software; she noticed that we are receiving a grant from the The Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Support from The Ontario Trillium Foundation is helping us to build our capacity to use and develop open source software and otherwise engage the not-for-profit sector in this social movement. More broadly, we are producing new knowledge, software, and solutions relevant to the needs of today's not-for-profit organizations. In other words, we are open sourcing more than just software. We are also witness to the increasing application of liberty (free) and transparency (open) to a growing number of fields of endeavour.

In September 2008, I had the privilege of attending a gathering of like-minded thinkers, and tinkerers, at an Open Everything event at Hollyhock, an educational retreat centre on scenic Cortes Island. It is difficult to be in such a magical place and not be inspired. Kris Krug took this picture of me staring toward the ocean, reverent. This event was part of a series held around the world and the application of “open” to “everything” clearly marches on. In a way, these events may no longer be necessary. The future is happening now.

We have some ideas about where we're headed, but we know we have much to learn and to do. We could use your help as we continue to develop our theory of change. This column is an opportunity for us to expose our interests and what we are currently working on, particularly as they relate to current trends and topics of interest to you, our readers. So, let us know what you think! Emboldened by one prospective volunteer who stumbled across our website, I'm sending this broader invitation to the like-minded thinkers and tinkerers who are reading this now. Let's engage.

Canada--Social Innovation Nation?

Today's columnist is Stephen Huddart from the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation. He writes:

It seems that everywhere you look these days, people are calling upon Canada to invest more in innovation. Here for example is Preston Manning on the topic and here is former Privy Council head Kevin Lynch. Such commentaries typically focus on the roles of business, government and universities – but either barely mention or completely ignore the community or voluntary sector. For those of us who work and volunteer in this sector, this is a regrettable and all-too-familiar oversight.

Tim Brodhead, President and CEO of the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation, has provided a helpful reminder of this sector’s powerful role in innovation, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the sector’s recent history and future potential. As he notes in the former document, the most recent Speech from the Throne makes a break with the usual pattern of omission, and refers to innovative charities working in concert with business and government to solve persistent social problems. The speech states that:

Every day, the power of innovation is seen at work in communities across this country, as citizens, businesses and charitable groups join forces to tackle local problems.

Too often, however, grassroots efforts are hobbled by red tape. Too often, local solutions are denied access to government assistance because they do not fit the bureaucratic definition of the problem. Too often, the efforts of communities falter not on account of a lack of effort or heart, but because of a lack of expertise to turn good ideas into reality.

• Our Government will take steps to support communities in their efforts to tackle local challenges.
• It will look to innovative charities and forward-thinking private-sector companies to partner on new approaches to many social challenges.

Before we can consider the community sector’s role in catalyzing innovation, we need to look at business model innovation within the sector itself. As Bill Drayton points out in Massive Change, from 1700 onwards business innovation has generated compounded productivity increases of 2 - 3% per year, while the social sector’s tightly regulated operating system of grants and donations has hardly evolved since the 1800’s. To support the passion and entrepreneurial energy that shape bold new ventures, innovative models and methods are essential.

First Steps: Creating Time and Space for Innovation in the Community Sector

Continuous innovation in the community sector has only emerged in the last couple of decades. Within this timeframe, McConnell developed a suite of national programs that tested, adapted and scaled up new approaches over periods extending up to a decade or more. In fields ranging from community economic development to arts in education, breakthrough results came about because a funder was prepared to accompany grantees through cycles of testing, failure and adaptation rather than put them all to sleep in a Procrustean bed. Tides Foundation Canada, established in 2000, introduced shared back office services so that social and environmental innovators could spend more time on their mission-related work and less on operating redundant, resource-intensive administrative structures. The Kahanoff Centre in Calgary and the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) in Toronto introduced co-location for non-profits so that they could benefit from access to shared services, economies of scale, and convergence innovation – the unexpected results of people and ideas bumping into one another. Today CSI is home to over 100 nonprofits and is linked to centres like the Hubs in Halifax and London, England. A second site is in the works. The model works in smaller centres too - the Creative Space in Barrie operates on similar principles. Counter to this promising trend - and to the government’s stated intentions in the Throne Speech - Industry Canada has just announced that it is ending support for much of its Community Access Program. This noble effort to bridge the digital divide ensured that low income and transient people had access to the net and supported innovations like Homeless Nation.

Next Steps: Building a Culture of Social Innovation

Social Innovation Generation, a partnership between McConnell, MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, the University of Waterloo and the PLAN Institute in Vancouver was designed to enable closer collaboration among institutions with complementary capacities for supporting social change. At the risk of oversimplification, McConnell contributes funding, convening and several communities of changemakers; MaRS adds support for social entrepreneurship and social finance; Waterloo brings intellectual leadership, research capacity and new tools for organizational learning; and PLAN’s work with the disability sector exemplifies how an entire domain can be shifted from ‘problem’ to ‘promise’.

