Mike, did you bother to look at what Holden0 linked to? Granted, they don't look at enough causes, but they did a bunch of work to figure out who's good and published it. That's what I'm looking for. Telling every individual donor to go to mounds of research, or to forget it because they don't count enough, seems stupid and wasteful if there are websites out there (and there should be) doing the legwork and sharing it.posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:57 AM on December 31, 2007
If anyone has more sites along the lines of givewell.net, please share.
To me there is a necessary link between transparency and quality. Transparency is more important than evaluation, more important than anything really, if you believe in your own fallibility.I really don't see people here as being the ones who are lacking in understanding.
"- Ivy Orator Holden Karnofsky offered wry counsel to the famously driven Harvard students.posted by peacay at 3:57 PM on December 31, 2007 [5 favorites]
"There's a saying here at Harvard: 'Friends, classes, sleep; pick two.' I recommend double sleep," he said. -"
Reading the book [Warren Buffett CEO], many of the managers talk about how they love working for him and being a part of Berkshire. They have access to all the capital they need, Buffett doesn't bother them, they don't have analysts or press to deal with, they don't have to meet quarterly earnings goals, and they can focus on the long term.
3. I can assure everyone here that the board of GiveWell will be discussing this in short order. Speaking entirely for myself, I believe this to be a quite serious issue because of the conflict between what Holden did here, and the goals of GiveWell to encourage more information, more transparency and more real accountability in charitable giving...So I take it you'll record the board meeting where you discuss Holden's viral antics? And we all get to hear it? Should be fairly entertaining.
5. Keep in mind that one of the reasons that the community here has been able to "dig up" so much information on GiveWell is that the organization is truly transparent. I would encourage each one of you to, for instance, listen to the recordings of our board meetings.
1. Now, I want to respond to some of the overwhelming cynicism here. While the cynicism is entirely deserved based on Holden's actions, it leads to the wrong conclusions.Wrong conclusions regarding GiveWell, not Holden's actions.
2. I will close by noting that none of the above is meant as a defense of Holden's actions here.
Please explain to me how (1) does not contradict (2).
Intelligent and cunning at the same time, rats are highly ambitious and strong-willed people who are keen and unapologetic promoters of their own agendas, which often include money and power.posted by dhammond at 9:02 PM on December 31, 2007 [1 favorite]
You should not judge GiveWell by my comments, other comments here, or Holden's actions. You should judge GiveWell by visiting the site and closely examining what the organization has been doing.So what you're saying, Tim, is "don't judge us by what we say, or what we do - judge us by the quality of our copywriters and spinmeisters!"
Lucy Bernholz said...I commented on Ms. Bernholz's blog that the problem is not self-promotion. The problem is an organization that can't manage their own PR and marketing with honesty is trying to advise potential donors concerning whether charities are well run. If your organization is not well run, you really have no business determining whether other organizations are well run. How would you know?
OK So far as I can tell - but I haven't fully looked into this yet - Holden has now managed to piss off a bunch (a few?) people over on a site called MetaFilter. Since the poster of the above comment did so anonymously, I know nothing about his/her beef, connection, role at MetaFilter. The complaint appears to be rampant self-promotion, violating the rules of the MetaFilter community. Holden has been "rampantly self-promoting" from the day I met him, has pissed off old-line philanthropy for this reason as well, and I find it simply odd that it makes folks mad. Maybe they just envy his consistent promotion of GiveWell?
I'll try to make sense of what the MetaFilter complaint is all about and get back to you - however, I have to ask, "since when did rampant, overt, self-promotion" become a crime? I've never liked it myself, but it seems to be about as American as apple pie...
As a board member I'll look into this. I wish the poster - who seems to be mad at Holden for pretending to be someone else in order to draw attention to GiveWell had not chosen anonymity from which to make his/her accusation...
Ah the irony of the hot-under-the-collar web world.
Ah the irony of the hot-under-the-collar web world.posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:57 AM on January 1, 2008 [74 favorites]
Hi -- I'm not anonymous, I'm one of the moderators of MetaFilter and I got to spend some of my New Years Eve watching this unfold and making sure it didn't get too crazy. My name is Jessamyn West and I live in Vermont.
Probabably the best place to get an idea of what happened is from the GiveWell blog where Holden explains that he he asked a question in our Q and A community Ask MetaFilter and then registered a second account so that he could "answer" it with another account that was not obviously linked to the first. This second account hyping GiveWell was also not linked specifically to GiveWell which is also sketchy. Promotion is one thing and not against the rules. If Holden had just stepped in and said
hey I run this cool non-profit" a lot of this could have been avoided. The fake answering stuff is a violation of our policies. The fact the the head of your organization is using this deception to get the word out is pretty shady in my opinion. That's a smaller issue than the bigger picture however.
