Birthing a Gift Economy Tonic, May 2009
May 18, 2015
Birthing a Gift Economy
Tonic, May 2009
No restaurant experience, no startup capital, no marketing.
After 2 years, still breaks even. Half hour wait to get a table, 4 week wait to volunteer!
Chapters in DC, Chicago, Boston. Three more in India.
Harvard Business Press: we don’t understand it!
Increasingly connected landscape.
Ideas spread rapidly, and virally.
Trillion web pages online. (Google, July ‘08)
5 billion mobiles by 2011. (Economist, ‘09)
More paid bloggers than programmers, firefighters or bartenders. (WSJ, ‘09)
Organizing without organizations.
Platforms simply hold space for emergence.
Massive disintermediation.
Philanthropy goes peer-to-peer.
Power of Many
Power of Abundance
Power of Small
Four volunteers at a homeless shelter, without a plan!
Websites to web solutions to cards to restaurant to magazine to films to health clinic.
Scaled exponentially, but we had three organizing principles that were never compromised.
Organizing Principles
1. Stay volunteer-run.
5 staff, 40 hrs/week
40 volunteers, 5 hrs/week!
Distribute and Decentralize Hierarchies simplify
coordination; org overhead is result of transaction costs.
Internet collapses transaction costs, aggregates small pieces.
Groups form without organizations, from Moldova protests to passing legislation to hobbyist meet-ups.
Crowd Sourcing
Crowd Sourcing Rules
The crowd is dispersed.
The crowd has limited attention span.
The crowd is full of specialists.
The crowd produces lot of junk.
The crowd finds the best stuff.
Organizing Principles
1. Stay volunteer-run. Power of many.
2. Don’t fundraise.
Zero Staff,
Tons of Help
Zero Marketing,
Tons of Media
Zero Plans,
Tons of Projects
Will Zero Fundraising
Lead To
Enough Money?
Scarcity
Abundance
Scarcity
Abundance
Scarcity
Abundance
Scarcity
Abundance
“Over 2791.297920 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.”
Scarcity
Abundance
Production Long Tail
Fall of the Hit
Source: Wired Magazine
Fall of the Hit
Source: Wired Magazine
Vs.
Many-to-Many Distribution
Push Comes To Pull …
Go-steady-ready: “Forbidden unless permitted” is now “permitted unless forbidden”
Many to many: broadcast shifts to simulcast, mass market shifts to million minimarkets.
Co-create: lectures become conversations, advertising becomes word-of-mouth.
Organizing Principles
1. Stay volunteer-run. Power of many.
2. Don’t fundraise. Power of abundance.
3. Think small.
Story of Smile Cards
Coffee table experiment.
No plan, no marketing, no sustenance plan.
All gifted. 950,000 cards in circulation. Warren Buffett, Dalai Lama tagged personally!
Small is Free
Internet: Land of the Free
Free bandwidth.
Free storage.
Free processing.
“Freemium” Advertising Cross Subsidy LaborExchange No Marginal Cost
Gift: Don’t Monetize Attention
Radiohead Experiment
Organizing Principles Staying volunteer-run means that
we leverage “crowd sourcing”.
Not fundraising means that we leverage “many-to-many” networks.
Thinking small means that we leverage the power of gift.
Karma Clinic!
Volunteering: 85M people, 20B hours
Blood and organ donation programs
Burning Man, Churches, NPR
Scientific research
Small scale gift-economies in families
Wikipedia: 100M hours donated each year
Give without any strings attached, and trust reciprocity.
Redefine wealth as contributions, not possessions.
Find reward in density of interconnections via circulation of gifts.
Tragedy of the commons. Typical solutions: eliminate commons, or add governance.
Can’t scale. Need reputation, trust, and mutual information.
No incentive to produce or innovate.
Million Smile Cards printed, shipped 15,085 orders to 101 countries in 2008 -- by distributed shippers.
Dozens of new stories posted everyday! Dozens more comments. 66,401 subscribers to weekly newsletter.
Chicken Soup to magazines copy-left: republish with no strings attached.
Zero overhead, auto-catalytic cycle since 2003.
Smile Groups
HelpOthers.org
FeaturedAnyone can
post anything;10-200 views;members can
comment,add smiles.
Edited stories;anyone can read,
and comment;usually, 200-500
reads.
On Homepage,potentially
HO newsletter, & other CF sites!
500-3K reads.Some hit 70K!
Small acts of kindness.
Stories celebrate everyday heroes.
Social networks propagate those values and start to shift our cultural ethos.
Mini gift-economies enable trustosity: trust-driven philanthropy.
Generosity Entrepreneurs!
Service: deliver value that is relevant to the current context.
Social capital: a community waters the tree that serves them.
Surrender: trust self organization to manifest impact.