[Assam] Google Offers a Map for Its Philanthropy - NYT

[Ram Sarangapani]

"There are 6.5 billion people in the world," Dr. Brilliant said in a recent
interview, "and in the last 18 months I've met 6.4 billion, all of whom
want, if not some of our money, then some of the Google pixie dust."  -
Google's Larry Brillliant

and

"There are 500 steps between the road and the Ganges," he said. "On every
step are beggars, lepers, people who have no arms or legs, people literally
starving. The saint has a couple of rupees; how does a good and honorable
person make a resource allocation decision? Do you weigh a hand that's
missing more than a leg? Someone who's starving versus a sick child? In a
much less dramatic way, that's what the last 18 months have been for us."
 January 18, 2008 - Google's Larry Brillliant

Interesting article about Googl'e quandry

--Ram
 Google Offers a Map for Its Philanthropy By HARRIET RUBIN

Google<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>announced
Thursday that it had come up with a plan that begins to fulfill
the pledge it made to investors when it went public nearly four years ago to
reserve 1 percent of its profit and equity to "make the world a better
place."

The philanthropy the company has set up — Google.org, or DotOrg as Googlers
call it — will spend up to $175 million in its first round of grants and
investments over the next three years, Google officials said. While it is
like other companies' foundations in making grants, it will also be
untraditional in making for-profit investments, encouraging Google employees
to participate directly and lobbying public officials for changes in
policies, company officials said.

DotOrg officials said they had decided to spend the money on five
initiatives: disease and disaster prevention; improving the flow of
information to hold governments accountable in community services; helping
small and medium-size enterprises; developing renewable energy sources that
are cheaper than coal; and investing in the commercialization of plug-in
vehicles.

Google may be one of America's 10 richest corporations as measured by market
value, but its budget for philanthropy is minuscule compared with the $70
billion of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/gates_bill_and_melinda_foundation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.


Still, Google's founders, Sergey
Brin<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/sergey_brin/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
Larry
Page<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/larry_page/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
expressed a hope back in 2004 that "someday this institution may eclipse
Google itself in terms of overall world impact." What it lacks in size,
though, Google.org may make up in cachet.

Larry Brilliant, a medical doctor who took on the role of director of
Google.org 18 months ago, said he could not even begin to count how many
spending proposals he had seen. "There are 6.5 billion people in the world,"
Dr. Brilliant said in a recent interview, "and in the last 18 months I've
met 6.4 billion, all of whom want, if not some of our money, then some of
the Google pixie dust."

Dr. Brilliant, who moved to an ashram in northern India in the 1970s and
went on to play a major role in eradicating smallpox in the country, likened
his moral quandary in figuring out how to spend Google.org's money to that
faced by a saint wandering the streets of Benares.

"There are 500 steps between the road and the Ganges," he said. "On every
step are beggars, lepers, people who have no arms or legs, people literally
starving. The saint has a couple of rupees; how does a good and honorable
person make a resource allocation decision? Do you weigh a hand that's
missing more than a leg? Someone who's starving versus a sick child? In a
much less dramatic way, that's what the last 18 months have been for us."

DotOrg has focused on what it can do "uniquely," said Sheryl Sandberg, vice
president for global online sales and operations at Google, who, like all
employees, is permitted to spend 20 percent of her time at the foundation or
in other charitable ventures. "If you do things other people could do,
you're not adding value."

In contrast to DotOrg's close tie to DotCom, employees of
Microsoft<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/microsoft_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>have
made Bill
Gates<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/bill_gates/index.html?inline=nyt-per>wealthy
but have no official influence in how the Gates Foundation money is
spent.

The only urgency imposed on the foundation is how soon it can live up to the
expectations. "Building a new ecosystem is not an overnight phenomenon," Dr.
Brilliant said. "Here at Google if you have a project, you press Send. We
won't work that quickly."

But for all the enthusiasm for the new organization, there are critics.
"It's wonderful that this company is devoting massive resources to fixing
big world problems, but they are taking an engineer's perspective to them,"
said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar at the
University
of Virginia<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_virginia/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
"Machines and software are not always the answer. Global problems arise from
how humans have undervalued each other and miscommunicated with each other."

