Prize Philanthropy: The Next Frontier of Peer-to-Peer Social Change

The 'Long Tail' effect will mean that even wild, off-the-wall (but innovative) niche ideas for DIY projects will find many backers across the country and the world. The flourishing of these projects will in turn cross-pollinate, creating a snowball effect as people come to recognize that a lot of 'social good' work no longer needs to be 'outsourced' to traditional institutions, ones that we donate to and then leave to their own devices.

The age of buying absolution this way is passing. We've recently seen the mega-wealthy getting their hands relatively dirty (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example), but the real potential of the internet is in harnessing crowds and the huge resources within them. The challenge is to provide tools for groups to form, collaborate, pool resources (including money), and if possible, to help snowball their cause and leverage the wider crowd for help and ideas. I'm working on an idea discussed with Phil Cubeta and others about bringing together two concepts—crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing—to create one such tool, but the field will need many more of these ideas and startups if it's to maximize its potential.

The benefits of a 'democratisation' and decentralisation of philanthropy and social change could be vast. I envisage a future where we've rediscovered the value - and fun - of collaborating to directly influence change (p2p philanthropy), rather than the current institutionalised environment where we outsource it and get on with our drab, isolated urban lives.

The reason I'm thinking of setting this up as a business (for-profit) is that the world needs examples of true social enterprise, how to manage double/triple bottom lines, and yet still earn a good living, an example of the sort of 'kind capital' Bill Gates called for at Davos yesterday.

Being a company that allows people to do good would be fantastic. I would love going into work every day – it would have everything you want from work. Doing good has to stop being an activity limited to utterly selfless people, or the world will never change for the better and philanthropy will stay on the fringes, a 'finger in the levee' that is funded by 'selfish' people that want to feel good about themselves but not get their hands dirty, and that is done by the rare saints of this world.

Everyone should start businesses to do good or to make it easy for others to do it! But first, we need to really find out how to manage the often conflicting pressures of triple bottom lines – profit, social benefit, and environmental impact.