Squarepeg Project Blog

Netsquared Conference was Awesome!

Isaac — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:51:45 -0700

Last week John and I got back from a grueling conference at Cisco HQ in San Jose. The conference was hosted by Netsquared, a project of Techsoup, and they brought together a big bunch of the most active people in the Internet and social change space. Squarepeg was one of 21 featured projects competing for the hearts and the votes of all the attendees. We didn’t end up taking home one of the top cash prizes (all the big winners have public beta or full release sites up, and we think they earned their rewards). We were able to bring home a few grand, receive some wonderful feedback, and meet a lot of really great people who are now interested in Squarepeg. We were a bit slow to blog about the experience because we’re still synthesizing and learning from all the interesting ideas we heard (and read about after the fact on blogs, video interviews, etc.). We couldn’t possibly convey everything that happened during this action packed conference, but we’d love to share a few ideas that caught our interest.

People really liked that Squarepeg is a communication tool for people who are organizing face to face meet-ups, rather than primarily a place to express ideas, concerns, and solidarity (exclusively) online. I guess others also feel room for innovation in this niche.

We’ve always said that integrating our technology with what’s happening on other sites or with other tools is very important. A few people at the conference actually thought that bringing a recommender system and combatting information overload on other popular Internet spaces is one of the most interesting things we are doing. We've discussed possibilities for open social apps, Facebook apps, etc., but of course the issue at stake is deciding what to focus on. What do you think? Is disseminating the recommender technology to other social sites as important as creating the perfect environment for effective activism on our own destination site? Shoot us an email if you have ideas.

For two days we met with 20 other featured projects, and even more Internet change makers who represented their own work less formally. Some of these projects were way inspiring (at times even intimidatingly cool!), but we noticed one significant disconnect almost across the board. Most of these innovators are building tools to facilitate more and better conversations, without addressing (at least during their presentations) whether the stakeholders in any given cause or organization are ready for more public conversation. Props to Holly at NTEN for blogging about this before us. Her explanation is that some people aren’t very comfortable (yet) with publishing their thoughts for the whole world to see. I agree with her, but I don’t think that’s the only important explanation. Frequently, facilitating a dialog with just one of the many causes I care about isn’t direct enough social change for me to bump it to the top of my long list of priorities. Sure I might consider myself a stakeholder if I think the cause is important, but is it enough of a priority that I want to drive the conversation? Or, if I already feel like I'm an expert, is more conversation with mostly newbies what I want/need? The answer to that question has a lot to do with the individual involved, how their personality fits with they cause they have identified, and how the particular cause/nonprofit is engaging them. These are problems we're trying to address, but this post is long enough though, so we’ll blog more about that soon.

All in all it was a wonderful conference, and we’d like to offer one more huge thank you to all the online voters who sent us there, and to all the other conference projects and attendees. And of course, netsquared/techsoup, you are uniquely wonderful and we promise to be in touch. You’ll are great.

cheers

Isaac

Why Squarepeg is a Limited Liability Company

Isaac — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:39:11 -0700

When we first set out on this grand adventure, we thought we would become a nonprofit 501c3 organization. After all, “social sector” and “nonprofit sector” are synonyms, right? Nonprofits are the trustworthy agents of social change, right? In many cases these assumptions are accurate, nonprofits do a lot of great work, but we had a few deep-seated organizational commitments that made us think critically about whether we might be different.

First, as college students who would rather be activists than waiters, we have to get by eating our fair share of top ramen and..uhh… plastic? Anyhow we have a very personal empathy for a lot of people and organizations who can barely pay the bills at the end of the month. With each decision we make, we are also really dedicated to stepping back and thinking about the big picture: how does this make the world a better place? While we are crafting our product we want to think beyond, how does this make donors happy? We want to ask ourselves “is this tool, or this feature, or this graphical flourish going to make activists happier and more effective at changing the world?”

For many organizations, some compromises would be in order. For us, a few simple solutions presented themselves, one of these was to show ads to people who didn’t want to or couldn’t pay to use the site. This is a very easy way to generate enough revenue to make sure our work is sustainable, scalable, and all around the best it can be. After we did a little research though, we discovered that advertising is not an acceptable form of income for nonprofits. It is taxed as “unrelated business income” and if it exceeded 2/3 of our total revenue (and we really thought that it might), then we could loose our 501 c3 status.

