5 comments

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  gregorylent

  11 months ago

  smartmob philanthropy and micro-niches .... combined with micropayment is a probable future for artists, musicians, bloggers ... instead of a few making a lot of money and the rest not, a lot of people making some money, via a kind of micropayment/subscription technology
  
  in america i pay for a newspaper just to read the comic strip doonesbury, and would happily send that 50 cents to the artist, the heck with the paper
  
  increasing transparency, reducing overhead, getting paid for being who you are ....
  
  (and i think charities are far behind for the same reason anybody is behind, a vested interest in avoiding change in order to maintain what works)
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  Philippe Bradley

  11 months ago

  Pure commoditisation - which ultimately, is what needs micropayment - is almost the exact opposite of microphilanthropy! It leads to donation requests getting so micro as to make the donation they ask for so small that potential donors can't be bothered to do it - it's too much effort to get your wallet out, type in the card details, etc (hence the need for micropayment systems to get over this).
  
  Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it's about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity perhaps more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)
  
  There's no reason why average donations can't stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it is based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, highly niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (because it's highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.
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  gregorylent

  11 months ago

  i think what you are saying is that with microphilanthropy i could start a charity for the five village women in my neighborhood who have alcoholic husbands and no food for the kinds, small targets ...
  
  sometimes i have trouble with academic language, and i apologize for my lack of clarity ...
  
  micro transactions of any sort seem to be in our future, through mechanisms as yet uninvented, it seems
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  crosbie

  11 months ago

  I prefer the term micropatronage. This isn't a donation in support of a favoured cause, but a commission contingent upon the production of art.
  
  That's what I'm working on anyway, a mechanism to enable people to reward artists for their art rather than publishers for producing copies. I call it the contingencymarket.com - commission similarly voluntary.
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  jennifer gree

  6 months ago

  http://www.changingthepresent.org is a non profit website with micro- philanthropic gift ideas for the holiday season
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