It appears that, over the course of his explaining this lapse in judgement that resulted in this whole thread on MetaFilter and his apology on the GiveWell blog, that he has also done similar things, many times, on other blogs. This went on to the point where he, by his own admission used a "new employee account" [i.e. someone else's email address, if I'm understanding this correctly] to send out promotional information about GiveWell under someone else's name. Holden specifically said this
"I sent 10 emails to bloggers, from an gmail account that I had recently created for a new employee, with a 1-sentence plug for GiveWell. The email did not mention the employee's affiliation and was a deliberate attempt to plug GiveWell without the affiliation showing up, even though it used the employee's real name."
Again, if he was a shoe salesman, or someone else involved in the hypercapitalist world of sell sell sell, that would be one thing. He's not. He's involved in philanthropy and not just any philanthropy but an endeavor that promises on its own web site "complete transparency." He's also a high ranking member of that company, not some street team member. In my opinion, these sorts of shenanigans to not only promote GiveWell but to cast aspersions on the competition makes the organization look shoddy and like it's not walking the talk.
While I forgive your not having read or possibly analyzed what happened in the MetaFilter thread, I just want to assure you that while there are definitely a few heated exchanges, that at its core the issue here is not that Holden broke the rules of a web community, but that he used unethical tactics to promote the GiveWell organization, got caught, and did not give particularly convincing apologies or explanations.
Feel free to do whatever you feel is right. MetaFilter is just a web community at some level, but the fact that this extends to fraudulent emails, many more comments on other websites and a general strategy of deception should be deeply troubling to the people who want to sustain and build GiveWell's reputation and ability to do good works.
For those of us who have been interacting and working with web communities for the greater part of a decade, I'm dismayed that people who are newer to the playing field see this as just another way to game the web to hype themselves. There's much more to it than that, on all sides.
The Clear Fund is the world’s first charitable grantmaker that is devoted to transparency in its decisions....So transparency is very important, unless you are trying to avoid being dismissed as a self-promoting shill.
True transparency means information is not just available but accessible, coherent, and understandable....
Complete transparency means more than making our information sources available. It means making our logic clear and our materials truly usable even to the casual reader.
BY GEREMIAH AT 01:03 AMposted by MetaMonkey at 7:13 PM on January 1, 2008
Really tired of seeing this website trotted out there as "the answer for smart giving." All of their ratings are based on financial data, not on whether the organizations are doing things that work. If we shopped this way, we'd buy our shirts based solely on their sleeve-to-neck ratio, or something.
I'd much rather see more websites like www.givewell.net. (See this Ask Metafilter discussion)
Thank you to people from MetaFilter for explaining certain elements of this to me. After checking into MetaFilter myself, its also clear that "blatant self promotion" is clearly discouraged and should not have been attempted. Its also now clear to me that it is not what happened - instead it was a case of mis-representation of himself and his affiliation. This is downright stupid, shortsighted, and will invariably come back to bite you in your ass wherever it is attempted - online or off. It was dumb, discrediting, and damning.posted by PercussivePaul at 7:43 PM on January 1, 2008
Here's where we seem to be:
1. Holden made mistakes and has apologized.
2. The community at MetaFilter has shown it can and will enforce its own, clearly-published rules.
3. Online communities can be powerful forces for holding high the best standards of truth-telling. They, and their rules, should be respected.
4. Organizations are worth only as much as the integrity of their people and their collective action. Anything that jeopardizes the highest standards of integrity is trouble.
5. Beyond the bounds of specific online communities, operating within the parameters of clearly stated rules, I am personally troubled by anonymous posts that refer to comments/conversations that have been removed from the web. In the offline universe, these behaviors are prevented by rules that allow for the accused to face their accusers and the basic rules of evidence - what are the online protections?
While I know that efforts at "bloggers' codes of conduct" have floundered, I find myself wondering where the bounds are between self-policing and vigilantism?
Ms Bernholz, when did you become a board member at GiveWell? Was it before June 4, 2007, when you wrote this post on Huffington Post mentioning GiveWell, recommending them without saying anything about your affiliation with the organization?In response:
posted 8:03 PM on Lucy Bernholz's blog
Lucy Bernholz said...Only the question of when she became a member isn't answered in any of her bio blurbs that I could find. The board meeting was June 22, but doesn't document her becoming a board member, but rather as already on the board. Perhaps the record just isn't as transparent as one might hope.
