March 2010 Letter from the Chair and President

The following is the March 2010 Letter from The Overbrook Foundation's Board and President. It is reprinted directly from our website here.

In early 2009, the Foundation posted a letter from its Chair and President outlining steps being taken to address the impact of the global financial crisis on its grantmaking programs (Click here to read the 2009 letter). We are writing now to update you on Foundation plans for grantmaking in 2010 and over the next several years.

Our endowment experienced significant volatility in 2009 as financial markets continued their decline early in 2009 and then made a remarkable rebound. As of December 31, 2009, the endowment totaled $111.6 million as compared to $187.3 million just two years ago. (As of March 15, 2010 the endowment’s unaudited value is estimated at approximately $126 million.) We know that our grantees have experienced similar challenges; and, we are concerned about the implications for support for all nonprofits dependent on fundraising from government, foundations and individuals in 2010 and thereafter.

We seek to respond prudently to this very serious financial situation and change in our endowment, while at the same time remaining focused on the work of our grantees around critical concerns and the likely enormous opportunities in human rights and the environment in 2010 and over the next several years.

We will continue to play an activist leadership role in the philanthropic community. Our program officers are heavily involved in organizing and managing funder collaborative partnerships such as the U.S. Human Rights Fund and the Civil Marriage Collaborative; creating vital new non-profit organizations to advance change; e.g., Catalog Choice, www.catalogchoice.org, and assuming leadership roles in a variety of foundation associations such as the Sustainability Funders Work Group. Through these various efforts, the Foundation believes it is able to influence the direction of significant philanthropic resources to those issues most central to its human rights and environment mission. We will use all of these mechanisms moving forward to protect and strengthen the fields in which our grantees are active.

We believe that the impact of the financial crisis will be felt for some years to come and that as a consequence the Foundation’s grantmaking ability will also be reduced. This is despite a commitment by Directors to fund grantmaking in excess of the mandated 5% payout requirement. To effectively manage this reduced grantmaking ability, directors are committing the Foundation to a strategic review of its environment and human rights programs during 2010 with the objective of redefining its priorities for grantmaking over the next three to five years. We expect to announce the outcomes of that review by the end of the year.

Our expectation and our goal is that we will preserve the viability of the Foundation and continue to advance its mission as we work through these very difficult times. Despite these challenges, we look forward to working with you in the coming year to move forward a progressive agenda for change.

Sincerely,
Kathryn G. Graham, Chair
Stephen A. Foster, President and CEO

LA joins the cloud via Google

Check out Cloud Apps, Big City: LA goes to Google.

"Starting today, Los Angeles will be equipping 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for email and collaboration in the cloud." While that in and of itself doesn't make me apprehensive, the article goes on about how they've been in talks with city officials for the past year looking to update all of their aging technologies. I'm worried about what we don't know. Its been confirmed that Yahoo offers data/digital evidence collection "spying" services when their price list and policy was leaked last week. I'd be willing to bet that's just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA has openly invested in and began utilizing internet surveillance tools since October.

I think that this is relevant to Francisco's UStream post - many people are using sousveillance as a way to subvert the "panoptical gaze."

Check out Scroogled by Cory Doctorow. Is this where we're headed?

ustream app streams live from iphone

ustream app for iphone has just been released. any iphone, anywhere with a connection to a server. the implications for privacy are tremendous. nothing is safe from me being able to broadcast it live to other people, record it for future viewing and even share it on facebook and twitter. it is not the first time we can stream from a phone, but now it is all bundled ever so pretty in an iphone app. any iphone, including the iphone which i was told had no video...a product that has been ripping the multimedia industry apart can now stream live video to the public.

this is a huge step towards real-time technology.

francisco.

Yahoo: new ad-interest manager

Hey guys,

Something big just happened in the world of online advertising; Yahoo just release its new ad-interest manager which allows users to see how they're targeted by online advertising and more importantly, to turn targeted advertising off. This is probably a preemptive move to protect themselves from Government scrutiny because of their Microsoft partnership, according to VentureBeat.

