The Dropbox Foundation
dropbox.com
dropbox.com
Restricted grants are when you give money to a nonprofit to do what you want, rather than what they want. Usually this is some highly visible thing that the donor can then claim credit for. These projects are almost never what the nonprofit would have chosen to do themselves. Often they damage the nonprofit significantly. I was talking to a nonprofit a few months ago that had branches in two different cities quite far apart. I asked them why they'd chosen to expand to another city rather than expand in the city they were in. Wasn't it a distraction? They said it was, but that they'd gotten a restricted grant to open a branch in the new city.
The less powerful nonprofits have no choice but to take such money. And they don't dare complain about it, which is why you've never heard about this issue. Exactly the opposite, in fact: they have to issue press releases lauding the generosity of the donors. Which then perpetuates the problem, by making it seem to future donors that restricted grants are how you're supposed to do charity.
I don't know how Dropbox figured out that they should do unrestricted grants. It's a remarkably sophisticated insight for beginners.
Spot on.
The picture is often worse than the one you have painted -- Hey there, here's a few million dollars to help your country tackle AIDS. BTW, you can only spend it on drugs manufactured by US pharma.
At that stage its creative accounting to route tax money to your base of choice, with PR for free. Works the same for defense related grants.
The way things usually go is we get interested in an organization and ask them if they need funding for any specific projects or initiatives this year, they send us a list of options, and we choose from the list. Usually we'll get an email later on about how the project went. If we don't care for any of the options but we still like the organization, we might make an unrestricted (albeit probably smaller) donation instead.
We do it this way for a lot of reasons, but one is that nonprofits can be as flawed as any corporation and in many cases they have all kinds of stuff they'd love to spend money on if they could that isn't directly related to their mission, or rather is related enough that they can book it as "program expenses" for the purposes of maintaining a five-star Charity Navigator rating when a reasonable person might look at it and see some amount of wastefulness. (That probably sounds more cynical than I actually feel about it, but it's a real issue.) Examples would be things like fancy office spaces and parties, questionable executive travel or compensation, optimizing for metrics that make the CEO sound good but aren't as impactful to the core mission as what they could be doing, etc.
Anecdotally, I'd say this is more commonly an issue with mid-sized organizations: huge charities usually have a big nest egg (like an endowment) to cover regular operating expenses, while very small charities are more likely to be entirely staffed by volunteers and thus have negligible overhead.
Anyway, we basically just want to know where our money's going. I can't speak to how gigantic foundations operate, but I'm sure there are a whole lot of individual donors and smaller foundations who do things the way we do (with no desire to claim credit).
https://deadspin.com/how-unh-turned-a-quiet-benefactor-into-...
Why can't they just say no if it's a not useful to them? How do the donors force them to take the money? I can't donate money to you and tell you to spend it on something - you'd just tell me to get lost.
And then the Red Cross or whoever cannot use all that money sensibly. Maybe the catastrophe turned out to be a bit smaller than expected. Maybe there is need for more tents and food and water, but for some reason there is limited transport capacity available. Maybe there is an armed conflict breaking out or going on and they don't dare to go fully in.
And then... there are lots of other worthy causes. Other natural catastrophes. General anti-hunger initiatives.
But they are forced to leave the money laying around because they are not allowed to use it for another crisis. Even if most of the donors would probably shrug and say "well, too bad, but sure, go ahead and help where you can".
For this reason: always refrain from designating a specific use. If you don't trust the organization to do good, give to someone else.
But sitting in the nonprofit's shoes, when that grant is what you need to stay alive, and is related to your mission, but doesn't reflect your priorities within that mission, you're still going to take it unless you want to lay everyone off and move on. And many nonprofits are in that position.
People are using language like ‘damaging’ and ‘no choice’. What they really mean is the donations are useful but they could be more useful if unrestricted.
Well yeah lots of things are more useful when you don’t have any responsibilities along with them.
More subtly, it's assuming that costs and benefits are somehow quantifiable in a single "benefit function". This is a modelling assumption that is often not true. There can be a benefit ("at least we can get some money to some people") that you can't turn down ("ethically can we turn down some money for some people like this?") while also being deeply damaging ("we are 'selling our soul' by acting as a PR arm for companies that want to improve their reputation rather than lives. This is damaging the ethical undeprinning and structural integrity of our organisation").
