January 04, 2008
GiveWell Board Member Seeks Advice About Internet Incident
Lucy Bernholz, a board member of GiveWell, is seeking advice on how to deal with that organization’s recent Internet imbroglio, in which one of its co-founders was caught using online aliases to promote GiveWell.
On her blog, Philanthropy 2173, Ms. Bernholz wonders what the consequences should be for Holden Karnofsky, including the possibility the board fire him. Several blogs are voicing their opinion on the matter.
Tom Belford, a nonprofit consultant and one of the authors of the The
Agitator blog, writes that Mr. Karnofsky is “an immature, under-informed, smart-ass,”
but that he deserves credit for pushing the nonprofit world to improve
and deserves a second chance.
David Geilhufe, a nonprofit technology expert, makes a similar plea
for “rehabilitation” on his blog, Social Source.
However, Adrian Hon, a computer-game designer and a member of the
online community group that uncovered the GiveWell deception, is less
forgiving.
On his Mssv blog, he writes, “perhaps Holden is a good guy. But he’s an adult, and he’s supposed to be responsible for influencing the flow of millions of dollars to charities; you would expect him to have some basic sense of judgment.”
Other blogs are gleaning the incident for lessons for other nonprofit
officials.
The author of the Donor Power
blog, Jeff Brooks,
writes that Mr. Karnofsky needed a mentor. “If you’re very young and
in the profession for the first time, get adult supervision,” writes
Mr. Brooks, who works for an advertising agency that serves nonprofit
groups.
On the Uncivilsociety blog, Jeff Trexler, offers five lessons that can be learned from the incident. “In short, it all comes down to a lesson that we haven’t
seemed to learn from the earliest days of Greek drama: beware of
hubris,” writes Mr. Trexler, who is a professor of social
entrepreneurship at Pace University.
What do you think? Should Mr. Karnofsky be fired or be allowed to
stay? Join a discussion on the topic here or share your views by clicking on the “comments” link below.
— Ian Wilhelm
Comments
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You say “online aliases” as if using them is in some way less damning than using regular aliases. Granted, not everyone in every internet forum uses their real full name when they post comments, but there’s a big difference between using an alias and trying to obscure your real identity especially if the topic of your comments is one you are intimately familiar with.
This is beside your larger point which is fascinating but I think one of the things that makes this whole situation confusing for so many is that there are two groups of people here — one group who is wondering “gee what are the rules in this sort of situation…? I wish there were people who understood these things.” and another group who is saying “We’ve been here a long time and we’re telling you what the rules are and you just don’t like the rules.” — and the two groups are communicating poorly.
Full disclosure: I work at MetaFilter.
— jessamyn Jan 4, 12:01 PM #
As Jessamyn (my coworker; I work with her at Metafilter, as ‘cortex’) suggests, one of the frustrating things about this whole situation has been trying to navigate and to some extent moderate the cultural disconnect between the folks who are primarily philanthropy wonks and the folks who are primarily web community wonks, so to speak. Communicating the misunderstandings between one side and the other has been a real challenge, and it’s difficult really to mitigate the culture shock all around.
The Metatalk thread from which this all sprang is a good example of this — there’s a lot of meat in there, a lot of really good substantial discussion, but it’s pushing on toward 1200 comments at the moment and a significant fraction of those are a mix of aggressive, angry banter and very inside-baseball metafilter jargon/references. I simultaneously do and don’t want people to read that thread, because the value is there but I worry about the outsider reaction to the less savory stuff that we regulars just skim right past.
We’ve been putting together a distillation of the thread and outside coverage of the situation on the Metafilter Wiki (which Adrian Hon hosts on mssv.net). The main article is here , and there’s an in-progress collection of media/blog discussions on this at this Givewell Coverage page. As a starting point into the topic, these may make for better resources than that raw Metatalk thread.
— Josh Millard Jan 4, 12:19 PM #
It really goes beyond than just “online aliases” and into using multiple online aliases deceptively in the way that shills con people into playing three-card Monte.
— Michael Jan 4, 12:24 PM #
Another metafilter user here, albeit one who came in late and read the whole debacle once it had run out.
I similarly am uncomfortable with saying “online aliases” as if it makes a significant difference. The fact that the online world makes it simple and quick to perpetrate this kind of behavior doesn’t make it any less worrisome to me. I also think this whole matter would have gone differently and we wouldn’t be having these “what should be done?” conversations if this had happened in a print medium.
The question and answer format is certainly somewhat over-represented in the online world, but it’s certainly not unique to the Internet. There’s no shortage of, say, newspaper advice columnists to whom Holden could have (and for all we know, did) written to feigning to be a run-of-the-mill charitable giver who discovered this great new resource, GiveWell.
If it were to become known that he’d sent such letters to Hints from Heloise, Ask Amy, Ann Landers and whoever else runs in national and local papers, would we feel the need to question what the right action is?
The Ask Metafilter system allowed Holden to not simply wait to see one of the advice columnists to pose a charity-related answer and then answer and promote GiveWell while posing as an unassociated person, but to plant the question as well.
I think the begged question is this: does it matter any less to pretend to be a disinterested party when writing both the question and answer online than it does to simply write an answer to a newspaper columnist?
I don’t think it does.
— Don Jan 4, 12:58 PM #
Part of the culture conflict is the idea that something that happens “on an online message board” is insular to that web community, and not of significant impact offline. But these days, blogs are populated with people active in all areas of society who track news, conduct research, and build relationships online as they do with other media and in face-to-face interactions. The boundaries between online and offline activities are not as stark as they once may have been. What happens online doesn’t stay confined there anymore; it impacts real-world identities, entities and decisions, as we’ve seen. Online ideas and identities are continually becoming more thoroughly integrated with daily life. So “internet imbroglios” are not terribly marginal — they become just plain old-fashioned imbroglios.
We are all in this discussion together, learning and deciding, as we go, what accountability, openness, and honesty are going to mean in a world making increasing use of online communications tools.
— Michelle Moon Jan 4, 05:31 PM #