“Over and again, New Yorkers told us they cared deeply about the needs of strangers, but that the realities of city living prohibited their reaching out. People spoke with nostalgia for the past, when they would routinely pick up hitchhikers or arrange a meal for a hungry stranger. Many expressed frustration—even anger—that life today deprived them of the satisfaction of feeling like good Samaritans.”

I just hope that Aidpage will eventually give those unhappy New Yorkers… and the many like them all over the world… the informal and immediate ways to be good Samaritans again. That’s my work now… and the work of my team at Aidpage… Ivan, Tzenko, Boby, Valcho, Pencho, and Stamen.

And then… another good… somewhat philosophical article… from The New York Times… “In Pursuit of Unhappiness” by Darrin M. McMahon. He writes:

“… the philosopher John Stuart Mill, came to a similar conclusion. His words are all the more worth heeding in that Mill himself was a determined proponent of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so,’ Mill concluded after recovering from a serious bout of depression. Rather than resign himself to gloom, however, Mill vowed instead to look for happiness in another way.

‘Those only are happy,’ he came to believe, ‘who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.’ For our own culture, steeped as it is in the relentless pursuit of personal pleasure and endless cheer, that message is worth heeding.

So in these last days of 2005 I say to you, ‘Don’t have a happy new year!’ Have dinner with your family or walk in the park with friends. If you’re so inclined, put in some good hours at the office or at your favorite charity, temple or church. Work on your jump shot or your child’s model trains. With luck, you’ll find happiness by the by. If not, your time won’t be wasted. You may even bring a little joy to the world.”

And then another article from The New York Times… by Stephanie Strom… originally titled “What Is Charity?“… as of now suspiciously archived under the totally meaningless “Aftermaths.” What were the “maths” for changing the title… I wonder. Did it sound a bit too much of a “questioning” for the good taste of some influential charity?

Here are snippets from “What is Charity?”…

“… among the many who had been turning away from Americans most in need of charity was the philanthropic sector itself. Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions…

Other statistics also suggest that the nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity. Nonprofit hospitals provide no more charity care than taxpaying counterparts do. While university assets soar, tuition continues to outpace inflation. Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services…

So what is charity today if it is not aimed primarily at the have-nots? Has its definition been stretched so broadly that it no longer has meaning? If so, are the tax breaks that propel our philanthropy justified? Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has raised those questions in a series of hearings examining whether tax exemption is justified for certain types of nonprofits.

The question, in his words, is, ‘What is the taxpayer getting in return for the tens of billions of dollars per year in tax subsidy’ offered to donors through tax write-offs or to nonprofits through their tax exemptions? According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households – overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise. No official estimates exist for the cost of the tax exemption covering money that nonprofits spend and for the property they own.

The hearings have received little public notice but have terrified nonprofit leaders, more than a Senate Finance Committee threat to tighten regulation of charities.

‘When you start to ask what is the fundamental underlying rationale for tax exemption and the charitable deduction for donors, it leads to questions that are far more difficult to answer than questions about greater disclosure and better governance,’ said John D. Colombo, a tax-law professor at the University of Illinois who testified before Rep. Thomas. ‘It gets you to questions like, why should an institution with billions in the bank get tax exemption?’”

(Here is more than you ever wanted to know on the “questions about greater disclosure and better governance“…)

I am tempted to ask my own questions though… Does compassion need incentives? If you want to give $10… why would you want a $1 tax break? Why not simply give $9? What’s the point of this tax incentivized “giving”…? But I must be too simplistic here… I probably don’t know enough about the complex dynamics of the partnership between government and private (some call them “special”) interests… bla-bla… bla-bla… whatever…

That’s it for today… and may be for this year. Hopefully, I did not break too many laws by doing these extensive quotes.

Here is a mirror of this post on Aidpage.

Aidpage is a response to two related problems affecting millions of people in the US and globally – (1) erosion of traditional support networks, and (2) institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive.

Erosion of traditional support networks

Today’s global markets by all definitions do not exactly “care” about individual livelihoods. People generally accept this as a fact of life, try to prepare accordingly, and do not expect “help” from the markets. People try to develop high levels of competitiveness, autonomy, mobility, and capability to change. This, however, accelerates the disintegration of traditional social environments built on cooperation, mutual dependencies, locality, and predictability – like extended family, neighborhoods, childhood friends, etc.

The erosion of these traditional environments has two aspects – (1) the psychological loss of informal, unconditional “giving and taking”, and (2) the practical loss of a historically well established support layer for people “in need.”

