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Ethan Zuckerman (@ethanz) muses on the interplay between love and money in the Global Voices community as he looks back at the GV2010 Summit in Santiago –
The closer I look at Global Voices through the lens of love and money, the more I realize I don’t know.
There are aspects of GV that I wish ran better – I wish we were better at covering some parts of the world, better at having our content featured in mainstream publications, better at providing opportunities for the people whose love keeps our community going.
Understanding how to tune the engine of any organization that works on both love and money – and what organization doesn’t? – requires some deep understanding that I don’t yet have. I know it when I see it working: TED’s amazing translation project, producing 7,000 talks translated by 4,000 volunteers, including 70 languages – required a huge investment of money to build a technology infrastructure that now runs primarily on love. Wikipedia has used love to build the world’s largest encyclopedia… but has discovered that love alone doesn’t produce sufficient content in some of the world’s neediest corners.
Is there an organizational physics of love and money that could be discovered and documented? Can we experiment, sliding balls down inclined ramps until we understand the basic laws that let an organization succeed or fail? Or are love and money quantum effects, where experimentation and observation are bound to change the underlying phenomena?
So much I don’t understand. And so I close the lid and pray it just keeps working.
The interplay between love and money is full of paradoxes.
As a general rule, people tend to work primarily for love only if they already have enough money. So, people in North America in Europe tend to volunteer more than people in Asia and Africa. But, sometimes, people will work only for love, when they won’t work for money. As an extreme example, most people will donate blood, but not sell it.
Some people think they will be happy to work for only love or only money, but most people realize that they aren’t. Some people think they will be happy to work for a little love and a little money, but most people realize that they aren’t. A lot of love plus a lot of money usually works, but it’s really rare and often leads to ennui.
The interplay between love and money is most visible in the gift economy on the web, especially in volunteer communities like Global Voices, TED and Wikipedia and Yochai Benkler (@yochaibenkler), Lawrence Lessig (@lessig), and Chris Andersen (@chr1sa) amongst others, have written thought-provoking books exploring different dimensions of this tension. However, like Ethan, all we can say for sure is that we don’t really know.
On a more personal note, during the four days of GV2010 I spent in the company of Ivan (@ivonotes), Solana (@solanasaurus), David (@oso), Rebecca (@rmack), Sami (@ifikra), Elia (@eliaws) and others, a voice in my head kept telling me: “this is where you belong”.
And, yet, I know that immersed in the business of running 2020 Social, I have written one post on Global Voices in the last twelve months.I know that, in fact, the only time I have really written for GV on a regular basis was during my Yahoo! Fellowship days when Georgetown University and Yahoo! were, in effect, paying me to write really long, really well-researched analytical pieces for GV. So, how does the interplay of love and money work for myself, to begin with?
But coming back to the voice in my head that key telling me “this is where you belong”, I am not even sure which “this” it was talking about: the GV community of authors and translators itself, or its shared worldview (if there is one), or the ecosystem of change-makers it has seeded. As I live my many lives simultaneously, I’ll be asking myself that question over and over again.
Hello Gaurav
I have the same feeling: this is were I belong. I have just left my job to belong “even more”, as “work” was getting in the way. It was very good to meet you and hear your success and misshapen on deploying Ushahidi. Yes, we will try to learn the lessons you have left us!
Best
Paula
I don't think the dichotomy between love & money has to be as stark as you're portraying. Anecdotally, people always say if you love what you do, then the money will follow. I heard about Tony Hsieh's book “Delivering Happiness,” maybe you can read it and share your insights with us
@Becky: I am learning that the relationship between love and money is complicated. Yes, it's important that you do something you love doing, but it's also important that you love doing a lot of different things, because money might follow love in some cases and not in others.
PS: I also loved Tony Hsieh's “Delivering Happiness”. He does a better job of explaining his philosophy in the book, than he did onstage at TEDIndia.
Good luck, Paula, with both “belonging even more” and Vote Report Brazil.