I am collecting the many innovative ideas about improving the philanthropic process over the years into a theme I am calling "Smart Philanthropy". The thrust of modern philanthropy tends to focus on fundraising - an organization's ability to attract attention and money from donors. Unfortunately, what happens with that money - the program activities that it supports - is not as visible. Smart Philanthropy seeks to balance this, using the emerging technology of networks to create a "smart edges" network design - pushing intelligence and information to the edges of the network. This is in contrast to a "Smart Center" apprroach that assumes that the center of the network has the intelligence and the edges are dependent, "dumb" nodes.

This is a replay of what happened with the introduction of the Internet. Ma Bell represented the "Smart Center, Dumb Edges" model of network connectivity. Consumers had a "dumb phone" and any services provided had to come from them. The quality of service was constrained by the quality of the weakest link in a phone connection. The Internet model changed all this, pushing intelligence to the edges of the network in a "Dumb Network, Smart Edges" model. The network's job was to simply pass bits back and forth, to be interpreted by the intelligent computers at the edges. It assumed that there would be some nodes in the network that were not functioning, so it "routed around the damage" dynamically so that there was no single point of failure. See David Isenberg's Stupid Network for a seminal paper describing this effect within the telecommunications industry.

Smart Philanthropy carries these ideas into the field of philanthropic networks. It connects people, ideas, organizations, and activities with the "smart edges" model. It assumes that there will be failures in the network, so it "routes around the damage" as well as learns from its mistakes.  It supports collaboration and autonomy at the edges of the network, rather than creating dependency on the center.

Some desired aspects of Smart Philanthropy:

A Fine-Grained, Massively Scalable network.  Little things, done at large scale.  eBay suceeded by lowering the transaction cost of small scale auctions, not by integrating the auction industry.  The auction houses were the last group that wanted eBay to succeed.  Smart Philanthropy looks towards newer startup organizations, rather than older organizations that are currently thriving in the fundraising environment.

Search/Amplify model of uplift.  Discover what's working, and then how to do more of it.  Lowering the granularity of interaction into smaller, identifiable activities increases our ability to understand what is happening, what worked, where it is being done, and who are the reputable participants in the network.  Similarly, if some participants prove untrustworthy, this allows the network to route around the damage and find other reputable participants. This is in contrast to Plan/Execute models which have pre-defined plans that are to be executed in the field.  Both models have their pros and cons, but Smart P