I became a board member of GiveWell at the organization's first Board meeting in June of 2007. All of my professional and volunteer affiliations are online in my company bio and my posted bios.
posted 8:20 PM on Lucy Bernholz's blog
The real shame here, believe it or not, is that you chose Metafilter for your showdown. You won’t find a group of snarkier, elitist, self-righteous windbags in your whole internet career...And what qualifies your most holy judges to dish the harshest judgement they can? They paid five bucks? Five bucks keeps out the spammers. But it also entitles Metafilter members to an outrageous sense of entitlement and piety.posted by dhammond at 9:38 PM on January 1, 2008 [1 favorite]
Lucy Bernholz: 5. Beyond the bounds of specific online communities, operating within the parameters of clearly stated rules, I am personally troubled by anonymous posts that refer to comments/conversations that have been removed from the web. In the offline universe, these behaviors are prevented by rules that allow for the accused to face their accusers and the basic rules of evidence - what are the online protections?This is spin, pure and simple. Bernholz understands the way communities work - the politics of communities - far better than some internet yokel like me or jessamyn or cortex. This understanding is the meat of her career and her stock in trade. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous, and that's the politest word I could find.
While I know that efforts at "bloggers' codes of conduct" have floundered, I find myself wondering where the bounds are between self-policing and vigilantism?
Holden says:posted by XMLicious at 3:14 AM on January 2, 2008
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:11 am
The Board is meeting about this as soon as we can. The exact date is still being set, but we are aiming for this week. We will decide on the appropriate action regarding my astroturfing then, and we will post our decision online.
After that, we will also go methodically through the Metafilter thread, noting valid questions and concerns about our project. We’ll add these to our FAQ. I don’t want to do that now, before we’ve made any official decisions about what might change in response to my inappropriate actions.
Before the above plays out, I feel that further conversation on this topic is unproductive. I’ve expressed this opinion to the Board, although a couple of them have chosen to engage in conversation anyway.
Regarding the blog comment policy, we don’t currently have one, and need to come up with one. I’m in favor of everyone’s expressing their opinion; I’m against the practice of making comments on this issue on blog posts that have nothing to do with it. I will be deleting comments along those lines, but continuing to allow comments on this post (and, of course, relevant comments on other posts).
Due to the high volume of irrelevant comments coming through, I’ve disabled the “subscribe to comments” functionality for now.
lucy bernholz said...This just doesn't make sense to me. First there is the non-denial that she knew she would become a member of GiveWell's board when she wrote about them without disclosure on Huffington Post.
Prior to the June GiveWell Board meeting I had had two phone conversations with the founder. I was asked to join the board and agreed to do so at the June Board meeting, which I attended by phone. At the time of the HuffPo column I could have revealed that I have, at various times, had conversations with the founders of GiveWell, GlobalGiving, and have used Network For Good to make charitable donations. As a Board Member of CompuMentor I was also affiliated with Netsquared, I have an account at Schwab, have worked with the Giving Forum, regularly use Craigslist, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and am on Facebook.
Here's where we seem to be:posted by ericb at 12:31 PM on January 2, 2008 [1 favorite]
1. Holden made mistakes and has apologized.
Holden engaged in highly unethical promotion of an allegedly transparent nonprofit, and said "Hey, sorry about that, I've been tired lately."
2. The community at MetaFilter has shown it can and will enforce its own, clearly-published rules.
Yes. But the rules of MetaFilter are not the central issue here, as has been stated several times, most eloquently by one of the site's mods.
3. Online communities can be powerful forces for holding high the best standards of truth-telling. They, and their rules, should be respected.
Sure, but again, not the issue. If Holden were just a blog rules-violating ass, no one would be here having this conversation now. They'd boot his ass, hurl a few pitchforks, and move on.
4. Organizations are worth only as much as the integrity of their people and their collective action. Anything that jeopardizes the highest standards of integrity is trouble.
Now we're nudging to the real issue. Holden stands for your organization, and his tactics speak to how your nonprofit is run.
5. Beyond the bounds of specific online communities, operating within the parameters of clearly stated rules, I am personally troubled by anonymous posts that refer to comments/conversations that have been removed from the web. In the offline universe, these behaviors are prevented by rules that allow for the accused to face their accusers and the basic rules of evidence - what are the online protections?
