Andy: Why not avoid any appearance of sounding hypocritical by
notifying readers when you contribute your criticism? How did you "made
sure that we could take positions on issues that were in opposition to
some of our funders. . ."?
When we received funding from a private sector partner, we made clear to
them we would keep editorial independence. So when AOL funded us, for
example, nothing would stop us from writing an article critical of
[EMAIL PROTECTED] We would always inform them of it, in case they wanted to
write a public response. No funder ever interfered with our publishing,
and they certainly never stopped DDN members from having their say on
issues they cared about.
It's also worth noting that DDN is now designed as a decentralized
online community. I don't write the articles. DDN members do. They also
post them directly to the site. So there's never been a situation where
private sector entities interfered with that editorial independence.
Ironically, the problem hasn't been private funding - it's been public
funding. Because EDC is publicly funded, we were discouraged from
picking fights with the federal government. And when DDN was based at
the Benton Foundation, we were not allowed to lobby for policies we
cared about because of Benton's legal status as a charitable foundation.
But private funders never tried to interfere or discourage us from
getting involved in one issue or another.
On the topic you raised about whether one organization's funding is
"better" than another's because it came from philanthropic sources, the
answer should be obvious, I think. Corporate money is by definition
given to any nonprofit project with but one goal in mind, that is, to
further the image and thus enhance the corporation's profits. For
example, any list that has Verizon as a contributor is fighting against
itself, if it doesn't spell out the why's and wherefore's of the money
contributed, so readers can understand the purpose of the partnership.
Tom
Sure, there's no doubt that companies give to make themselves look
better. But as long as they don't dictate how that money gets spent and
they don't interfere, why not? It never stopped us from writing about
municipal wifi or another cause we thought relevant for greater public
discussion or support. You're also forgetting DDN's original mandate -
to create an online, multistakeholder, multi-sector network of activists
seeking to bridge the digital divide. Multistakeholder and multi-sector,
by definition, means working with the private sector. So it's not like
this was some dirty dark secret - it was central to our founding and has
always been a part of the mission.
Like I said, DDN never have been created or lasted as long without
support from various sectors, including the private sector. And what
happened when we tried to focus on getting less money from the private
sector and more from the public sector? We ran out of funding and lost
our jobs. Sure, it would have been great if some noncommercial
philanthropic benefactor had stepped up and bankrolled DDN so we could
do our work and really mobilize, but that was never realistic.
ac
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------------------------------------
Andy Carvin
acarvin (at) edc . org (until Jan 31)
As of February 1:
andycarvin (at) yahoo . com
http://www.digitaldivide.net
http://www.andycarvin.com
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