Community building is the key to online capacity, but because the phrase "social networking" is used to refer only to a narrow set of well-hyped commercial tools, it's hard to keep our eyes on the real prize: building and enriching connections between our stakeholders. One of the specific consequences is the way in which people have gotten distracted from email, which remains the most powerful online social tool of all. "Making Social and Email Work Together" by Jeanne Jennings is a short post that will help get you re-oriented around using all the media that your stakeholders use, in concert.

I've wondered for years what was going on with the increased funding of major environmental organizations by some of the world's most egregious polluters. It's been going on for years, but I'm not enough of a policy analyst or environmental news wonk to really discern the impact. Well, in The Wrong Kind of Green, Johann Hari spells it out. Frankly, it's deeply disturbing. We need independent advocates for the environment more than ever, but after twenty years of cooptation, many of the biggest players are, at best, neutralized. This is scary.

As far as I can tell, the target of "what is cool" keeps moving, but the dynamic and the consequences are always the same. When we're motivated by hype, we are likely to lose more than we gain. Take the case of recent fundraising for Haiti by Facebook game company Zynga. They may deny that taking more than 50% of donations intended for the people of Haiti was a scam, but I don't think any of our readers would consciously hire a firm that did that.

Something terribly unsettling is going on in the world of community organizing. The phrase itself and possibly the concept are under attack by the right-wing meme machine in the US. David Neiwert summarizes a lot of what's going on in this post at Crooks and Liars: Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, and the Campaign to Kill Community Organizing. He opens with a video (which I can't really tolerate watching) of Beck doing his bizarre schtick against ACORN. Looks like ACORN itself may dissolve as a national organization, despite the independent investigations vindicating the organization. But acorn itself is not the only target. Funding for community organizing is muddled in general as is the entire dialogue. This ongoing strategy to use sleaze and innuendo and propaganda to undermine the language of civil society is deeply disturbing to me. I for one don't plan to stop using the phrase "community organizing". It's a noble practice that contributes to the heart of our democracy and economy and, in many respects, is the antidote to much that ails us as a society.

I'm teaching a workshop soon on Online Community Organizing and I took the time to re-read Scott London's super essay on Collaboration and Community. It's jam-packed with insights that we keep ignoring in our online efforts. For example, London lists five key weaknesses of collaboration in general: (1) Collaboration is a notoriously time-consuming process and is not suitable for problems that require quick and decisive action. (2) Power inequalities among the parties can derail the process. (Boy is this a big one that we ignore, especially when funders are at the table.) (3) The norms of consensus and joint decision-making sometimes require that the common good take precedence over the interests of a few. (I find this is exacerbated by our tendencies to want to pretend these issues don't even exist.) (4) Collaboration works best in small groups and often breaks down in groups that are too large. (5) Collaboration is meaningless without the power to implement final decisions.

The Just Awards nominations are getting some good attention. (Thank you for spreading the word.) Since I last wrote about the awards, we've added four new people to our panel of judges: Aaron Dorfman, Alana Conner, Paul Light, and Rosetta Thurman. We have short bios (and photos) of each, but briefly: Aaron Dorfman is the Executive Director of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy. Alana Conner is a Senior Editor at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Paul Light is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service, and Rosetta Thurman is a prolific blogger at places such as Perspectives from the Pipeline and Change.org.

People who work in civil society are not immune to the personal and political delusions about wealth that permeate our culture. Those delusions, combined with the service vs change dynamic in our sector, means that we often embrace "change" strategies that reinforce the status quo -- whether it's in our personal lives, organizational lives, or our economic lives as citizens. Given the prominence of the finance sector on our minds these days, I find that it's a good time to recommend Wall Street, a book by Doug Henwood. Mr Henwood is one my favorite economists, right up there with Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. The book was written before the current crisis, which I believe gives us exactly the right analytical perspective. We are easily lost in the spin of the day, even our own.

Association of Fundraising Professionals partnering with HEP Development to provide its members with products and services for matching gifts.

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Brad Worley, president, Worley Reporting, joined board of directors, DHIC, Raleigh.

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IntraHealth International, Chapel Hill, opened its first permanently-staffed office in Washington, D.C., housing senior leaders of CapacityPlus, project addressing health-workforce crisis, plus new global policy division

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Nicor, Naperville, Ill., gave over $2 million in corporate and employee financial donations in 2009, and thousands of volunteer hours, benefiting over 1,200 causes throughout northern Illinois.