We design Aidpage as the “people aid people” platform – based on the following principles:

• person-to-person giving is a basic human need
• empathy and compassion need no incentives nor conditions
• everybody always “gives” and “takes”
• immediacy and informality work better than “process”
• people are “wired” for trust.

Institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive

Institutionalized aid (government and nonprofit) in the US is a huge system driven by over a trillion in tax and donation dollars annually. The distribution system is so complicated and vast that it is rather opaque to traditional processes of public scrutiny. Episodic media interest – notably after big disasters – “let’s see how the money will be spent” – is only scratching the surface of the problems. Despite recent well intended efforts, nonprofit organizations still largely operate as purely private organizations that do not feel enough pressure or need to be transparent to the public. The knowledge about the bysantine mechanics of the aid system is embodied in fully blown professional occupations like fundraising, program development, grant making, grant administration, grant writing, grant consulting, etc.

Most people turning to government aid are already having trouble coping with competitive markets. They are indeed looking for unconditional assistance. Why? First, because they have the psychological need for unconditional assistance (see above). And second, because they intuitively know something that many politicians seem to have trouble grasping. It is the simple fact that the government does not own anything and that all government money has been collected from the people with the idea to be administered back in the form of government assistance. True, there are the big “entitlement” programs like Medicare and Social Security. But also true is that many other vital areas of government support are strictly conditional, competition-based, selective, restrictive, outcome based, and policy driven – such as student aid, medical expenses assistance, small business assistance, housing and home repair assistance, etc. Average Jane and Joe have to “inquire”, “apply”, “prove”, “qualify”, “compete”, “perform”, and “report” – to get the aid that is funded by their own tax money. If only they knew how to do all this.

Nonprofit aid has even more openly discriminatory distribution policies – tolerated on the assumption that the money is “private”. But let’s see how “private” is it. Annually, the nonprofit sector gets about $250 billion in tax incentivized private donations ($210 billion of them from individuals)… and about $390 billion from government grants and contracts – pure taxpayers’ money that is (see data source).

Access to institutionalized aid is acutely problematic for the intended beneficiaries. Naturally, there is an unending public interest in the “who, how, how much, and why” of the distribution processes and outcomes. And there is an unending frustration with the complexity, lack of transparency, selectiveness, and competitiveness of a system whose main purpose is to help people.

Information on these processes is publicly available – residing in thousands of different sources and formats. However, the information is one sided – it is only produced by institutions and naturally reflects “institutional” points of view and bureaucratic “defending of turf.” The other main participants and de facto “owners” of the system – the aid beneficiaries – do not have any outlets, formats, or platforms they could use to publicly speak out, discuss, and reflect on these processes. Money wise – the system is a full circle from the public up and then from the institutions down. But information wise – it works one way only… whenever it works… to the extent it works.

We design Aidpage as a bottom up conversational media:

• aggregating large bodies of information offered by participating publishers
• easy self-publishing (blog-like but non-geek)
• audience participation on each page – commenting, adding of links, system-wide communication
• system-wide findability – search, tagging
• public space, mutual visibility, transparency.

Richard’s own blog is Read/WriteWeb.

Advertisers of the world… stop spending on “pushing” image and message… it doesn’t really work well anymore… in the near future it won’t work at all.

Invest in Aidpage instead… … or in similar projects… Give a platform to your customers and let them write, talk, sing, make pictures. You don’t even have to be “creative”… let them be creative. Do not judge or mediate. Now, just imagine how will they think of you.

It was also a test for our thinking about Aidpage in general. But I cannot say anything meaningful right now. May be I am somewhat tired… or plainly overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues.

I tried to follow the discussions about Recovery 2.0 started by Jeff. For some unknown reason… while fully supporting the “buzz”, I couldn’t find any way to connect, participate, or contribute. May be I was too buzy trying to figure out how our own Aidpage project fits into the Katrina picture.

Help Yourself

You use a map or a booklet with information about the city. That’s ok… although… feels a bit like work… and is somewhat lonely.

People Help People

You ask a passer-by for directions… Or simply, a passer-by recognizes your “tourist” behavior, stops on his/her own will and spends 30 seconds (often much more) helping you. You feel good. The passer-by feels even better. Witnessing onlookers feel good too. What happens is an easy, almost instinctive “give and take”… so natural that we don’t even think about who “gives”, who “takes”, or why is this happening. This is not “giving”. People just help each other.

So… What is AidPage?

AidPage is a free public space on the Web where you can speak out about (1) your needs, and (2) your desire to help others. AidPage fosters informal communication among AidMates (simply posting on AidPage makes you an AidMate), sharing of experience, and mutual support.

