Eugene Chan's blog

The Obama campaign said that he will announce his Vice Presidential running mate via text message.

We invited the team from The Blink Tank, a social venture founded to jumpstart business models for organizations in the social sector, to meet with a few of our grantees today. Of particular interest is Mission Ad Works which is their socially responsible web advertising services business. Structured much like other businesses such as Federated Media, Mission Ad Works has a socially responsible filter on both the advertiser as well as the media partner.

One of the problems with Web 2.0 (and more specifically AJAX’ed applications) is their lack of usability for people with different types of disabilities. AJAX (aka Asynchronous Javascript over XML aka snazzy things done behind the browser screen) is an example of technology that has been adopted widely with graceful accessibility trying very hard to catch up.

Not all is bad news, Google for one is working very hard (and so are other companies such as Yahoo!

This week, I was invited by Andrea Levere of CFED to speak with Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech and ZeroDivide boardmember, in a conversation on technology and community development at the Corporation for Enterprise Development’s board of directors meeting in San Francisco.

Jim had a characteristically enlightening story about the genesis of one of his projects. A few years ago, his then 14 year-old son had installed a music exchange program onto their home computer.

I was excited and heartened to hear that the NAACP had selected Ben Jealous from the Rosenberg Foundation to be its next President.

I’m sure that the next few months will be busy—especially with the national elections—as Ben lays out a vision for what the NAACP of the 21st century should look like.

Our Hip Hop Initiative’s Kitchen Cabinet (although there wasn’t a kitchen in sight) met to discuss how hip hop could inform and influence the upcoming elections and the political process.

I first joined ZeroDivide (then the Community Technology Foundation of California—whew, what a mouthful!) as a program officer over eight years ago.

I have no formal education or training in program officiating. (But I should ask: who does? Those of us in the field, we’re all accidental philanthropists for the most part.) There’s no certification per se, no accreditation, no good housekeeping seal of approval for the philanthropy sector.

On Monday, ZeroDivide graduated the second class of our Zfellows at the wonderful Museum of the African Diaspora located in San Francisco. (I recommend checking out their new exhibit: Africa.Dot.Com: From Drums to Digital.)

I met Josh Becker in 2001 when he launched the Full Circle Fund, a giving circle for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. As a growing and succesful network of highly connected people, Full Circle provides as much knowledge capital as financial capital to its grantees. In many respects, Full Circle reflects much of Josh’s values.

I point to an article by Laura Efurd on media policy and the next Presidency over at Grantmaker’s for Film and Electronic Media’s website entitled Media Policy And The Next Presidency: The Time Is Now.

Here are her suggestions for funders:

• Support educational and informational activities related to media and technology policy issues throughout the electoral process, such as education forums.

• Fund research to gather more robust data on broadband access, media ownership, and the digital divide.