Advancing Collaboration for Online
Marketplaces in the New Development Ecology
Dennis Whittle
Dennis Whittle is CEO of GlobalGiving, which he co-founded in late 2000 after a career in the official aid sector. GlobalGiving is the world's leading marketplace for international philanthropy. It allows qualified community-based groups around the world to post projects, and anyone in the world to fund them. Updates are posted directly to the site and automatically sent to donors, who can provide feedback and ask questions. Tens of thousands of individual donors, as well as many leading Fortune 500 companies, use GlobalGiving. From 1997 to 2000, Dennis co-led the World Bank's Corporate Strategy and Innovation units, including the team that created the Development Marketplace. From 1992-1997, he led a variety of initiatives in the Bank's Russia program, including housing reform and energy efficiency projects. From 1987-92, Dennis was an economist in the World Bank's Jakarta office advising the Indonesian Ministries of Finance and National Development, and managing projects in the agriculture and forestry sectors. Before joining the World Bank in 1986, Dennis worked in the Philippines with the Asian Development Bank and with USAID. Dennis graduated with honors in religious studies from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar, and did his graduate work in development studies and economics at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Dennis also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
About the Project
This grant will support the development of a pragmatic set of strategies to help development marketplace intermediaries leverage collaboration to more effectively facilitate integrative solutions for poverty eradication and the improvement of human wellbeing. Topics will include:
1. Mass Collaboration: How can intermediaries engage the wiki-economy of co-creators as a powerful force for social change? How can intermediaries use web services to create platforms for people and organizations to co-create their own giving and receiving services, communities and experiences?
2. Partnership and Consolidation: What approaches would enable intermediaries to integrate with each other (and also non-marketplace organizations and companies) both horizontally and vertically along the value chain as a way to drive innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of information, transaction and collaboration services?
3. Enhanced Revenue Models: What new business models could help intermediaries increase their revenues, despite market trending towards free information and inconsequential transaction costs?
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that connects you to the causes and countries you care about. You select the projects you want to support, make a tax-deductible contribution, and get regular progress updates - so you can see your impact. In 1997, World Bank executives Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle were asked to develop innovative ways to combat poverty. They created the Bank's Development Marketplace, a first-of-its-kind event where people from around the world competed for World Bank funds. The event's success unveiled the enormous potential of a global marketplace for philanthropy, and participants asked for a real marketplace that was open year round and operated virtually. Mari and Dennis saw the brilliance of this idea, left the World Bank and launched GlobalGiving.
GlobalGiving was launched as unique collaboration between two entities: the GlobalGiving Foundation (GGF), a US 501(c)3 registered non-profit and a Delaware corporation, ManyFutures, Inc (MFI). In December 2008, GGF acquired over 98% of outstanding shares in ManyFutures, making MFI a formal subsidiary of GGF. To streamline operations and prepare for future growth, GGF has consolidated all operations under direct Foundation management.
Entrepreneurs create products, services and jobs. They expand economies, improve people's lives, provide employment (high and rising wages) and bring about competition. A competitive environment, in turn, gives rise to efficiency, meritocracy and further innovations and entrepreneurial drive.
The potent combination of entrepreneurship and technological innovation can forge an environment that is conducive to further enterprise, involving even government policy in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.