This multidimensional map mashup, part of the Net Squared mashup challenge, could be something we’d use at our event.

And the social capital market is both something to invest your money in and something to invest your hope in. That’s clear when we talk to sponsors and when we talk to the players. Nobody is in it just for the money. They are in it for more than money; social value and financial value, a blended value as my friend Jed Emerson would say. It’s about value and values, what people find valuable, and now the spectrum of what a business can be is opening up wider. One portion of this conference is dedicated to erasing the impact of Friedman’s thinking, his rationale that the social responsibility of a business is to make money. Friedman also did not understand either part of John Kennedy’s saying “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Friedman’s emotionally and cognitively stunted view and his pervasive and deadening influence is one of the things we are overcoming in the social capital market.

That’s one of the topics that came up today in talking with John Berger and Jonathan Rosenthall two of the people who are helping us shape the fair trade track. There are a lot of questions about whether calling something fair trade turns off a lot of potential customers, and questions about rating agencies and associations. And there is no place for that dialogue to happen in a setting where you can talk about all the issues, so that’s going to be one focus for that track.

Also, equity may not be the financing answer for fair trade; debt and alternative investments might be more important, since there will be some kind of compromise to return when you are preserving village values and paying the producers more.

Person Jonathan Rosenthal

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Person Jonathan Rosenthall

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I’ve become personally kind of obsessed with the Democratic primaries and the change Obama represents. I just maxed out on my contribution after they said if I gave them $1,000 (which was my limit) I could be in a gathering with him again. The transformation we are about enabling and helping to convene at Socap08 has a political dimension, too. The political transformation folks are talking about cultural transformation that accompanies it here, among other places. How do we talk to that constituency? I naturally talk business, other people talk capital itself, some people talk the political process. I have tended in the past to consider government something to work around more than a part of the solution. Probably I need to think differently about that.

Jerry Michalski will lead an open space convening at our church in about an hour. how do the tech world and the church world and the political world and the finance and business world all do a mashup that doesn’t violate the integrity or essence of each?

We at xigimedia talk about mapping all the time; visualization is useful for making sense of complex situations. It becomes more than eye candy when it is a tool for simplifying things. We have a huge interlocking set of content tracks for our event; five discrete vertical areas; base of the pyramid, fair trade, digital inclusion/ict4d and health, education and workforce, and green and clean, along with one category, capital, that is both a vertical and a horizontal. Capital providers need to talk among themselves because government, foundation, VC, Wall Street and Angel investors are all bridging their silos in new ways and learning to talk across the theory of change to ROI divide. But they also impact each of the other verticals. So does the social entrepreneur horizontal track express itself in each vertical. That’s a level of complexity that’s best expressed in a visual.

This article that I got from Melanie Swan’s deli feed from her blog talks about all the ways people are thinking about mapping. Maybe we convene mappers to experience our conference and come up with variety of overlays that help make sense of the space with us and for themselves.

Brooke Partridge and Cheri Voss of Vital Wave agreed to lead the digital inclusion ICT4D track at the event and Regina Ridley and Eric Nee of Stanford Social Innovation Review said yes to being our first media sponsor. Yesterday had a great talk with John Berger, our fair trade track lead. We’re talking to Al Hammond of WRI about being involved in the BOP track on Monday. A large foundation and a large consultancy are both interested in sponsoring the event. All in all, we moved the ball forward a good bit.

Talked to Dave Chen, Oregon VC working with the Meyers Trust, an innovative foundation doing more on program related investing (MRI’s) than almost anybody. He will be coming to our small gathering of funders (govt, foundation, Wall Street, venture and angel investor) in New York May 9th. He is excited about the conference and wants to help us define the capital track. Also talked to Charly and Lisa Kleissner, who are leading the philanthropic capital track. The site for their foundation is up, highlighting their cutting edge asset class allocation, and a Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors case study on what they are doing is out.