The Social Economy and

Digital Civil Society

Lucy Bernholz
Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Digital Civil Society Lab
#pacs

What is the Social Economy?

All the ways we use private resources to create
public benefits.
What is Digital Civil Society?
All the ways we use private resources to
organize, create, distribute, and fund public
benefits in the digital age.

How did we get here?

Interwoven decades of technology and market driven innova6ons

On demand
informa6on

Changing
Corporate roles

Data assets

Social nance

Mobile
organizing

Crowdsourcing

Social enterprise

Crowdfunding

Background context: public funding shi=s, measurement demands, focus on impact

Donors Choices
Components of social
economy funding
(US data)
Charitable Giving
Impact Inves6ng
Poli6cal Giving

+
Consumer choices
+
Crowdfunding
2010 Data

Do-ers Choices
The Social Economy of Enterprises

C4s
Sharing
econ

Digital Civil Society

Unknowns: How will digital assets and organizing change the nonprot form?
Revenue needs?

Digital missions, changing enterprises

Quiz: Which of the above are nonprots?

(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Photo: Gail548, Flickr CC h\p://www.ickr.com/photos/galfred/

The current state of digital civil society

Photo: h\p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Bigeaux_houseboat.JPG

In the social economy

NONPROFIT

and in digital civil society today.

NONPROFIT

What we need to invent next

A spectrum of ownership rights regarding
digital data
New norms for respecting the rights of digital
data donors
New forms of governance for managing digital
data as a public good
Broader definitions of public benefit both
individual and aggregated

(CC BY-NC-SA