So, what is a social enterprise?

Basically, social enterprise is a marketing buzzword analogous to “Web 2.0” (which means ajax and a few cultural things). Activists and scholars are still debating what the term actually means;* suffice it to say that we increasingly agree that becoming a nonprofit is not the only valid organizational route to social change. In fact, more and more of us believe that even companies and corporations can choose to make social justice the cornerstone of their organizational DNA. We don’t care enough for this name game to call ourselves social entrepreneurs, but some thought leaders in the social enterprise movement did encourage us to investigate the Limited Liability Company structure. This legal structure offered us a few major advantages over becoming a nonprofit.

Agile: Simple set-up and tax reporting. Takes thirty minutes and costs 50 dollars to set up in Oregon versus months/years and hundreds/thousands of dollars for a nonprofit.

Safe: Offers us limited liability – if we make a big mistake we could loose the venture, but they won’t garner our children’s children’s wages.

Flexible: Can pass through taxes to our own tax returns, or file to be taxed as a corporation. Also perfect for a hybrid nonprofit/llc business model.*

Independent: We are allowed to make money. In our particular situation we felt that building a site that could make a little money would not distract us from our mission as much as trying to build an organization and a perpetual fundraising arm that people wanted to donate to.

So in the end we decided to become a limited liability company, and we formalized that intention by filing articles of organization in Oregon (you can do it on their website now!) on December 20th, 2007. For us, the moral of the story was to be true to our goals and think carefully about our current and future needs. Organizations are about as diverse as the people they serve. A llc was the right legal structure for us, even though we hope we won’t make a dime unless we are making the world a much better place. If you are considering founding a venture, you should definitely consider all your options, and check out what some of the people in the social enterprise movement are doing. Of course, we’d also be happy to offer advice about going through this process, just shoot us an email.

Notes:

Various groups favor very different definitions of social entrepreneurship. For the time being, you can expect to hear us call ourselves social entrepreneurs about as frequently as you will hear us call ourselves a ¡Revolutionary Web 2.0 Phenomenon! (never).

In the future we might found a nonprofit to partner with our llc. Or we might not. We'll probably wait a while before we reexamine whether that kind of complex but interesting hybrid legal structure would fit our mission and our organizational capacity.

Nice Words About Squarepeg From a Few Friends.

Isaac — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:32:50 -0700

In recent weeks we’ve met with people from a few organizations that we thought might want to use Squarepeg. We have a hard enough time containing our enthusiasm already, so you can imagine how we felt when they said this about us.

We sat down to speak with Isaac from Squarepeg and were really impressed with some of their ideas and what they are doing. We work mainly with young people and have been trying to figure out how to connect in a way that is productive for us and satisfying for them. Squarepeg seems to be working on some of the problems we've been trying to solve, so we're excited to give their site a test run in the coming months.

Kirsten Merrell, Awards for Excellence Coordinator, AFS Intercultural programs.

Squarepeg’s vision is a progressive movement to leverage current social trends to create substance, change and, finally ACTION. No longer is "social networking" only the simple act of peering into the lives of others. It now can be used to share ideas regarding the stuff that really matters, the issues that need a true compilation of perspectives. Squarepeg seems to be working in this direction, and I fully support and encourage the proliferation of such social networking enterprise.

Nick Triolo, eMarketing Assistant, AFS Intercultural Programs

With Focus the Nation, we have a lot of participants who are dispersed pretty much all over the country. Having everyone feel connected to this movement and our impact is a big challenge for us, but to be honest I feel like dedicating resources to social media has burned us more than it has helped. We just haven't been able to find the return on investment yet, but Squarepeg seems to have solutions to some of the issues we've been struggling with. If we invest in online communication, we want it to help us move people offline, so we're excited to have Squarepeg use Focus the Nation as a testing ground this fall.