Holden's own words are what indict him. The fact that I'm posting here as middleclasstool and not Matt Reed doesn't change that he did what he did, and there's a trail. The deleted comments you refer to are gone because MetaFilter members alerted those site owners that Holden was astroturfing for your company, so they pulled them. Contact the site admins, see if they keep deleted comments in their database. But meanwhile, try not to make this sound like poor Holden made a minor boo-boo and the Big Bad Anonymous Internet is ganging up on him. This is to your benefit and the benefit of the people who run the sites where he pulls this crap -- we thought you might want to know that you have an unethical employee who reflects badly on your organization. Clear enough?
While I know that efforts at "bloggers' codes of conduct" have floundered, I find myself wondering where the bounds are between self-policing and vigilantism?
Well, see, you're dipping into a deep pool there, when you start asking questions like that. We could spend months here discussing the ethics of online identity, self-promotion, etc. Fact is these codes seem to be emerging organically within specific contexts, and self-policing seems to be doing the job.
Sure, some of the people who have responded to Holden's horribly stupid actions have done so out of malice and spite, but at least as many had legitimate concerns for your company and the entire philanthropic community at large, not to mention the other web admins who got their sites spammed by your wunderkind.
In short, your question is valid, but nobody's beaten up Holden or anything. Nobody's done anything but tell the truth about him, and as one of GiveWell's board members, I guess an appropriate response would be at least an acknowledgment that you want to hear about such things regarding your staff.
I'm not sure what you're driving at...we've gotten that objection a lot. ...I'm telling you from the response I've received from these letters is that getting $20000 in unrestricted funding, if the grant application is not overwheming, I think is something that they're going to do...and it's the biggest names that are going the craziest, definitely. Those are the ones that are e-mailing me back and forth, sending me stuff about their organization already, because they have people for this stuff. You know, they have development people. They love to get unrestricted funding. Those budgets are big, but they're mostly for certain things, you know, so,...I think we have to be careful about making our grant process something that we won't say 'it's overwhelming, screw you,'.. but if we give them somewhat of a normal application process where it's like "if you already have it, send it, if you don't, don't," then I think almost everyone is going to fill out these applications. It's worth their time.
"Just pick one of your programs and tell us about that. For education, it's like, all right, what schools did you serve, pick one, like that you have information on whether academic performance and/or attendance rates improved. For jobs, it would be what areas do you serve, or what programs do you run, now pick one, and show us evidence that you've increased people's incomes over the long term..."The idea is the recipient delineates one successful program, demonstrates impact per dollars spent, and gets a GiveWell grant.
"My call on December is that December is giving season. and it's just, in terms of the media coverage, that is what I'm thinking. It is just a totally, totally different universe from every other month in terms of how easy it is to get exposure for a resource like this."What is astounding is the constantly repeated idea among board members that they are the only ones ever to have asked questions about effectiveness to target charities. There is a frequent allegation that charities don't measure themselves by any set of standards standards, don't communicate them to their members, trustees, and grantmakers and can't "prove" their impact. I suspect this charity model was built on their narrow experience as donors who didn't know what questions to ask.
Tim: "From the media side, you're talking done by the first couple days of December? Because the coverage of giving really is the two weeks after Thanksgiving, not all the way through December in the media."
Holden: "Really? I don't - I disagree (laughing), and this is all anecdotal and experiential, but to me, like it's December 30th when everyone is losing their mind. Did you see what happened on Wikipedia where they had, like, um, God, they had, like, 500 grand raised on like, December 29th, and then they had a million on December 31st? That's how it goes."
"I think that a lot of charities simply don't work this way, they simply don't track what they do. And so it'll be perfect, because the ones that have any chance of being good are going to have one program that they have something pretty good on, but I think that will eliminate the vast majority....Our goal is to change the way these guys operate, but that's by changing the pressures, the market forces on them."They actually believe that their screening process is doing something no one else is doing. They are simply discovering that when you wish to measure several heterogenous organizations by your metric, you have to provide the metric: a questionnaire or grant application, and reporting requirements. That's no different from what any grantmaker requires! Nonprofits keep records for: the state; the IRS; their members; and their grantmakers. A new grantmaker usually requires a new metric. How is this supposed to be a new "market force" bringing new pressures to bear on the independent sector?
Earlier this week, when the kids at Metafilter noticed...Hey, I'm 56. Spare us the lazy stereotyping. But kudos for keeping up with the case.
