3 A Case Against Altruism

Some people find they are able to practice altruism, at least on occasion. I suppose soldiers on the battlefield are altruistic. The problem is you cannot build a society on altruism.

You may have gathered I am a theologian and apologies to those who are not religious but I want to show how the roots of my views about self-interest and altruism are in the deep past. It’s what people have believed for thousands of years. Some people will remember words from the Christian New Testament: “We ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16, NRSV). This is something religious people aspire to but it is not the main thrust of Jesus’ teaching or indeed of other religious traditions.

In various places Jesus teaches the second commandment, “You shall love your Neighbour as yourself” (eg Mark 12:31, NRSV). I remember Mrs Hayes, my teacher at Junior School, who told us that with the first commandment this means we must love God first, other people second and ourselves third. We are permitted to love ourselves it seems but third.

This is of course nonsense. The second commandment is about mutuality. Remember mutuality is understanding that when I work for the benefit of others I benefit myself. The point Jesus makes in this second commandment is not that I come third but I am one of the neighbours I love. From God’s perspective we’re all the same. There’s no third tier of love occupied solely by me!

The word used to describe this love is self-interest. It is the basic value underlying mutuality. Maybe sometimes altruism, giving of my entire self for the benefit of others is important. It makes for inspiring stories but in the regular day-to-day world it is self-interest that benefits all. It is not the same thing as greed.

Greed is where the powerful act solely in their own interests without accountability. Listen for it in the mouths of politicians and directors of industry. They genuinely believe taxation is evil, that supporting the weak through the state is a waste of money, that deregulation benefits the economy …

But pure altruism has its down-side. You can’t build a society on it, unless you need soldiers to fight wars. Here are some of the issues:

The local economy is where we act out our commitment to the values of self-interest. In a disadvantaged local economy, our opportunities to act out of self-interest are limited. When it thrives we are able to collaborate and increase general wealth.

Those who tell us that the economy is essentially competitive are not participating in the economy. They are predators in sheep’s clothing who do not care for the benefit of all.

So, self-interest is a core value but there is another one, about which I shall write next Monday.

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1 The Immortal Leader

Two weeks ago I wrote about mortality and how it is essential to good community leadership.  We all know we’re going to die.  We may believe it will be in the distant future but it is a future that will perhaps arrive sooner than we think.  We all know this.  So what do I mean by the immortal leader?

The immortal leader lives as if they are never going to die.  Ask them and they will readily concede they will one die one day.  But in practice they are there forever.  Here  are some signs of immortality?

Immortality is a spiritual issue.   A theologian called Walter Wink has written a three-volume book about the Powers (the first volume is to the left).  For Wink demonic possession is where someone allows an organisation to inhabit their being.  In first century Palestinian cosmology, every organisation has an angel that can be healthy or sick.  Sick angels are demons.  We normally read these texts through the twin filters of Medieval demonology and modern horror films and so miss the sophisticated cosmology of this period.

Healthy organisations empower their members and others.  Sick organisations can embody humanity’s vilest tendencies.  Organisations are in principle immortal.  With succession in place they can continue for centuries.  The churches are a good example of this and so are governments.  They have powerful structures in place so when key personnel unexpectedly go missing, the organisation is not threatened.  They can to a degree accommodate their immortals because they are not dependent upon them.

But identification with an organisation is never healthy.  It distorts vision and undermines rational thought.  Immortals never listen because they have already made up their minds.

How might immortals appear online?  Does the Internet extend their power or threaten it?

0 Using the Text View

If you enter the WordPress post editor and look to the right just above the one or two rows of buttons you can see two tabs labelled Visual and Text.

For most purposes you will work in the Visual area. This offers an approximate version of the post or page you are working on. If you want to see it exactly as it will appear once published, press the Preview button towards the top right.  The Visual area has improved in recent upgrades and now it offers a fairly good approximation to what you will see once published. This means writing your post is a little simpler than it used to be.

What is the Text View?

The text area is where you can see the underlying html of the post or page. Some people work solely in this area but I don’t recommend this unless you are familiar with html.

The text area offers a very basic facility to control the detail of what you see on the page; your theme and plug-ins control a lot of it. the Text area enables you to control  your posts’ and pages’ appearance using CSS.

There are a few buttons that allow you to add html tags and some are similar to buttons in the visual view. You can add any html into the text area even if it is not available on the buttons.

I’m not going to go into detail. If you know html you can work out what the buttons do and if not you’ll not follow it anyway.