Summarizing this complex situation as a net benefit is naive and a bad model that will lead you to incorrect conclusions (like: "well they must get a net benefit, so it can't be that bad" rather than "we need to eliminate the structural factors that lead to such situations.")
[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator...
Actually, it's exactly the reliability of SS/medicare/etc that make people take it for granted and give it less attention than its dollar value would suggest. People can plan for it to be around in 20 years which can't be said for charity schemes.
Donations do have blind spots, though: They rarely go through the sort of assessment that is required for public spending. They are also susceptible to individuals' subjective motivations. I know of one charity caring for stray cats financed mostly by the estates of wealthy widows. Meanwhile, nobody donates to rehabilitation efforts of middle-aged sex offenders.
Not really. It depends on what you think taxes should be paying for. If you think they should cover essential services that can't be taken care of by the private sector (ex: roads, police, national defense) then lower taxes and private sector philanthropic spending is a better choice.
It removes the particularly heinous problem of government officials spending the public's money on things the public doesn't actually want them to spend it on. The private sector has no such issues as by definition they're spending their own money.
That's actually a good thing in my book. Sometimes the right thing is not the easy or popular one. "Let's cut education spending and increase everybody's salaries instead" would probably be very popular but it might not prove very beneficial in the long term. If you dislike the way the government spends money then you elect a different one. If you don't manage to do that then maybe "the public" doesn't disagree so strongly with the way the money is spent.
More generally if you move this to the private sector then the problem is that you effectively weaken democracy. The rich decides what needs funding while the poor, well, they do poor people stuff I suppose.
If you look at modern western societies the rich already have significantly more power than the average citizen (through lobbying, campaign funding etc...). Do you think that's a positive thing? Do you think we should cut the middle man and let them handle everything directly? Instead of complaining that my government doesn't spend money the way I want to I'll get to complain that Mark Zukerberg and Bill Gates don't spend money the way I want to? How is that a better proposition? Can I vote Bill Gates out? Do I have to become a Dropbox shareholder if I want homeless shelters to be funded?
I'll admit that libertarianism in general baffles me. Many of its proponent seems very clever people, many certainly more clever than I am, yet when I discuss with them I feel like I'm talking with somebody from bizarro-earth. "Finance and banking are out of control, let's deregulate it completely!", "Governments are corrupt, let's give the power directly to the ones doing the corrupting!", "It's getting cold, let's get naked!"
Taken out of context, it would be hard to know whether this is a criticism of the public sector or private.
> If you dislike the way the government spends money then you elect a different one. If you don't manage to do that then maybe "the public" doesn't disagree so strongly with the way the money is spent.
Taken at face value, believing that this is how it works realistically is quite similar to the impractical beliefs of pure, staunch libertarians.
Not that I take one side or the other, because I reside in the middle, but surely you can understand why people think governments are worse at things, waste more, and actually give individuals less control over where their dollars are spent.
Well sure, the philanthropic model, which is in essence allowing the wealthy to control every part of society by determining what exists (i.e. is funded), who gets to live and die (by who they choose to give jobs to), what can be said (since every communications medium is privately owned), is a better choice for the wealthy, never for society or anyone else. It moves as much as possible of society from a public sphere where democracy exists into the corporate world, which is always a dictatorship.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is great in that it funds research and development in educational pedagogy and techniques and funds education in general. But its existence is also explicitly anti-democratic. It funds schools that accept its doctrine, and leaves the others to wither and die. The existence of charity will be used to cut public support (why do we need public support when these schools are funded without it?) and then we have the setting where one billionaire effectively sets educational policy without democratic input at all. The Kochs are trying to do this by replacing standard American History textbooks with the history rewritten and changed to better serve as Libertarian propaganda.
Make no mistake, when you accept that philanthropy is a fundamental tenet of society you are literally ceding all decision making power to the ultrawealthy who can afford to take part in it, and cutting out nearly everyone else, ensuring they will be begging for scraps from their masters forever. You ensure that anything people have is framed as a kind gift from a wealthy benefactor (and you wouldn't want to make that benefactor mad and risk losing those gifts you need to survive, would you?), not a right or expectation. Even well-intentioned philanthropy is extremely dangerous.
Private sector military defense or police force has a lot of issues. It's a non starter.