That said, my message to you Meta-whatevers is "go f*ck yourselves." I hope you show the same zeal for truth when you encounter obfuscation and ethical lapses outside your irrelevant little online community. You've devoted considerable energy to outing Holden as a liar. I hope you've given a proportionate amount of time and energy to protesting secret CIA prisons and waterboarding, prisoners held without due process, an immoral war fought for immoral purposes.from someone called Rachel Tension (haha 'racial tension' geddit?)
What's the worst sin?:
a) Being dishonest in a way that betrays the trust of a small online community, in the service of a great public good? or
b) Getting all holier-than-thou in a community focused on questions like, "Familiar with the Las Vegas airport? I need some practical advice for choosing my flight/airline." Like go f*ck yourselves.
It's not that Holden didn't do a bad thing. It's that you guys are so inwardly focused and appear to have no mercy.
So go f*ck yourselves.
After graduating from Harvard College in 2003 with a degree in social studies, he was recruited into the hedge-fund world, spending three years doing research for Bridgewater Associates, an investment company in Westport, Conn. — where he was strongly influenced by a culture of constant questioning.I guess that might be worth funding in the private sector, but I'm not sure it's worth a tax exemption. It strikes me as a way to get the equivalent of a graduate degree which is very cheap for Holden but rather expensive for his donors. Reading Holden's posting history, the picture that emerges is of someone who begins making statements of sweeping import while knowing very, very little about what he's trying to do. Gradually, academics, professionals, researchers, writers, and nonprofit employees introduce terms and point out websites and recommend books. By doing this, he instigates the knowledgeable into responding, and then absorbs the free information and lessons of experience they throw at him (eventually). He's had a fortune in consulting and education offered to him, gratis, via his blog and discussions like this.
"What was really reinforced there was how much there was to be gained by surrounding yourself with what I call 'no men,' who are very smart, very critical, and will just constantly criticize you and tell you what you're doing wrong," he says. "I had always believed in this, but I got more into the idea that there's a ton to be gained by open discussion, admitting your weaknesses and letting other people point out your weaknesses."
we really haven’t looked into evaluating boards at all. I’m interested in your thoughts on how we can do so. I am skeptical of the importance of boards, because it isn’t clear to me how important a body that meets a few times a year can be. I’d rather judge a mature organization on what it’s accomplished, anyway, than on who its board members are. But I’m listening.Boards are the single most important factor in determining the success or failure of an organization. They are responsible for the CEO, and an incident like this one could have been prevented through more timely counsel. Meeting twice a year is insufficient for a nonprofit board - generally groups like BoardSource recommend monthly or bimonthly meetings. According to them, 66% of boards meet once a month or every other month. It might be that in the business world, boards of directors meet twice yearly, but nonprofit boards are expected to be more active contributors to the activities of the organization and to its oversight.
The Charities Bureau has jurisdiction to investigate complaints that involve 1) wrongdoing by charitable corporations, trusts or other nonprofit organizations; 2) fraudulent or misleading solicitation and improper expenditure of money for charitable purposes; and 3) improper activities of executors, administrators, trustees and personal representatives responsible for honoring pledges or bequests to a charity.I imagine they would take a signed written complaint more seriously, but you can always just e-mail Charities.Bureau@oag.state.ny.us. Please no anonymous e-mails.
"....Even though you might be able to do what Holden did and get away with it, don't do it. It's unethical.posted by ericb at 11:02 AM on January 3, 2008
And if that isn't enough to persuade you, just take a look at the savage treatment Holden, GiveWell, and anything connected to them have received in the past few days. It's probably safe to say that the reputations of Holden and GiveWell are meaningfully and perhaps permanently damaged. It's hard enough to raise funds without getting stuck with baggage like that.
The Net is a great tool, but you've got to use it right!
Another thought: If you're very young and in the profession for the first time, get adult supervision. Really, a lot of this looks to me like the work of a zealous youngster who believed he was smarter than everyone else. A few years having to work with older, more seasoned folks might have imparted some wisdom."
Rachel’s a provocateur. Her primary function—to use the strained language of the academy—has been to foreground, and thereby open to criticism, middle class norms and prejudices...she exists to prompt a quick dismissal and reveal something about ourselves in the process...Her rant has elicited an insensitivity to people with mental illness (“Are you 15 or simply mentally defective, Rachel?”), narcissism (“what I have done for the world is irrelevant, though my answer would probably shame you”), classism (“She is an untenured professor at a totally third rate commuter college")...That's some fine, fine bullshit piled higher and deeper, all right.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:51 AM on December 31, 2007