Here are two things to note:

1. Sometimes if your post or page does not publish how you expect it to, the reason is visible in the text view. If you know html, it’s worth taking a look.
2. You can do a lot by using div with a class attribute supported by css. I use this method to add my cross, tick and arrow bullets. Anything that requires css will need a div tag and class attribute.

2 Third Sector Organisations: Outputs and Outcomes

Last Wednesday I offered five reasons why so many websites lack purpose. Whilst these can apply to any organisation, I’ve found the third sector is particularly prone to purposeless websites. The reasons why so many sites fail lie in the nature of the organisation that puts them there.  If the organisation is not clear about its own purpose or the purpose of its website then it is inevitable the site will not have a clear purpose.

Business and Third Sector Organisations

Businesses seek profit and so they have to get their websites right; they must get to know their customers and potential customers and so offer a site they will respond to positively. Their existence may depend upon them getting their website right and keeping that way.

Third sector organisations can be businesses but many of them are not. They are often dependent upon grants and this means they need to satisfy their funding bodies and not their clients. The relationship with funding bodies is rarely a partnership. Usually funding bodies are interested solely in whether their money is spent for the reasons it was given. They are not so interested in how effective the work is, even allowing for all the talk about outputs and outcomes.

Outputs and Outcomes

Outputs are brilliant to the bureaucratic mind. They are measurable. So you offer a grant to an organisation and in return you might ask, for example, that the organisation sees 100 clients. The organisation needs to provide evidence they have seen 100 clients. Usually there are several outputs, so if the organisation helps people find work there may be further outputs detailing numbers who do training courses, find work, set up their own business, etc.

The problem with outcomes is they are far less visible. Let’s say you have a single output, which is that one person found work through the organisation that received the grant. The outcome would be the difference it makes to the client’s life and their family. Here things can get messy. How do you measure the extent to which they enjoy their new job? What if they enjoy it but are on low pay and have to travel 2 hours each way to get to work? What if they hate the job but the money really benefits their family?

I don’t want to get bogged down about how to measure outcomes; it is possible to record them. It requires qualitative methods and these are generally less well-known and more demanding than quantitative methods.

A business offering a service similar to a third sector organisation has to focus on outcomes if they are going to understand their customers and offer them a valued service. The third sector organisation has to understand their funding body and their requirements. They may be fully aware the statistics they gather for their funding body are effectively meaningless but they have no option but to collect and process them.

Their focus is on where their income is coming from and it is not coming from their clients. This means they have to become bureaucratic and not responsive to their clients’ needs. Any innovation has to be justified to the funding body at some stage. Sometimes the hassle is too great.  Why bother changing things to meet the needs of clients if the funding body is already happy with your performance.

The Role of Business and the Third Sector

One final point: I am not making the political point that the private sector is more efficient than the statutory sector. These political ideologies seek to justify privatisation of public services and they have proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Most private sector organisations on government contracts are large corporations who generate their own bureaucracy and their accountability to the government generates its own bureaucracy.

The strengths of small businesses lie in their closeness to their clients and their ability to respond directly to their clients’ needs. Once consumed by bureaucracy they lose their advantages and deserve to lose their business.  It leaves open to question the best way to fund services for clients who cannot pay for them.  The least wasteful approach for mainstream services has to be through public services.  This leaves small businesses and third sector organisations to fill the gaps in provision.

1 Evaluating the Marketing Worldview: Mutuality

Last Tuesday I discussed the value of marketing to small businesses and before that evaluated underselling marketing as a means to personal wealth.

This time I want to ask how marketing can bring about transformation of society. First, a warning: there is no panacea. There is no magic bullet that will instantly change things for the better.  The neo-liberal worldview is almost universally dominant. In the UK the three main political parties have all bought into this worldview. Through privatisation they have sold off the sovereignty of Parliament and so seem unable to effect change through legislation.

The recent growth of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a joke. They perpetrate the same ideology, whilst recognising the helplessness of our politicians they believe it is membership of Europe that is the cause of loss of sovereignty.

We need a new politics that is pro small business, pro local economy, pro regulation and pro taxation. We need to re-democratise the economy.

Co-operation

This happened in nineteenth century UK through the co-operative movement. It was much wider than the retail co-ops and working people experimented with a range of Friendly Societies that lasted well into the twentieth century.

People understood mutuality and they understood what many people who are in business understand. To be successful in business you must collaborate. The idea that competition is somehow the means to wealth is one of the lies perpetuated by the neo-liberals. It is a lie taken for granted to the extent that almost all of society believes it.