He pointed to Google.org's decision not to take a step like financing
scholarships for girls in India who have not had access to education.
"That's what is so naïve about Google.org's approach," he said. "If you can
educate a thousand girls in one state in India, you've already made a bigger
difference than 99 percent of the human beings on earth because every one of
those of girls can make a difference."

The process of determining what to finance was not easy, said Jacquelline
Fuller, the head of advocacy at Google.org. Beginning in the spring of 2007,
"the 20 team members had 20 ideas." Team members, she said, "debated, cried
and held hands as we tried to determine what kind of difference we could
make." It took them almost a year to winnow down the list.Although it was
just announcing its initiatives on Thursday, Google.org has already begun to
give away some of its money.

That is the case with grants for the first of its initiatives — what the
philanthropy calls "predict and prevent." This effort focuses on
strengthening early warning systems in countries around the world to detect
a disease before it becomes pandemic, or a drought before it becomes a
famine.

To attain that, DotOrg has made a grant of $5 million to a nonprofit group
that Dr. Brilliant helped to set up, though it is independent from DotOrg.
Called Instedd, for Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and
Disasters, the group seeks to improve data and communication networks. An
additional $2.5 million has been awarded to the Global Health and Security
Initiative to respond to biological threats in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Laos, Myanmar and China's Yunnan Province.

"In recent years," Dr. Brilliant said, "39 new communicable diseases with a
potential to become pandemic have jumped species," including SARS, or severe
acute respiratory syndrome; monkey pox and bird flu.

"What if we could have been there when the H.I.V. moved from animal to chimp
to human and could have averted that risk?" he asked. "To prevent or abort
or slow a pandemic saves tens of millions of lives."

The second initiative, called "the missing middle," refers to the missing
middle class in Africa and South Asia and the missing middle level of
financing between microcredits and hedge funds.

Microcredit funds currently provide families with three or four or five days
of livelihood, Dr. Brilliant said. "But what can you do when your kid is
sick and you can't work?" he said. "No country has ever emerged from poverty
because of microcredit. Jobs make that possible. China did it with
manufacturing, India did it with outsourced call centers."

To that end, DotOrg has awarded $3 million to TechnoServe to find worthy
entrepreneurs and help them build credit records and get access to larger
markets.

The third initiative, "information for all," is aimed at helping developing
countries provide better government services by making information available
on their efforts to improve health care, roads and electrification. "India
has promised health care, work, and transparency throughout," Dr. Brilliant
said. "Yet it's hard to do something like this on the scale that India is
trying to do, to let people know what their entitlement is."

DotOrg has awarded $2 million to support the Annual Status of Education
report in India to assess the quality of education; $765,000 to create a
Budget Information Service to improve district-level planning, and $660,000
to build communities of researchers and policy makers to deliver
information.

DotOrg decided to finance literacy information because, said Lant Pritchett,
a DotOrg adviser who teaches economic development at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard, "We're looking for things where Google could have a
transformative impact. Ideas, flexibility, entrepreneurship are better than
just cash on the table."

Google.org's fourth initiative supports the development of renewable energy
sources that are cleaner and cheaper than coal. DotOrg has invested $10
million in eSolar, a company in Pasadena, Calif., that specializes in solar
thermal power.

The philanthropy is also working to accelerate the commercialization of
plug-in vehicles. Google, whose own computers and customers use plenty of
energy, "does not want to be part of the problem; we want to be part of the
solution," Dr. Brilliant said.

"We're not trying to bring returns to Google," Dr. Brilliant said. "Profits
are vital to businesses that will support the missions."

Mark Dowie, author of the book "American Foundations," said DotOrg is part
of "a new mode of philanthropy that is very similar to venture capitalism,
holding those they fund responsible in ways never seen before." The danger,
he said, "is that a lot of philanthropic work is not quantifiable. How do
you qualify arts grant making, for example."

Still, he added, "what would be worse is for Google not to give away its
money, but to hoard it."