E-Bay enables the simple, direct “people buy from people” over the Internet. AidPage enables the simple, direct “people aid people” over the Internet.

See also:

How Does AidPage Work

I’ve tried to interest my wife, for example, in our local Montclair, NJ, blog, baristanet. She’ll use it for movie schedules but has no interest in reading or writing comments (and has trouble understanding why anyone would).

So true… Yes, most people seemingly are not inclined to be active media producers or actors. Most of us prefer the “one-click” media engagement. Click – your TV is on; click – look at your new picture; click – go from this web page to that web page.

Most people will not learn the “blog speak”. How about “trackbacks”… Oh, yes… these are links to somewhere on the Web where somebody already said something about what you read here. And this is supposedly happening automatically. For example, I am writing this post hoping for a “trackback” to appear on Stephen Baker’s blog linking back to this post right here – automatically – because I’m linking my post here – back to his original post there. How about easy to imagine… Not to mention “rss”, “pings”, “tagging”, and other similar nerd niceties. Not enticing for most normal people.

And what’s all the fuss about “blog this”, “blog that”… I still cannot get it. How in the world bloggers see each other on the web. It’s not obvious at all. There are the links in the side bar… and in the text itself… true. But how do you easily put these links there. As obscure as any old-fashioned DHTML/Javascript coding. My guess is – bloggers see each other on CNN, may be on Google, locally everywhere in SF, and on Web 2.0 conferences.

And… where is the information? As Stephen Baker points out:

…it will take new types of blogs to broaden the appeal. They’ll function as tools, and will feed less from comments to other types of input. One example is this new virus wiki (from Ross Mayfield). Here users create the value by contributing data. It’s promises clear value, even for the comment averse.

Yes, most blog posts are comments about other blog posts that are comments on something already produced on old fashioned web sites, TV, or newspapers. There is no much hard data on blogs. But this is to be expected from a publishing format that thrives on quick “real time” typing done by people with other day-time jobs.

And yet… and yet… people can be surprisingly prolific in writing and reacting when faced with serious issues – like personal physical or financial survival, choosing between Kerry and Bush, or more recently – the incredible wave of Internet activity for the tsunami disaster. So, here is a point I want to emphasize – the issues. And then again… the large amounts of useful information.

And here comes the plug – AidPage. How is AidPage relevant? Read my recent posts about AidPage.

Update (July 8, 2005): Turns out Blogger does not support trackbacking yet. No hope for an automatic trackback appearing on Steve Baker’s original post. I did an old fashioned comment there referring back to here…

Help Yourself
You use a map or a booklet with information about the city. That’s ok… although… feels a bit like work… and is somewhat lonely.

People Helping People
You ask a passer-by for directions… Or simply, a passer-by recognizes your “tourist” behavior, stops on his/her own will and spends 30 seconds (often much more) helping you. You feel good. The passer-by feels even better. Witnessing onlookers feel good too. What happens is an easy, almost instinctive “give and take”… so natural that we don’t even think about who “gives”, who “takes”, or why is this happening. This is not “giving”. People just help each other.

So… what is AidPage?
E-Bay enables the simple, direct “people buy from people” over the Internet. AidPage enables the simple, direct “people aid people” over the Internet.

Once you make a posting (automatically published on a new AidPage), you instantly become an AidMate. Nothing technical about the process – no setup, nothing. This gives you (1) immediate visibility to the thousands of AidPage visitors – including your own editable home page, (2) the ability to communicate privately with all other AidMates without giving up the privacy of your email address, (3) the ability to make unlimited number of new AidPages if needed – including with pictures, (4) the ability to easily relate pages by keywords. All of this – as simple as typing in a normal text editing program.

But most importantly… being an AidMate makes you part in something larger… a new global public place… where people see each other… and help each other… with no fuss… and no need to be part of organizations with all their rules, bureaucracy, and political agendas.

Organizations though are absolutely welcome to use AidPage – but within the spirit of informal immediacy that is the hallmark of AidPage. Organizations, we believe, will want to publish large amounts of useful data on AidPage for three reasons – (1) as part of their own web visibility strategy, (2) for a fair share in the advertising revenue generated on their AidPages, and (3) because this will be extremely easy technically and organizationally.

And yes… let’s say it again… it’s all free. AidPage is a highly sophisticated system created and maintained by a micro-staff of selected few – expenses partly covered by content related advertising and mostly by pure enthusiasm.

You too have the chance now – to be able to tell one day to your grandchildren: “I was one of the first AidMates.”

More on this subject… coming really soon. Thanks for visiting!
But don’t just visit… Make an AidPage… Make a difference!