When entrepreneurs set up in business they discover it is a lie. You can choose to compete for a small piece of the pie or you can collaborate to grow the pie. But make no mistake: pies do not grow in a neo-liberal economy. In 2008 the neo-liberal debt based economy collapsed.  We’ve paid for their mistakes ever since.

“Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the pies? The Corporations, the Corporations, they ate all the pies. (And then they ate a pie.)”

Marketing can counter this prevailing ideology.  Online marketing offers everyone an opportunity to get their message across using methods that a few years ago were available only to a small élite. If we can learn to collaborate, it may be possible to experience the mutual benefits our great-grandparents experienced.

You would think the third sector would embrace this approach and to a degree it does. However, the third sector has also embraced the neo-liberal worldview. The consequences are that much of what is happening is self-defeating and so over the next few weeks I shall look at third sector worldviews.

1 Self-Interest and Altruism

Last Monday’s post asked, is it possible to rebuild the local economy? Despite the views of some politicians the truth is many voluntary sector organisations and churches work with private businesses. These relationships do not always work because values clash but there are examples of collaboration between these sectors.

Imagine a spectrum with greedy grasping capitalists at one end and selfless or altruistic saints at the other. Both ends are unreal.

The grasping capitalist is closest to the 1%, the directors of the corporations who draw wealth from local economies. They are responsible for the collapse of the global economy (and will be again soon it seems) and environmental damage. They do this through deregulation which skews the economy in their favour.

Starry-eyed people occupy the other end of the spectrum.  They genuinely believe it is possible and desirable to act solely for the interests of others.

Self-Interest

Most of the rest of humanity is somewhere in-between and motivated by self-interest. When I work for the benefit of society I do so for my benefit. If society benefits through my work, so shall I because I am a part of society.

The corporations want us to believe everyone is essentially selfish and so wants to pay lower taxes and make fewer contributions to general well-being. Another way of  increasing tax revenue and so to benefit society is  to increase wages but big business doesn’t like this solution because it will cost them a lot more.

I don’t see why volunteers should not be paid; they can always give away their excess. We earn for the benefit of  ourselves and others; pay the state to provide some of that benefit and can choose to contribute to causes not supported by the state.  But this works where people earn enough to be able to freely exercise these choices.

I’ve made a case against the greed of the banks and corporations, supported by our political élite.  Next Monday I shall explain why altruism does not explain why people work for the local economy.

0 Real Time Computing

One of my stories is about my Masters degree in Computer Science.  It dates from 1975, which I think was about a year before they  announced the discovery of silicon chips.

I studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK.  There was one computer in a tower basement.  It had remote teletype terminals.  Mostly we programmed using punch cards and our output was via a line printer.  There were a few on-screen terminals, all hard-wired to the computer.  There was one computer game I remember which was a dungeon exploration game.  I don’t remember anyone ever finished it!

The operating system had, we they said, a million errors.  Every month they received a disc with corrections to the operating systems errors.  The disc itself contained a thousand errors.

There were limits to computing.  If the Newcastle University computer were the size of an orange, they would have to keep it in liquid nitrogen because it would overheat.  I suspect a decent mobile phone today is more powerful than that old computer.

The main difference between then and now is certainly communications.  We had lectures looking ahead to IT and communications convergence and even some stuff about network theory, which nobody understood.  Although we didn’t rate it as particularly important.

We had loads of languages to choose from and learning languages was very much the core of using computers.  These days you need know nothing about languages.  My favourite was called Simula, based on queuing theory and Algol 60.  I enjoyed it because thinking in Simula opened up new insights.  You could visualise things you could not see without it.

Still Relevant

Which brings me to the main similarity between then and now, Real Time Computing.  Sometimes we called it Systems Analysis.  This was about the interface between machines and people.  Our course focused a lot on languages and how to program computers.  But their power is in their interaction with human systems.  I’m sure the manufacturers of hardware and software understand this.  I suspect many people don’t.

Computers are entirely dependent on humanity.  They have no purpose without us.  To allow hardware or software to determine our behaviour is to allow others to decide our lives.  We would resist it in other walks of life and so we should when using ICT.  There are loads of options available and it is our responsibility to choose how we use them.

1 How to Insert Media

We’re almost through my account of the basics of blogging and this week covers inserting media in WordPress. Most content management systems will have similar functionality, if not consider using one that does.

One reason I’m covering basics is there are additional options available depending upon your theme and plug-ins. Today I’ll keep it simple and consider how to insert an image.  There are hundreds of plug-ins that help you present images in various ways such as galleries and sliders.

How to Upload and Manage Media

So, open the post editor and below where it says “Enter title here” you will see a button that reads Add Media. Press it and the media library pops up.

