Comments on: Knight Foundation rethinks its stance on for-profit deals

By: Dave Chase

Dave Chase — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:32:44 +0000

I think this misses the real opportunity that Everyblock is Exhibit A of (in a good way). That is, an increasing trend in foundations is Mission Related Investing or Program Related Investing (google those terms for a deeper explanation than I’ll provide). The core idea is that foundations can focus not just on the 5% of their endowment they give away to charity but on the 95%. You can think of the endowment as a sizable “mutual fund” given the investable dollars. If just 2% of those investable dollars were invested in businesses congruent with their mission, the foundation could expand their ability to impact the market and hopefully get financial return but even if there’s a lower financial return than the rest of the portfolio, it’s still helping their mission. The companies they invest in could be mature or startups as long as they fit the mission objectives.

The most common examples these days are environmentally focused non-profits investing in clean tech/energy companies rather than their portfolio having holdings in companies not congruent with their mission.

By: The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal | Open Parenthesis

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:13:19 +0000

[...] Update 10/11/09 – see Zachary Seeward’s post about how the Knight Foundation is considering changing the terms of grants in the future, as well as Patrick Thornton’s piece on how the Foundation is assembling a team [...]

By: Patrick Thornton

Patrick Thornton — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:02:21 +0000

Zach,

I’m very interested to see how this turns out and how much time, effort and money it takes to make EveryBlock and other projects easy to install. And then it will be interesting to see how many news orgs will install the software. I have a suspicion that some are so lost right now, that they wouldn’t even install something that came with an easy installer.

By: Everyblock, Nonprofiteering, and the Affero License « Digifesto

Everyblock, Nonprofiteering, and the Affero License « Digifesto — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:16:22 +0000

[...] Knight Foundation itself may look to get more of a piece of the action in the future. In the meantime it is devoting resources to developing the community around the [...]

By: Zachary M. Seward

Zachary M. Seward — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:25:40 +0000

Thanks so much for following up with that, Patrick. A really interesting and probably smart move by Knight. —Zach

By: Patrick Thornton

Patrick Thornton — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:40:05 +0000

This sounds like the right plan. The real key will be pulling this off correctly.

Kebbel has said that Knight is considering asking for up to the full amount of the grant back, but I have to wonder if that would cause some people to seek venture capital instead of working through the News Challenge? Adrian, do you have thoughts on that?

Ultimately, however, if Knight pulls this off correctly, it could help keep the News Challenge going for years to come.

Knight is taking this a step further, and will be continuing development of EveryBlock and other popular Knight-funded open source projects. Kebbel told me that the idea is to take this great open source code and making it easy for people to install. Most news organizations could not utilize EveryBlock because they don’t have the staff resources on hand to install the code, but Knight is hoping to lower the barriers to entry.

By: What Everyblock owes Knight after its open source success | Open Source Blog

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:02:07 +0000

[...] month, however, Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but should Knight get its money back, even a little of [...]

By: Michal Migurski

Michal Migurski — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:58:49 +0000

Thanks James, that’s kind of what I figured. BTW I think you’re absolutely right above when you say that the real secret sauce is EB’s ability to get data out of agencies. Nobody here has mentioned Daniel X O’Neill, so I’ll just say that I have seen how incredibly valuable it is to have someone on your team who’s a data-chasing phone monster. I’ve done projects like Oakland Crimespotting that deal with similar, smaller datasets to those featured on EveryBlock, and I know from firsthand experience that servers and code aren’t enough to keep delivering a site like that. You download the EB source, you don’t get Dan.

By: Kristen Taylor

Kristen Taylor — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:53:53 +0000

Adrian,

I was going from Brian’s tweets about it and missed his mea culpa tweet you reference. I apologize to you and your team. [Zach, if it's possible to strikethrough that in my earlier with retracted in caps, please do.]

I do think it’s curious Knight is mentioned in most of the articles in passing at the bottom (I took a cursory glance at about forty articles); you certainly thank Knight in your announcement. Sometimes it’s in the spirit rather than the letter.

Wouldn’t it have been great to mention the News Challenge at Gov 2.0 with all of those interesting developers working on local applications? My bias, and it’s a big one, is always toward more people finding out how to receive funding for their project, especially those that might not otherwise know about foundation support.

I thank you for the compliment, but I’m not a journalist. As I know many who hold you in the highest regard, I’m happy to have been wrong.

Here’s to hoping everyone can find and use this code as the grant intended–

By: What Everyblock owes Knight after its open source success | Open Source | ZDNet.com

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:37:09 +0000

[...] month, however, Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but should Knight get its money back, even a little of [...]

By: Medial Digital – Medien, digitale Medien, Medienwandel, Journalismus, Internet, soziales Internet, Social Web, Web 2.0» English Blogposts » Is Everyblock greedy? No, the Knight Foundation’s reasoning is wrong.

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:55:05 +0000

[...] sold the plattform to MSNBC. And this doesn’t sit well with the Knight Foundation, as NiemanJournalismLab points out: The sale raised questions about nonprofit funding of for-profit ventures. After all, [...]

By: James Bennett

James Bennett — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:24:59 +0000

Michael, I do work on open-source projects, but my day job involves working on a proprietary news CMS, and GPL code is off-limits for that. So both for practical and ethical reasons I have a policy of not even looking at GPL code that overlaps with what I do at work (and EveryBlock’s codebase certainly does). This is probably much more paranoid than is necessary, but I like to err on the side of caution.

By: Michal Migurski

Michal Migurski — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:07:11 +0000

James, I can see from your about page that you’re an open source developer with Django, so I’m curious what it is about the EB GPL code that you can’t touch with a ten foot pole. Academic question, really – are you worried about some sort of clean room / contamination situation?

As for the rest of you, this comment thread has seen some incredibly unpleasant innuendo.

By: Zachary M. Seward

Zachary M. Seward — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:59:10 +0000

Wow, well, I was traveling all day from San Francisco to Boston, but this post certainly lived on. I appreciate all the input, and it looks like we got somewhere, even if it was more turbulent than my flight. —Zach

By: Paul Smith

Paul Smith — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:49:06 +0000

>> questions of whether or not Adrian “held something back” in his open-source release of the code. While that’s a fairly incendiary question

More innuendo! And in a post were you have it straight from the horse’s mouth! That takes sack, dude.

>> When you cede the field to others in this way, this is what often happens.

Which is another way of saying, “engage with me on my terms, or have unfounded accusations made against you.” Victim blaming is always a classy line of argumentation.