Open philanthropy uses transparency, participation, community and other open source principles to create a better world. Our aim is to run the Shuttleworth Foundation on these principles.
Everything that the Foundation creates, funds or helps with should be open sourced. This means: under an open license; available in an open format; and accessible from a public web site, always. All of our consulting and grant contracts require this.
We believe that community should be a part of everything we do. Despite the rhetoric, most philanthropy and social investment happens in silos. The result is zero leverage, poor use of resources and slow progress. We believe that we should get down and dirty with communities working on education, innovation and access each step of the way. The open source world has lots to teach us about this.
We believe in radical transparency. This means opening up not only your yearly books (we need to do this anyways), but also openly sharing your planning, learning and relationships as you go along. By the doing things like this, we hope to have partners who come with better ideas, offer improvements and even run with things on their own. That's what we want.
The Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that markets are conversations. The same is true of making a better world. Open philanthropy must include constant engagement and conversation with partners, activists, policymakers and (god forbid) customers. Knowing what people think in real time with 75% accuracy (using cluetrain-style market research) is way better than finding out with 99% accuracy five years too late (using the rigorous and expensive evaluation processes that foundations love). This is especially true if people think what you are doing sucks, as you've still got time to fix it. Our aim is to do kind of listening in a very systematic way, and then to use what it is hearing and learning to steer the ship. Of course, this is probably the biggest challenge on our open philanthropy plate.