If your blog is established you will see all the media you have previously uploaded to your website. You may see a mixture of images, videos, audios and pdfs. These are a part of your site and can be used as many times as you like on as many posts or pages as you like.

If you have a new image on your computer and you want to upload it to your site, click on the Upload Files tab. Then you can either drag and drop new files into the library or select files by pressing the button in the centre of the screen.

Reviewing and Editing

Return to the Media Library and then click on a thumbnail to select it. It highlights in blue, a tick appears in the top right of the thumbnail and a new section headed Attachment Details appears on the right. You can adjust the attachment details whilst the thumbnail is highlighted in blue.

If you hold down the shift key and click on another thumbnail, you will see the tick remains in the top right of the previous thumbnail whilst the new one is highlighted and you can work on its attachment details. This way you can add multiple images to a post.

Below the heading Attachment Details, you will see the image and then to the right some information about it, ie the file name, today’s date, the file size and the image dimensions. There are two links to edit the image and delete it.

If you press Edit Image, you enter a new screen where you can crop the image and rotate or flip it. On the right you can scale the image to the size you want or control the cropping to retain the ratio of length and breadth of the image.

Adding Meta-Data

Click cancel to return to the previous screen and look at the next 5 boxes.  These include meta-data, information about your media.  This helps your readers and also assists search engine optimisation (SEO).

1. The first, marked URL contains the image’s unique url. This means if a visitor clicks on the image they will be taken to a full size version. This might help them see its detail. The url is also helpful if you want to insert the image elsewhere on the site, eg in a sidebar.
2. The Title is the words that appear when you hover over an image. You can add extra information in the title, for example I often use the title for information about who owns the image.
3. Caption is text that appears below the inserted image. This is the information it is essential for all readers see.
4. Alt text has various purposes. If for some reason the image fails to download, the alt text will appear in its place, it is the words that users reading the site with a screen reader will hear and some search engines use it. This is the one box you must complete because it helps screen readers interpret the site. You need just a few words to describe the image. If the image includes text, it should be included in the alt text.
5. Description is sometimes called a long description because the alt text is the short description. Sometimes you need more than a few words to describe an image, for example a diagram with a lot of text.

Inserting Media in Your Post

Below this you will see Attachment Display Settings. Alignment determines whether the image is on the left, right or centred on the page. Link to determines where the visitor goes if they click on the image, ie the full size image (which is the default), the page it’s on or you can insert another url. If you set it to none, then you can’t click on it. Finally there are four size options. You can try these out and decide which size you prefer.

Click insert into post to add the image to your post. If you hover over the image in the post editor you can either delete the image or edit it, eg to change the display size.

Copyright

One word of warning.  For some reason copyright is a major issue with images.  My general rules are (1) I never use an image unless I am 100% certain I have permission to use it, and (2) where someone else owns the image, I acknowledge it, usual through the title.  See my post about copyright for more details.

1 Five Reasons Why So Many Sites Lack Purpose

Perhaps I’ve covered this several times but it is worth returning to the question, why do so many organisations struggle with the purpose of their website?  Why do their sites lack purpose?

The purpose of the organisation and the purpose of their website are different but closely related. I would expect the website to support the organisation’s wider purpose in some way.

Your website should be designed to meet some purpose of your organisation. If it doesn’t what is it for? The chances are you are being short-changed in some way. This can happen where you ask someone to design your site who provides technical assistance but has no interest in its purpose. Disaster looms when web design pools your ignorance with the designer’s.

So, here are some key things that can go wrong:

1.  You do not Know Your Organisation’s Purpose

When the client does not know their organisation’s purpose, it is a problem for the conscientious website designer or consultant. Where the purpose is not clear there are two possibilities; the organisation may be  unaware of its need for a purpose or else they don’t know how to express it (we’ll know when we see it).

The consultant has to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, where on the one hand they let the client down by designing a site that becomes a burden to them because it cannot possibly meet their unarticulated needs or else they risk alienating their client by intervening in a sensitive area.

2.  The Organisation Resists Finding its Purpose

If you think organisations are grateful for an offer to help them articulate their purpose, think again! It’s not easy for a designer to get access to information they need when their client does not think it’s any of their business. This may be a problem where the client has a clear purpose but doesn’t see why their designer should be interested in it.

There seems to be two intertwined problems here. First, many people find the process of determining their purpose, with any degree of thoroughness, tedious in the extreme. This is where marketing might come into play. Finding fun approaches to building a picture of an organisation’s purpose should be a possibility.