New operating systems for the community sector are about to emerge. One set of strategies is clustered under the heading of social finance – funding and organizational models that support hybrid organizations generating both profits and specific public benefits. Shared reporting platforms are needed to streamline relations between funders and grantees. We need a new marketplace for good ideas in this sector – one that removes some of the barriers to bringing good ideas to the attention of funders, and to scaling up the best ideas. When one funder has done due diligence on a proposal it can often save others the trouble – here's an idea from Philanthropy Australia that might be worth building upon. Other areas in development include tools for measuring social impact, and open software platforms that enable multiple organizations to share data and learning.

To take this work to the next level, we need public, private and philanthropic investments in these areas, plus an accessible, adaptable architecture – an ecology if you will – that supports new players entering the field - locally, regionally and nationally. With social innovation partnerships and hubs in place, and networked, a whole new set of capacities and possibilities emerges.

For the open source community – volunteer developers, teachers, students, entrepreneurs – the needs and opportunities are boundless. In addition to the work involved in connecting the community sector with new, networked means of getting things done, whole new frontiers are opening up: working with open API databases to create new data sets for analyzing and tracking social innovations will generate new knowledge and enable innovation collaboratives to learn and adapt quickly.

When private and public institutions collaborate with the community sector, disruptive innovation can take place, saving scarce resources, improving services and deepening civic engagement. An illustrative example is PLAN’s Tyze program, which enables collaboration between the formal and informal health sectors. This one social innovation, developed in Canada, has garnered attention and support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in the US and is also being piloted in the UK. Imagine what could be accomplished with a pipeline of such ideas, as Mexico is building with its Oportunidades program.

Canada: Social Innovation Nation?

As a uniquely diverse society with a strong community sector (the second largest in the world as a share of the economically active population according to The Canadian Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector in Comparative Perspective; Imagine Canada 2005), we have some natural advantages when it comes to social innovation. Observers who have rightly pointed out that innovation = productivity = social wellbeing have often missed the fact that the community sector provides invaluable social R&D, and that hobbling it with outdated business models is a serious drag on the economy.

The open source software community is part of this picture too, although often overlooked because it isn’t organized into ‘charities’ where things like volunteer hours can be counted. Unleashing the generative possibilities among open source technologies, new social process tools and the community sector ought to be a priority component of our national innovation strategy, and would help Canada to define and occupy an advantageous global niche.

Avatar, Open Source and Humanity 2.0

Beginning today, the OSBR will publish a weekly columm written by open source experts, in addition to the monthly magazine. The first column is by Stephen Huddart of the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation. Stephen writes:

"In the face of rapidly changing technology, there is a deeper obligation still, to reconceive not only citizenship and political commitment, but human nature itself." Mark Kingwell, The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age

First, a word of introduction. It is an honour to be asked to contribute a regular column to the OSBR. Thanks to Dru Lavigne and Tony Bailetti, who invited and guided my submissions to past issues; and to the community of OSBR writers and readers who contribute to my thinking, as well as to a growing sense of a movement linking technology and social change.

My columns are going to be broadly about social innovation and open source methodologies. As we move from the machine era to the information age, social structures and institutions are evolving to afford us the capacity to grapple with managing ourselves and the planet for the long term. At least, that’s my hope. My hunch is that Kingwell is right - our very nature is changing, or has to, in order to complete the process.

(Spoiler alert: skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie Avatar yet). In addition to displaying some remarkable technical achievements, the movie Avatar relates a parable for our times: to solve an energy crisis on Earth, humanity must resort to destroying the pristine and beautiful planet Pandora, and the primitive civilization that lives there. The hero - a disabled war veteran who is initially part of this conquest - falls in love, has a conversion experience and discovers spiritual, human and environmental values that transform and heal him.

While we certainly know how to make blockbusters today, it’s unlikely that we’ll be watching them in either a future Armageddon or the primeval Eden that director James Cameron points to in his film. Watching Avatar against a backdrop of the failed negotiations in Copenhagen and the recent financial crisis, we’re left with a growing sense that our leaders, our institutions and our political processes are incapable of bringing about deep-rooted changes to economic and social structures that are fundamentally unsustainable. Our problems are complex, pervasive and persistent, and so far, our approaches piecemeal and short-sighted when they should be transformational and long term.

What’s missing from the movie, and from public discourse, is a vision of what we want our world to look like, and a process for transitioning from where we are and seem to be heading, to where and who we’d like to be. Without this sense of purpose meeting opportunity, we’ll continue to let crises like those of the past year go to waste.

Carleton University professor James Meadowcroft outlines how the transition approach works in a briefing note published last month by the Government of Canada’s Policy Research Initiative. It should be on every change agent’s reading list. “By experimenting with new technologies, new products and processes, and business models and social innovations,” writes Meadowcroft, “it is possible to explore pathways to a better future.” He adds, “The emphasis here is on cooperation among all types of societal actors (from business, civil society, universities, government, and so on) to develop partnerships to trial innovations”.