> Also very typical American, not considering healthcare an essential service, lol.
Just because I didn't list something doesn't mean I don't consider it a service that should be provided as a public service. I picked the simplest examples to make a point. If I were king for a day my list would include a basic form of universal healthcare services (think Medicaid, not Medicare) and public education as well.
First, even if some Americans don't support universal healthcare, that doesn't mean that all Americans don't support it. Even if they do, there are arguments to be made both for and against universal healthcare. I happen to fall on the pro-universal healthcare side, but it's certainly not without drawbacks.
Second, the OP wasn't suggesting that we should have privately funded militaries and private roads, but that one possible government outcome is the government paying for such things while leaving other items (maybe donations to scientific foundations as an example) up to private sector interests. If you're Dropbox, and you strongly believe in a cause and you want to support that cause, it makes far more sense to withhold taxes (so far as it is legal to do so) that you have no control over and set up a foundation to pursue the cause that you're aiming for. Not only can you ensure that money goes toward that cause, but you're nearly guaranteed to do a better job than the government which is, by it's very nature, subject to the whims and opinions of people who may not share your view on the use of your money and less efficient in the handling of your money.
I have a big problem with American companies not paying their fair share of taxes, and even more so with the obscene wealth inequality that has come to dominate the last few decades, but your post here is a drive-by at a reasonable discussion point, followed by a trite comment about Americans for no reason other than to stir up trouble.
I would like to see these foundations "consolidate", and streamline their grants offering and application processes.
It's surprising (and a little depressing) how much money goes to for-profit in the funding cycles of "not for profits"...
Companies should pay taxes, and more, lobby officials for fair and simple tax codes so these issues don't arise in the first place. Dropbox, Apple, Google, etc. shouldn't have a competitive advantage over companies unwilling or unable to play these games.
That being said, funding and supporting non-profits and charitable work is fine. I don't know whose intentions are so important that we should discourage that kind of behavior.
It seems a lot of time the specific conditions that are attached to a grant are used as a way of trying to hedge against the PR risk for a foundation/nonprofit that a grant was used improperly. I don't think empirically it's that effective of a hedge against money being used poorly anyway, organizations that will squander money will squander money.
It's also super exciting to see that they're offering in-kind support from employees as well. We're working in rural Kenya where the internet can be really challenging and I know that we'd be incredibly excited to work with some of Dropboxes team on sync'ing problems. My impression has been that the reliability and seamlessness of sync'ing at Dropbox has been primarily driven by some absolutely world class distributed systems talent, and it'd be phenomenal for organizations to get access to those employees/teams.
Do these types of PR lines from companies that make productivity tools actually resonate with folks? At Dropbox’s scale, they probably materially increase economic productivity, which is great. Why push some narrative about helping aid workers achieve their mission?
This sort of language seems especially strange to me when announcing something that actually can make significant social impact. The juxtaposition between the Dropbox product and the work of this foundation jumps off the page.
Maybe it’s just me as I get older, but it seems so patronizing.
Anywho, this seems like a great project — great work DB, PR quibbles aside :)
That ties in well with their policy of making unrestricted grants, which similarly aims to delegate decision-making downstream.
In the case of Dropbox, for me, it comes across as cynical virtue signalling.
If Dropbox were funding the EFF or the FSF or even dropping some funding to CCC or FOSDEM then I could start to overlook their ties with the sort of people¹ that create clients for Warchild.
As it is this stuff comes across as pretty horrible, and I keep on thinking about Dropbox as being part of a network of businesses closely tied to the military that create the problems that they now care about.
I realize I am not their target audience, but this PR has the effect of making me dislike them more than ever.
But if you insist on using it, at least use it according to its actual meaning: proclaiming some supposed virtue without costs.
In this case, it doesn't apply because they are, actually, spending $20 million.
[0]: Because it's a cheap way to disparage anyone, cynically using the perceived virtue of their stated opinion against them.
[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/i-invented-virtue-signal...
The Dropbox Foundation does better fit the traditional definition in signalling theory, i. e. "costly rituals, performed publicly, as a hard-to-fake sign of commitment.". But OP did not intend to use that definition, clearly shown by their term "cynical virtue signalling".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling#Pejorative_u...