The other problem is that the client finds it threatening. This is harder to approach and the perception can come from many places. You can negotiate a needs assessment with one person and then find opposition comes from another once the work starts and they work out what it is about. I recently wrote a post about needs assessments and audits that explores why this sort of opposition arises.

3.  The Organisation may be Unclear About their Website’s Purpose

This can take many forms and may manifest as no clear idea other than wanting a website to the sort of site that includes everything including the kitchen sink.

If the organisation is clear about its own purpose, then this is a good place to start. Working through the organisation’s purpose, using a needs assessment, may help them identify the options. Options can then be prioritised and scheduled.

If you can get that far it is a major achievement. Your client will have a viable plan for their online presence. The next two headings are examples of what can go wrong.

4.  The Dash to an Inadequate Purpose or Design

People often come to the table with a clear idea about what they want. They’ve usually seen a someone else’s site and want something similar.

If so, they are not asking for a design. They are seeking technical assistance. That may be OK so long as the designer doesn’t get the blame when things go wrong.

If you take on this technical work, the problem  is mission creep. The real purpose of the site begins to emerge at the snagging stage when the client discovers they did have a purpose and their solution doesn’t meet it.

Taking time at the start to explore with the designer or consultant what their solution will actually do and other possibilities will result in a better site. Getting the client to see the value can be a struggle.

5.  Not Knowing What is Possible

This may be the most common problem and it can be the easiest to tackle. Technology has moved on so quickly that many people have been left behind. They simply don’t know what is possible because they have old models of web design, lack knowledge and perhaps are fearful.

For example, someone’s first video will not be as good as a video produced by a professional firm. The question for the client is, does it need to be? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.  Whilst it might be possible for the client to produce their own videos there may be many reasons why it is not desirable. The important thing is to help the client make an informed decision.

Once the client has clarity about the purpose of their website it is much easier to make decisions about particular approaches to building and maintaining the site.

1 Evaluating the Marketing Worldview: Democratising the Economy

Last Tuesday I argued the emphasis on using marketing to raise money undersells marketing. Today I’ll show how marketing can be used for society’s transformation through democratising the economy.

I’ve shown how the biggest change we have witnessed is approaches to marketing that were once inaccessible to all but a few for reasons of expense, are now available to all. These tools have a wider application than it may first appear.

Selling Bread and Courses

You may think online marketing is for information products only. So, you may be an educational charity, video your courses and make them available online. However, if I am a local baker I can’t put my bread online although I can still use the Internet to promote my business. If I can get my customers’ email addresses I could have a simple site with a blog and use it to tell my customers about my bread, share recipes, or ask for feedback about the types of bread they would like to see. I could do a product launch about a new recipe loaf. It would be small-scale for people who can get to my shop but it might work.

A baker could use content marketing and their story. How did they become a baker? They almost certainly have a story to tell. Working out their story and how to tell it may take a while but it is worth it and can be very effective.

These are approaches small businesses might have dreamed of just a few years ago. Today the main constraint is they don’t know what is possible. Once you know what you can do it is a smaller step to find out how to do it.

Collaboration

These changes open up potential for small businesses to work together, build their local economy and link between local economies to build wider networks where cash flows between people and not into offshore accounts.

As new tools have become more accessible, the powerful have turned to new tools to entrench their power. They use the internet to bolster their power and that is at our expense.

Taxes

Small businesses should be happy to pay taxes. It is their contribution to a society that helps them to do business. When powerful corporations opt out by going off-shore they show their true nature. They have no need to market what they are doing because they are not dependent on customers as they derive their income from investments and debt.

Regulation

We are told regulation disadvantages businesses. Actually it levels the playing field by ensuring businesses stay small, it increases the interactions between businesses and this is what builds local economies. Legislation must support the marketplace and not dismantle it. We have the tools to make it work, we need a state that allows it to happen.

We need to ask of the people who claim to support small businesses if they support corporations. Massive financial institutions and companies that receive government contracts are proving to be a brake on the economy. It is not true that private business is good at everything. We need a state that supports genuine small businesses and closes down the back-door deals with big corporations.

Concentration of wealth in the hands of the state is at least subject to democratic control. Support for the so-called private sector is actually support for the establishment, politicians and directors of industry. The same people rotate between state and the giant corporations and do not support the local economy.

The question is how can small business, with charities and other organisations active in the local economy, network to form a coherent opposition to the corporations and their political apologists?  I believe that in the last few years we have found the tools we need to take that opposition to a new level, involving people who have perhaps never seen their work as political.  How can we make a start?