Dr. Eban Goodstein, Project Director, Focus the Nation

The Archimedes Movement is working to engage citizens from all walks of life so that we can advance solutions to the common problems we face, starting with the health care crisis. We have nearly 40 community chapters. Though most of our supporters are here in Oregon, they are dispersed geographically. We would like to feel more connected to all of our members (and the members to each other). We have created a drupal-based site, pages for each chapter and can schedule events, but it just isn't doing quite what we want and we aren't able to invest a lot of resources into improving it right now.

After talking with the people from Squarepeg, we think integrating their software with our current site might be a great solution so that we can get better feedback from all our members and make this grass-roots process more democratic. We're waiting for them to finish the beta site, and hope to see it soon.

Rick Ray, Technology Manager, The Archimedes Movement

A bit about these organizations:

AFS Intercultural Programs is one of the world’s largest community-based volunteer organizations dedicated to building a more just and peaceful world through international student exchange. Nearly 13,000 students, young adults and teachers participate in AFS programs each year.

On January 31st, 2008, Focus the Nation organized teach-ins, workshops, and debates on the topic of Global Warming Solutions for America with over 1900 universities, schools, and civic groups. They engaged over 1 million people, and aim to engage over 5 million during a day of focus in 2009.

The mission of The Archimedes Movement is to create a new space for civic engagement outside our traditional legislative and governance structures to advance solutions to the common problems we face. They have nearly forty community chapters, mostly in Oregon.

Face to Face: Meet us at Netsquared Conference May 27th & 28th

Isaac — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:05:07 -0700

You may have heard that John and I will be representing Squarepeg at the upcoming Netsquared Conference at the Cisco conference center in San Jose (we will be the only Portland based project at this event). Did you know you can attend too? Maybe you should take a look at the agenda; we actually think this would be a really fun conference even if we didn't get to talk about our own dear project. In addition to showcasing 20 other groups like us, the Netsquared team has some exciting speaker sessions lined up. If you want to join us, you better hurry though. Tomorrow, Friday the 16th, is the last day to register for the conference or reserve a discounted hotel room (sorry, we know it's spendy).

Most of our team just finished finals (congratulations Laura and Polly, graduating seniors!), and so we get to work just about full time on Squarepeg in the next few weeks leading up to the conference. If you are going, we would love to connect with you beforehand, so we can make sure we find a time and place to meet-up during the conference. Just send me an email, isaac [at] squarepegged [dot] org. Hope to see you there!

cheers

Isaac

Thank You Voters for Sending us to the Netsquared Conference!

Isaac — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:16:22 -0700

Whew, we have something important to say and we've been holding it in for a while. Now that our blog is up and running... Thank You! Thank you everyone who voted for us in the Netsquared Challenge. Here's an update about the cool stuff we get to do thanks to your votes:

On May 27th and 28th John and I will go to San Jose California for the netsquared conference. Netsquared is leveraging their contacts with popular bloggers and bay area tech companies to bring a lot of talented volunteers to this event. John and I get to talk about Squarepeg with curious and creative people (we love doing that), and maybe even convince some of them to work with us.

Getting out the vote was also a great opportunity for us. Asking loads of friends and family to vote was a convenient excuse to discuss this work we are passionate about. They also gave us great feedback about Squarepeg and helped lead us to more people who want to take up this cause.

Energy. That's right, we took a risk and put ourselves out there for judgement. Being selected was motivating; it's really nice to hear that other people think Squarepeg is a cool idea too.

Oh yeah, money too. We get some share of $100,000. Pretty cool, hunh?

We are excited about the conference in May, but we definitely aren't waiting for the conference to move forward with our project. Come to think of it, maybe you shouldn't wait either! If you think you've spotted some talent, have duffel bags of cash lying around, or just want to encourage us to keep moving along, just send us an email.

cheers Isaac

Fingers crossed!

John — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:51:00 -0700

Ok, everyone, I think the transition to the new server is finally complete! I've been squashing bugs for the last few days, and I really, really, think I've got 'em all. If you, god forbid, find one, please don't hesitate to email me at john@squarepegged.org.
We'll see you at netsquared!
john

Sit tight...

John — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:01:37 -0700

Hey everyone, sorry for the delay, but we're experiencing just a few technical bumps as we move servers. We'll have everything, including the blog, up and running pretty quick.

best, John