Either way, I think you can use this idea pejoratively with or without that part of the definition: Dropbox says they support the community and these stated values, they drop some money on it and go back to doing whatever else they were doing that ignores these values. That's "signalling virtues" (by some definition) that you don't actually live by, except when it suits you to signal them.
(Note, I don't know enough about Dropbox to say that they are not actually living by these virtues.)
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-...
I don't think your definition or objection is correct.
Is it just me that think this is very cringy and reminds me of https://youtu.be/J-GVd_HLlps?t=31s
I like that they help fund stuff but I just think the statement is kind of hilarious.
Heck, as long as the bar is this low, Microsoft could write a similar sounding PR statement to put some lipstick on their file system patent trolling - "At Microsoft, we have an unwavering commitment to the fight against poverty. Our storage technology has been crucial to the success of the one laptop per child program."
>foreverbanned: They didn't mentioned the filename at first. What they actually said was: "And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file (It was a picture of a cat!)"
AFAIK there is no equivalent Dropbox incident, though they were forced to clarify their marketing in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox#May_2011_...
If your threat model mandates that you use end to end encryption, go for it, and choose something other than Dropbox. But saying the encryption is pointless just because the organization that manages the keys could become “evil” is hyperbole.
Edit: to be clear, I believe it is an option on enterprise accounts to use your own key.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/16/dropbox_ftc_not_goo...
Since you’re running their software, you’re ultimately trusting their policies anyway. Even if they had encryption at rest it wouldn’t tell you that it’s correctly implemented and doesn’t e.g. leak keys.
Personally, I want to love them. I think Drew has built up a decent company. However choosing Dr. Rice for the board, although she probably brings a lot to the table, was an unforgivable act. The creation of the foundation is laudable but feels a bit of a band-aid to solving their image problem. The choice of War Child UK just rubs more salt into the wound for me however.
This or most users don't even know/care about the company / software. They just installed it to solve a problem and it works fine
Very much installed it to solve a problem and it works fine
(But now I guess i have some reading to do)
I'm not a US citizen, so I don't know about Condoleezza Rice and personally I don't care that much. But I do care about:
1. the Halloween documents
2. their NSA partnership
3. them being happy about censoring content on China's whims, which allegedly is also affecting international users
4. Windows 10 being a privacy nightmare
5. their ongoing racketeering practices, forcing a tax on Android phone makers for patents
Yes, please lecture me on how other companies are doing it too, blah, blah, I don't care as these are things that have a measurable impact on my everyday life.
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually not boycotting Microsoft, I just choose not to use them given the choice. And I would use OneDrive given its price, if it would be reliable, but it isn't. I tried it multiple times actually, always noticing unacceptable limitations or bugs.
And so your choice is dubious at best.
Never said I trust MS, just that I trust them more than Rice.
I'm not saying that they're perfect now, but they're definitely better :)
Beside these, MS have been dragged to court multiple times for unethical business practices, on both side of the Atlantic, and were found guilty, again on both sides (so it's not merely "an EU witch hunt"). The last time that I know of was in 2016 for the "malware-like forced installation of Windows 10" case. Windows 10, supposedly their latest and best, being itself technically a spyware. They're an immoral company. "Definitely better", I think not.
4 out of those 5 points are ongoing and highlight that in fact Microsoft has not changed, following the same pattern.
Plus I don't really care that it happened in 1998. Can't forgive that. Sorry.
In society when people hurt other people, usually relationships get broken indefinitely, we don't really forgive unless it's about family or close friends. I don't see why companies should be any less different.
As they say, don't do the crime, if you can't do the time. Maybe companies should think twice before doing shit.
But I do get the impression that she's the kind of person that one can have a deep discussion with even while disagreeing; that her positions, while wrong, are within the realm of possibilities, especially given her rather impressive biography. In other words: she's frequently wrong, but she's not batshit crazy and filled with hate like the current administration.
On a more practical note: I doubt that a board member has the power needed to single-handedly set company policy in the way implied by the criticism. If anything, her appointment is more of a symptom of the problem.
I guess it is cooperation with the national security apparatus people are worried about? With the increased scrutiny post-Snowden, especially in the EU, I'm not sure how much leeway companies have left, anyway. Yes: Dropbox almost certainly cooperates when presented with a "National Security Letter". But I would take Rice to actually be more concerned about limiting her liability than, say, Yahoo, and push back at requests that are in legally grey areas.
