Just read a great book called "The Power of Unreasonable People", by Pam Hartigan and John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility. As Bill Strickland said in his book Make the Impossible Possible, “Why not do something remarkable with our time on the planet? Why not set our sights outrageously high?” This book addresses exactly this: Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in SE & future trends.

The book Peter suggested "Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises" is the best thing I've read one the subject so far.

Michael, glad you jumped into this discussion and hope anyone reading feels welcome to do the same thing.

A weighted voting system is interesting and glad to hear between you and Daniel this is being considered.

Please also see http://www.omidyar.net/user/active/ rating system where threads, posts and member profiles are all rated, and between -4 to +4 are anonymous, but members names become credited to the user when they spend points at the -5 and below and +5 and above levels.

>>If there is one thing I've learned from dealing with lots of orgs, is that many exist in a gray area of acceptability and whether they get in or not, can be very nuanced. In situations like that, a transparent system is needed and it would be great to have confidence in the users that do the actual voting.<<

So here is another example.

Recently was involved in an open space event and $5,000 was being given to benefit the people of Gulu, Uganda. 130+ people, primarily from Africa, attended the event...but roughly 35-45 were from Gulu. We divided into 5 teams at random, then each team developed an idea/project they thought could best benefit the Gulu community, and a "champion" volunteered for each idea/project.

Now, who am I, some guy from Portland, Oregon to vote for or decide what is best for the community and people of Gulu? In essence, after a two hour Q&A period, only the people of Gulu got to vote on the project they preferred and it worked like a charm. The other 2/3 of the people at the event just happily watched with great interest as the voting process took place.

Quite candidly in Gulu I saw oodles of white people in expensive white air-conditioned Range Rover trucks driving around, but never interacting with any local people. Not once. Must-read books like "Despite Good Intentions", "White Man's Burden" and "The Lords of Poverty" all outline similar problems with decades of what has become "the development industry". In other words there is a need to be somewhat weary that those in a "higher position" would assume know the answers, my faith is in the community being served and their ability to rate who are supposed to be helping them.

The local indigenous community members within Gulu very well understood the potential problems with a microfinance program. Corruption. They make be making 1,000 shillings a day (.58 cents), but just because they are extremely impoverished does not mean they don’t have some of the best ideas on what could truly help them overcome issues of poverty.

A non biased comparative rating system based on replicable, scalable, open source, transparent, easy to understand, sustainable, action based problem solving ideas would be worth its weight in gold and clean water.

Hey Daniel. Could orgs get scared away? You bet. But one might imagine that many of the grassroots orgs willing to openly collaborate and such would be very open to a transparent system...pushing things to the smart edges so to speak. I’d go so far as to argue that smaller grassroots orgs have many of the best overall solutions to many problems, but given their size and limited voices their solutions often go unnoticed.

And I'm thinking too orgs play a part of this, but rating, ranking and evaluation "solutions" is much more important. "Clean Water"...do you care more about if the provider is UN or Save the Children or an NGO you've never heard of, or that it works best.

Mmmmmmmm.

A Consumer Reports type org to analyze problems and many various solutions that could also include various supporting global NPO/NGO's.

A standards and best practices evaluation process, nonpartisan, transparent and fair in every way possible.

Also Daniel, you might want to check on WiserEarth member Ethan McCutchen (another o/net member) and look into his Grass Commons...they are working on kind of a better product company rating thing too.

>>It is too easy to "rate and rank" to satisfy the needs of funders (both major and micro) rather than parsing down to the intersection of "who?", "why?", and "what?"<<

Peter, I agree 100%

In the way many larger newspapers have "public community editors" inhouse to be critical of their own company on behalf of the public it could be interesting if NPO/NGO's had some similar position that transparently oversaw and reported publicly about the organization on behalf of clients, investors and donors.

Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises looks like a great book. $179...ouch.

Well, thought I'd drop in a post here to explore the threaded dialogue experience a bit. I'm wondering if this site were to implement some form of community based reputation, rating and ranking system for the NPO and NGO groups what 7-15 things would be more important to rate?

Transparency? Measurable results reporting? Ability to scale? Cost benefit analysis? Collaborative environment?

What do you think would be some of the most important things to rate and rank? Or do you think rating and ranking is an awful idea?

MarkGrimes
http://www.ned.com