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Charities step up census role; Harvard builds stock portfolio; and more.

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The $140 million-asset John William Pope Foundation, which granted $10.8 million in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2009, aggressively promotes a conservative agenda.

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While most wealthy Americans still feel obliged to invest in their communities in the economic downturn, wealthy people worry they may not be able to keep giving at past levels, a new survey says.

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What if they had a fiscal crisis, and nobody came? What if the chump generation figures out the Ponzi scheme? Bob Samuelson thinks the fallout will be political:

... As baby boomers retire, higher federal spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may boost Millennials' taxes and squeeze other government programs. It will be harder to start and raise families.

Millennials [ages 30 and younger] could become the chump generation. They could suffer for their elders' economic sins, particularly the failure to confront the predictable costs of baby boomers' retirement.

Samuelson asks the question in a political context, and that's how most analysts interpret the looming fiscal crisis, as if young voters will punish fiscally irresponsible representatives in Washington. My alternative theory focuses on the context of immigration. Already you may have heard about the millions of illegals who departed the U.S. when the Great Recession dried up job opportunities. A lot of crass nativists might think "Good Riddance!" but I wonder what they'll say when their own children seek greener pastures abroad in 10 or 20 years?

Consider: almost everyone younger than the Baby Boomers expects to get the short end of the fiscal stick. We were laughing about the unlikeliehood of getting Social Securiyt Checks when I was in high school in the 80s. So now that the reckoning is all but unkickable, do the Boomers think their kids and grandkids will just become fiscal serfs?  Think again.

The consequences of U.S. fiscal calamity will go hand-in-hand with globalization. The world is in the early stages of globalization, but already member states in the EU are feeling the effects of combining tax competition with the right of movement. A 2006 BBC report noted that nearly 10 percent of Britons lived aborad, a million in Spain.  Two emigrant types dominate: retirees and workers!  Here's a more recent report from the OECD

... the share of immigrants in the OECD population almost doubled from just over 4.5% in 1975 to 8.3% in 2005. It is also noteworthy that 45% of immigrants living in OECD countries in 2008 came from other OECD countries.

The threat America faces is a world that competes for our greatest natural resource: it's young. If we make the tax climate hellish, the U.S. is going to suffer outmigration as places like Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Chile realize what an opportunity they have to cream our entrepreneurial talent. If we don't, and let the deficit spiral out of control, the dollar will fall and workers will go elsewhere for value reasons. There's already a migratory tension in Europe, waged primarily with favorable tax treatment for high net worth immigrants.

Go ahead and worry about the fiscal crisis of 2020, and worry about its implications across the generations. Just make sure you worry on a big enough scale. We all know that globalization will deepen, and the national borders that seem so tall and vital today will look more and more like borders among the 50 states of yesterday. Remind me again, how difficult does Texas make it on fleeing Californians to move in to their state?

Jon S. Abramson, professor and chair of pediatrics, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, appointed to three-year term, executive council, Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.

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New generation of givers sets own course; shakeup at Bethesda Make-a-Wish chapter; and more.

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Eight philanthropic groups are giving $5.7 million to support clinical trials by the Pediatric Hematology and Oncology Center at Levine Children’s Hospital.

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The phrases used to describe social content on our websites are not the best. I use the phrase "stakeholder generated content" and most people favor the unfortunate "user generated content" moniker. I don't care for these phrases because they focus our attention on content and not on communication. What's really happening with this ongoing revolution is that we are empowering our stakeholders to communicate, in support of their own interests and relationships. That's the game-changing perspective that makes this all so important. We teach that perspective, along with the practical planning considerations needed to implemented it, in the latest addition to our on-demand seminar catalog: The Voice of Your Community: The Strategic Role of Stakeholder-Generated Content. Check out the details and remember that, as with all our current on-demand workshops, it comes with a 30 minute private consultation, focused specifically on the issues you and your team identify as most important to your organization's success.

As a publisher, editor, and contributor to various journals, I'm very happy to witness the launch of Journal of New Organizing. It has the support of the well funded and vibrant New Organizing Institute, which means we can expect open access and a critical mass of interest. It's inaugural issue is a little too Obama focused for my taste, but I nevertheless enjoyed every piece: Socially Networking Your Data: An Obama Campaign Case Study, Coalition Organizing on Campus: A Student Perspective, Keeping Hope Alive: The Story of Obama's Neighborhood Teams Following Election Day, and Lessons Organizers Can Learn From the Military. The Internet has made us all organizers, so this one is worth your time.