Is it really better if an intelligent person willingly helps start the Iraq war than if an hateful person does so on a whim? I find it hard to decide what's scarier.
I've stopped using Dropbox when they hired her, but not because I think there are practical implications for users. Rather, I wish that the IT community would finally, please, start thinking about ethics.
The real distinction that matters is how stubborn someone is, or how convinced they are that they are right. One might be stubborn out of hate, one might be stubborn out of pride (I loudly claimed X, so I must to all I can to show X is right, no matter what happens), or one might be stubborn out of 'true belief'. Such stubbornness is scary.
Notably, it is scary no matter whether you agree with them or not. Such stubbornness might help accelerate change if they are exactly right, but there is no room for error.
I have a hard time believing that anyone in the Bush administration was acting in good faith and invaded a country because nobody raised a solid counter-argument in time.
There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. While I don't think this is excuse to just not give a flying f at all whatsoever, it sets a general expectation — I'm not going to pick what's worse, Rice in the Board of Directors or an NSA partnership or a plan to essentially _become_ the NSA, but for advertising.
One day I'll stop being lazy and make something that's independent from cloud providers (and thus their ethical issues) for myself. It will probably be less power efficient and thus contribute more to global warming, but at least I'll have tried - but, still, there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
Reasons for that could be different, but ethical reasons are completely legit ones.
The main reason why I have a personal Nextcloud server is because I don't want to deal with considering pros and cons when choosing where to stash my most valuable data (like cloud service, calendar, contact lists, to-do lists etc).
Sure, it takes me maybe an hour per month to keep it updated, but constantly considering different options would take me even more. Sure, paying for a dedicated server takes a chunk of my monthly income, but it would also add up to pay monthly subscriptions to other bullshit SaaS, because free editions rarely allow a consumer to accomplish most of the things[0]. And as far as the climate change is concerned, my hosting provider is powered by a hydro plant. My hosting provider is also not from a five-eye country (nor does my everyday traffic reach any of those when traveling to my server and back) and is in the EU jurisdictions. I don't really have to worry about NSA that much, as long as I trust my end devices not making those connections with my most sensitive types of data.
With all that said, I do feel like an ethical consumer online. There are some hints of it outside the keyboard as well. Heck, I'm 23 and still haven't learned how to drive because it isn't viable to have an electric car inside of my country, and I prefer public transport over taxis and Uber.
[0] Shoutout to Pocket, the only SaaS I could think of that's completely usable in the free version, and becomes even more usable when paying for a premium.
Seriously, I rue the day someone decided not to build-in such features as Internet-wide file sharing into my operating system, giving me full control over my content - subjugating me, instead, to the whims of yet another un-trustable third party.
If it was a feature of the operating system, who would host the files?
The only issue is, it hasn't been considered of any importance to maintain user agency; better we steal the users agency over their data/computers, put it out 'in the cloud', and get them addicted/dependent on third parties, than to make the operating system deliver similar levels of service, at scale, at the local level.
What if, instead of getting all hot and bothered about browsers, OS-teams instead focused on making source-/locality-/ownership- of user-generated data, within the context of the local machine, available at scale?
Like, gimme IPFS open and operating by default, in my regular distro, and I'll never have to host a site on a cloud server again...
Todays computers/bandwidth/connectivity can handle the load.
Also, the battery can't handle your laptop open 24/7 just to serve a couple of files you _might_ need someday in your phone or other computer.
What they can't handle is the load imposed on them by the farming of data by third-parties from my feed. But thats okay - because thats exactly what I want to get rid of.
They also filed for IPO in January. I doubt that they will shut down the Foundation a few months after announcing it when they go public.
Most shareholders don't care about the 'Do everything to make me money short term'. Some activist investors do. Those are easier to keep out if you are a private company.
When you read that and have the recent Oxfam scandal in mind, it creates some interesting pictures.
Btw. I don't want to criticize the decision for unrestricted grants in any way, as I don't have enough expertise in the field.
There are exceptions for organizations that are large enough to have multiple organizations nested under them with competing or independent goals (such as a university or a large charity with independent projects targeting different issues).
I’ve seen people on the left get upset when they find out that the ACLU defends the rights of people on the right in addition to those on the left.