Deborah Elizabeth Finn

Eight years ago, I wrote a blog article about failure-friendliness in nonprofit technology. It was very much inspired by my friend and colleague, Dan Scharfman. Since Dan died this week, and this is also a week when I have been thinking hard about the obstacles that nonprofit organizations face in tracking their outcomes, it seems appropriate to reprise the article here and now. Having coped with the need for failure-friendliness in nonprofit technology for years, I see that my understanding is still superficial when it comes to the difficulties that nonprofits have in acknowledging programmatic failure. I invite your thoughts on how we can be more transparent about and more open to learning from failure. Meanwhile, special thanks go out to Beth Kanter, for her outstanding blog articles on this topic.

Wed 26 Jan 2005 05:41 PM EST

The term “failure-friendly organization” was first introduced…

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Food Governance

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development , the only international, peer-reviewed journal focused on the emerging field of food and agriculture–based community development,  has a call for papers on Cooperatives and Alternative Food Systems Initiatives

Cooperatives have historically been, and still are, important institutions in the global economic landscape, and have strong roots in food and agriculture. Conventional agriculture cooperatives work to increase the marketing power of farmers by pooling their products to achieve economies of scale. Traditional consumer cooperatives focus on increasing buying power to meet member needs. Recently there has been a surge in cooperative alternative food systems initiatives in the form of cooperative food hubs, cooperative local food networks, cooperative farmers’ markets and box schemes, worker‐owned food cooperatives, cooperative value chains, and cooperative food buying clubs. These initiatives represent new forms of collective engagement of consumers, producers and other actors as “food citizens” within “civic…

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My Island View

For those who do not know, here are two basic Twitter principles: 1. If you only follow 10 people you will only see the general tweets of those 10 people. 2. If only 10 people follow you, only those 10 people will see your general tweets. Although some might argue that the right ten people might be enough, I would argue that ten educators is a very limited Professional Learning Network. The never-ending task of building a PLN is to continually follow really good educators to get the information they put out.

I often say that the worst advocates for using Twitter as a PLN are power users. They come up with numbers, time on task, and strategies that overwhelm and blow away the average Twitter users, not to even mention how they scare off any novice. The accomplishments and numbers of power users tend to intimidate those who would…

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