During the Clinton Global Initiative in late September, the Omidyar Network announced its commitment to invest $55 million in Internet and mobile technologies to advance government transparency and economic empowerment. The philanthropic investment firm, started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, has dedicated $30 million to provide information and tools to help citizens participate with in the governing process domestically and abroad, and $25 million to progress mobile technology in emerging markets.
Huffington Post recently spoke to Pierre Omidyar and the network's managing partner, Matt Bannick, about how their organization will make good on its pledge.
The Huffington Post: When your organization announced this pledge, you specifically explained that you wanted to invest in technologies that are life-changing. How does your organization define a life-changing technology?
Pierre Omidyar: There's a two-part answer to that. At the high level, the very first thing for me is the notion of creating opportunity for people. There's a type of technology and services that can empower users to do great things. This is the experience I had at eBay, which was watching people connect to a global network -- which then was a new thing, this notion of connecting with other people. That connection will inherently create value and will be life changing. I come from the perspective that people are basically good and if you give them the benefit of the doubt, you will rarely be disappointed. If you give them the tools to succeed they will help themselves and those around them. Giving people the tools they need will have a spillover effect.
HP: How do you identify social innovations to invest in?
Matt Bannick: It really comes from developing a network. When you look at who is active in the realm of tools and platforms to enable government transparency, it's a small cast of characters. We were fortunate to identify the Sunlight Foundation, which is fairly well connected. We started doing the networking thing, talking to folks doing interesting things in the space. After a few years, you tend to know the folks in the space and when something new and exciting happens you tend to hear bout it. Identifying and finding them has becoming easier as we develop our network.
PO: Mobile technology and mobile phones are really the next revolution. There are many applications that are built on a mobile platform that will create tremendous opportunity for people.
MB: In terms of identifying these technologies, we're just in the space now. We consider ourselves denizens of the Internet and the mobile space. You're in the flow and using the technologies, so opportunities just emerge.
Instead of saying, "let's make the next new application for mobile in Kenya", we say "hey, who's doing what?" Those people on the ground in Nairobi will be far more in touch with the next application in Nairobi than we are.
PO: Fundamentally, we are focused on finding organizations that have massive social impact and then helping them scale with financial and human capital. Then the key is how to get them from the early stage to affecting millions of people. We do that with flexible capital, grants and investments.
HP: Do you have a preference for investing in for-profit or nonprofit organizations?
MB: We invest in both. We think of the problem first and the tool second. We think of the impact we are trying to make and then decide on the appropriate tool to invest in. For-profits are serving their customers and they're generating revenue to scale. but even the not-for-profits we support, we encourage to find ways to generate revenue to scale.
We just announced a significant grant to Refugees United, which allows refugees to find one another. There are 40 million displaced persons and this will help them find one another. This is a technology that creates an opportunity to have an incredibly positive effect. This mobile platform allows people to enter their key information to find each other to reunite. It helps people find each other and creates broader societal benefits as people create stronger networks.
Another platform we've invested in, Ushahidi, allows anyone with a mobile phone to send information about emergencies, plot it on a map and people can view the map and take action. It's been used for a whole host of crisis situations to identify where people in Haiti were short on food and during various elections to create voter transparency.
An additional example organization is FrontlineSMS, which has some pretty basic downloadable software. It allows people to create a one-to-many communications platform. The software has now been downloaded about 10,000 times, mostly by NGOs. The software providing a tool to allow other NGOs to be much more effective.
HP: Advancing government transparency is a lofty goal. How do you measure success in government transparency?
MB: It's hard to have one metric. We tend to think about things in reach and engagement and what the depth of engagement you get: How may use the platform and how many people are affected by that platform? Or how many people are in the field and how many people are affected in the field? We also try to think of not only the scale but the efficacy of the platform or technology we're investing in. If you get to point that it's costing you $50 to unite a family, a technology seems like it has a positive effect. In the not-for-profit world there is no shared bottom line, it's inherently tricky. So, prior to making an investment, we work with organizations to find out how they measure themselves.
PO: There's also the second-order impact of government transparency. It's important to do all the first-order measurement but when you talk about enhancing and increasing information from a government, this creates a number of second-order effects. Sunlight Foundation, for example, publishes a lot of information on how the government works. We consider how many people were able to access that info, and if it encouraged them to get involved or to vote. These effects are in some cases much harder to measure, but they are based on this fundamental notion of, if you give people greater visibility then it will increase how government will act.
MB: If we do a number of things to help make a government more transparent, those societal impacts will be our biggest impact. They are also harder to measure, but they are the most exciting result.
HP: It's obvious that you both are passionate about both technology and information. But why have you chosen to invest in these sectors now?
PO: Every day, we feel an enormous sense of gratitude and privilege to work with the people that we work with, the invests and the grantees. What motivates my wife and me is creating opportunities for people. It isn't so much a particular program focus, it's much more this notion of investing in humanity generally to create opportunities, to give people the tools to be successful. When we see people out there working against all odds to improve their communities and quality of life, we are grateful and inspired.
MB: Mobile technology is equally as important as creating government transparency. We do think that it's absolutely transformational. There's a government transparency part to it too, because you have the opportunity through mobile technology to fundamentally change the relationship between the government and the governed. People have a voice. It was once only the elite in capital cities but now everyone has a voice. Historically there has been a technology divide between the "haves" and "have-nots". With a mobile phone the very cool thing is that the technology brings people together and it can shrink the difference between "haves" and "have-nots" in terms of level of opportunity and access. It's a fundamental shift in the way people manage their lives, in how they manage their lives and technology in general.
People are inherently capable and what they need is opportunity. The best way for us to provide opportunity is to find really inventive ventures that can scale massively. We're in a really interesting age of helping people support social innovation.