I hope that this becomes the rule rather than the exception. It's about time that we've had some government intervention on matters of privacy; so much of our data is virtual these days that precautionary measures are necessary. Our presence on the net should be protected. Google Dashboard is a bust; it doesn't share any targeting data and it doesn't allow you to manipulate your search data, which is the bread and butter of the company. Thoughts?

the metaverse inches closer to reality

Google's new project, liquid galaxy, is kind of like The Veldt. Once large-scale, flexible AMOLEDs become affordable, this can be more or less seamless.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/google-liquid-galaxy/

Brazil, where hearts entertaining June

Can I say that the song "Aquarela do Brasil" is stuck in my head after watching the movie Brazil. Sorry for the delay in the response, but I finally managed to get a netflix account and got the movie. I chose this because well I recalled friends talking about it and i've seen some scenes here and there and I recall thinking it's an interesting, perhaps slightly scary movie. It struck me while watching it that there are a lot of 'fantasy' scenes were similar to Pink Floyd's 'The wall' film which featured similar breakaway scenes, I also kept thinking that if this movie was produced with today's technology the effects would be amazing! But for a movie produced in the 1985 it still holds quite well in terms of special effects.
The World that Sam Lowery lives in is quite the distopia or Orwell's 1984, filled with surveillance, military police and control by a government we don't actually see or meet in this film. The fact that this movie features examples of computers, and security or surveillance cameras is fascinating, seeing that the computer it self was still a rather new concept in the market and well quite different than the computer we know today. So in some sense this Sci-fiction/futuristic movie was able to predict the use of technology as instruments of control and surveillance. Can I add that I love how the screens are so small that they require a magnifying glass! From our readings for our surveillance class we got to see how technology, not only cameras, but also computers and online social networks have become tools for surveillance.
What also struck me in this movie is the concept of the terrorist and level of hypocrisy in the film. Though Hypocrisy whether in plastic surgery (strange and scary procedures in the film) or handing the promotion to Lowery is nothing new to our world, and I found interesting to see in a Orwellian like world. But what really caught my attention at first and saw it's significance towards the end is the idea and concept of the terrorist. I don't want to give out any spoilers but the way the movie progressed with the terrorists that emerged gives this idea that perhaps there are no true terrorists, whether it was a mistake from Information Retrieval (Buttle/ Tuttle) or even towards the end. Perhaps it is the people that think outside the box or a different are deemed terrorists for their otherness and their threat to the system.
Anyway, I enjoyed watching this movie, even though at times I felt it got lost in a lot of fantasy scenes, I also thought it interesting to compare it to the 21st century, with all the talk of terrorists, and surveillance. Oh and it wasn't till I did some research on the song and well the title of the movie that I understood the significance of the song in the film, it's interesting how Lowery wanted to escape this world by singing or humming the song from the start.
I must mention that there are a lot similarities with the film "V for Vendetta", but then again most 1984 like movies tend to be similar.

They're Listening

After watching The Conversation (twice..it was that good, or my Thanksgiving was that boring), a 1974 film by Frances Ford Coppola starring Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a paranoid sound surveillance man running his own business in which people pay him to record conversations. After recording a conversation between two young "lovers," Caul becomes engrossed in their conversation and begins stalking them in order to solve what he thinks is a plot to murder the woman's wealthy husband. Caul is reluctant to hand over the tapes to the man who hired him, because he is afraid the man will his adulterous younger girlfriend and her lover. It turns out the situation isn't what Caul had thought, but I wont spoil the ending.
Caul himself is very secretive, taking precautions to protect his own privacy. He has several locks on his door, uses pay phones, and doesn't even share much information about himself with his girlfriend. Yet by the end of the film, his own apartment becomes wire tapped (by the "aide" of the man who hired him to spy on the young couple), and Caul tears apart his residence to find the source of the wiretapping (which he doesn't), proving that no one's privacy is ever completely safe.

Caul's paranoia and the film's ending remind me very much of Lessig's Code, which argues (among many things) that no one is ever completely anonymous. It turns out that Caul's phone was being used to listen in on his apartment, and that there was no actual bug. The idea that the technology you use to connect with the outside world can monitor your actions is something very relevant in the digital era. Government's using Internet records in court cases is all too common. How often to we hear in a news story that a murderer Googled "how to strangle someone" before actually doing it?

Although The Conversation was somewhat slow, I absolutely loved it and would recommend it to anyone interested in sound/music studies and/or surveillance.