Sam Knuth (he/him)

Authored Comments

Hi Chris,

I was reading the times today after seeing your post and noticed this article about the struggles of Google's philanthropy effort, google.org:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/business/30charity.html?_r=1&ref=business&pagewanted=all

The article talks a lot about the culture of the .org project and how much trouble they've had getting a foothold. This example, I thought, was particularly interesting. In talking about how decisions were made over which projects to fund, it's pretty clear that the process was not an open one. A small group of people was invited to discuss the decisions and often they didn't show up, so:

"Dr. Brilliant [then head of .org] worked out a system of e-mailing the proposals to Mr. Page and Mr. Brin. If they did not respond within 48 hours, he made the decision himself."

It seems like the people who were invited to the discussions were not even interested. I wonder how different this initiative would have been if it had been totally open to all google employees.

In any case, the article provides an interesting look into Brin and Page and some of the culture of google that I hadn't heard about before.

Sam

Rebecca - sure! Shoot me an email samfw@redhat....