He also makes the point that while scenario planning is helpful in tracing current trends, visions go further to include values and aspirations. They’re important because they influence how we act today to align our efforts with larger purpose. This isn’t about shoe horning everyone into one ‘world is flat’ utopia but about formulating and exploring diverse options.

A team of writers and researchers at the UK-based New Economics Foundation has recently developed one such vision in a paper appropriately entitled The Great Transition. It is remarkably detailed, and recognizably not so different from today’s world as to be beyond possibility.

In his seminal work The Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur points out that the machine age led to notions of ideal societies organized around the means of production and the bureaucratic state. The engineered and controlled structures of communist, socialist and fascist states reflect failed efforts to take such notions to their logical conclusion. Liberal democracies cannot rest on their laurels, either. Institutional rigidity and hierarchy are part of their legacy too, and corporatism is alive and well in the world at large.

By contrast, open source is inclusive, messy and vital. Structurally it reflects the diverse, organic nature of life itself. As an extension of human thought and capability, it opens up new horizons for turning our problems into processes of continuous learning and innovation. We can literally co-create the world we want. So, is the open source world ready to take on the visioning and transitioning process? Will governments support it? Does the community sector recognize the opportunity this presents? Can we afford not to be investing in our capacity to do this work together?

In Canada, open source practitioners are beginning to show the way. David Eaves is helping governments see that opening up their data to a new generation of open source programmers can accelerate service innovation and lower costs; Mark Kuznicki is using open space techniques in ChangeCamps that convene citizens and policy makers around things like transit systems, with breakthrough results. Michael Lewkowitz of ChangeMedium is introducing open source tool builders to social activists, and Peter Deitz is aggregating social actions across the Web at Social Actions.

Linking citizens with one another, and with their governments, to create new and better possibilities for the future...when do we get to see this movie?

Happy New Year!

Upcoming Events (Ottawa)

These events didn't make the publication deadline for the November issue:

November 25

2008 Social Innovation Challenge


Ottawa, ON

Those attending will have the opportunity to vote for the top ideas from the following six finalists:

* Forming a Community Institute in the Mayfair Theatre Building
* Helping Ottawa's Street Youth to Redefine Themselves
* Ottawa Blue Book Search Engine Tool
* Royal Ritchie Drummers (a music initiative for youth at risk)
* Transit Library Kiosk in Ottawa
* YUP - The Youthful Useful Program

Please RSVP by November 17th

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December 1

DemoCampOttawa11

Ottawa, ON

At a DemoCamp you can show off your software or hardware and get feedback from an informed audience. A DemoCamp is a small unconference-style event. The demos listed so far are:

*Dex - a business relationship management tool for professionals & small businesses
*ChoiceBot for e-Retailers v2.0 - decision-assisting tool for shopping sites that allows shoppers to figure out which TV, car, washing machine, etc. to buy in under 2 minutes.

September Issue Published

The copyedit crunch is finally over and the September issue of the OSBR has been announced. We were literally overwhelmed with submissions this month and some very well written articles had to be held in the editorial queue to await publication in the October or December issues. We also held off the publication of the two most recent lectures from the TIM Lecture Series until October--otherwise this issue would have been over 60 pages long.

The October editorial theme is "Building Community". Looking at the submissions we have received thus far, it looks like this will also be a large and very thoughtful issue. I'll be providing previews of the upcoming authors and their topics over the next few weeks.

More on the Upcoming Issue

The September issue is now before the advisory board for final review and the creation of the PDF and HTML versions will start in earnest this weekend. The announcement on this issue's availability will be made by the end of next week.

In addition to the authors mentioned in the previous post, this issue contains insights from:

John Roese, Nortel's CTO, explores the social and strategic benefits achieved through Nortel's participation with the One Laptop Per Child project.

Allyson Hewitt, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at MaRS, explains the importance of social technology and innovation intermediaries to achieve positive outcomes for social innovation initiatives.

Nancy Doubleday, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, introduces the concept of adaptive co-management and how it can be used to foster projects that effect far-reaching change.

Kim Matheson, Carleton University’s Vice-President (Research and International), discusses the critical role universities play in enabling social innovation.

Upcoming Issue on Social Innovation

We're knee deep into the editorial process for the upcoming September issue. The theme this month is "Social Innovation" and the guest editor is Dr. Tony Bailetti from the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering and the Eric Sprott School of Business at Carleton University. This is shaping up to be an excellent issue and what follows is a sneak peak of some of the authors and their topic within the editorial theme:

Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte, President and Vice-Chancellor of Carleton University, explores the challenges for social innovation and the use of information technology.

Tonya Surman, the founding executive director of the Centre for Social Innovation, and Mark Surman, the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, explain the Constellation Model, an innovative approach to organizing collaborative efforts in the social mission sector which shares various elements of the open source model.

David Wiley, Chief Openness Officer for Flat World Knowledge, describes how open textbooks leverage openness to create social value.

Edward Jackson, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carleton University, discusses the dynamic triangle of community-university engagement (CUE) and how universities can play a pivotal role in social innovation.