Burning Questions
Jun 16, 2006
I was invited to spend a week to 30 interesting folks to discuss the "role of philanthropy". Everyone is asked to submit a bunch of
"burning questions" and I penned down a few that have created some good conversations:
- Is philanthropy creating more problems than it's solving? To "help" is to see life as weak, to "fix" is to life as broken, but what happens when we see life as a whole? Is it possible to serve without pre-conceived solutions in our head?
- What are the design flaws in man-made institutions that encourage fear, competition, and scarcity? Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." How do we address the design flaw so deep into the game?
- Who has done more good for the world: Mother Teresa or Bill Gates? After much analysis, Forbes magazine concluded it was Bill Gates. How exactly do we measure the "good"? Can we count what really counts?
- How do we shift from a transaction oriented society to a flow-based society? If 15 still frames can create an animation, how many transactions does it take for real life to flow? Divorcing technology isn't an option anymore; how can we steer it towards flow?
- In our current "attention" economy, eyeball time is money -- seconds of SuperBowl time, click-thrus on Google, placement in Time. But can we go a step further and create an Intention Economy? Instead of marketers constantly interupting consumers to sell unwanted products, can we create a consumer-driven, demand-pull system based on communities of intention?
- How does the online world relate to the the offline world? Are they diametrically opposed and can they be weaved together for positive social transformation?
