The 1 million T-shirts saga goes on.

I really, really would wish that we could all just say that the T-shirt guys learned from what happened and we could move on to more rewarding issues. In fact, I thought exactly that had happened, and hadn’t spent even the shortest tweet on it for several weeks – and then they posted this blog post. Go and read. And cry.

Yes, that is right. They want to support what is probably the most badly conceived anti-child-trafficking initiative ever. I am not going to tire you here with why it is such a bad idea (others have done an admirable job on that, e.g. this post by Amanda Kloer, which was written well before the T-shirts ever came up). What I do want to draw attention to is that, evidently, Jason still has not learnt that it might be a good idea to stop and think before jumping off -  and preferably only do so while being informed by best practice and evidence.

Obviously, he was taken aback a bit by the criticisms and quickly took the post down, tweeting that he did so for ‘due diligence’. Perhaps it should be pointed out here that ‘due diligence’ is normally understood as something done before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan. If you do this afterwards, it is more properly known as ‘negligent laziness’.

And then Jason and Stephen write a follow-up post in which they try to explain why they posted their first one. And fail miserably. What they do bring across is that they feel that it’s all about them. Take this sentence, for instance: “It’s frustrating and disheartening when individuals with a great deal of experience in various efforts seem to get pleasure in crushing the energy and desire of people who want things to be better in the world.” Seriously? You think that people get a kick out of kicking you? Is that why so many people who can use their time in ways that are much more gratifying to themselves insist in trying to explain to you again and again (and again, and again) that it would be a good idea to ask questions before you go off on your next hare-brainwave? I mean, of course I have nothing better to do than spend an hour on writing this blog.

“The story we shared was simply that… a story. … We simply shared a story that we heard and wanted to pass it on.” Again, really guys? So I guess that’s why you decided to donate those t-shirts to ‘Bob’, because it was simply… a story. That you wanted to pass on. Without any suggestion that you thought it was a good idea. Tell me, what exactly is the level of stupidity you expect from your readers? And while you’re at it, if you only wanted to share a story that should not have any impact, could you please explain why you did not keep it for your next session with your drinking buddies?

This post is a serious break from what I have written before on gifts in kind in general and on the t-shirt saga in particular; both in content and in tone. First, I don’t only write about the issues any more, but also about the people behind it; simply because I think the people have now become the issue. A mistake can happen, and the people who make it usually go through it growing a bit wiser and more knowledgeable – and get my full kudos for learning from their mistake. You can even make multiple mistakes and still get my support – if you learn from it and don’t make the same mistake over and over again. However, you lose it if you don’t learn from your mistakes and not only insist on making us all go through the same sorry arguments over and over again, but in addition make clear that you haven’t even tried to understand the central issue: that it is not about you, but about the people that you say you want to help, and that consequently you have a duty to do your due diligence – and yes, that implies thinking and asking questions before you do something stupid.

Secondly, up to now I have tried to write in a fairly dispassionate voice. I have left that behind me too, because I have started to realise that Jason et al. are apparently more reactive (if not receptive) to snark than to reasonable discourse. Yes, they go through the motions of being nice, reasonable people who listen to what is being said, but this latest little jaunt shows that it is a front. They don’t listen, not even to the people they asked themselves to advise them, unless the message is hammered home with a sledgehammer. So I guess that is what we need to do. Sad.

[Image: Dollar Origami 4 by Piotr Bizior - www.bizior.com]

Related posts:

1. Diversion: the shirt meeting and lessons we can learn from it
2. The job search: a rant

• An analysis by Alanna Shaikh of how we tend to react to critics. Of course it is easy to take down an ill-conceived initiative like 1millionshirts, but it is important to reflect on whether we react much better when we are the focal point of criticism.
• Wired Magazine writes about the logistics of the Haiti response as a spring board for a wider discussion of disaster response logistics. It’s a bit overly endowed with ‘human interest’, but on the whole I would say that it is a very good introduction. “Organizing Armageddon”, though? (H/T Cynan Houghton.)
• Alex de Waal writes a great article on the ‘humanitarians’ tragedy’: the inescapable cruelties that come with our work. Sadly, it is hidden behind a paywall, but I recommend it highly if you do have access.
• The Royal Geographical Society is holding a conference on how to improve the response to natural disasters. I would expect that logistics will be an important part (although sometimes that sort of expectations are incorrect).
• I am trying to find somebody who can tell me more about the cooperation between Handicap International and Atlas Logistique. Email to their general address goes unanswered. So if you work with/for them or know somebody who does, could you please ask that somebody in the know contacts me?
• Texas In Africa writes an excellent post on how to go from saviourism to empowerment (but seriously, Laura: Barbra Streisand lyrics for a title?). On a related note, Linda Raftree writes about community dialogue, which in turn leads to some interesting discussion over at Tales From the Hood.
• According to Scott Gilmore, mercenaries, missionaries, and madmen should not work in aid.
• A video from MSF showing how bad logistics can cost lives.
• Aid logistics is getting more and more serious attention from universities. The Hanken School of Economics will organise an external course in supply chain management in development aid at the University of Manitoba (Canada).
• How a simple legal mistake by a national mail carrier can cost lives.

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

Related posts:

1. Humourless Links for June 13, 2010
2. Humourless links for March 1, 2010
3. Humourless links for March 3, 2010

This morning’s round table teleconference on the 1 million shirts episode was an interesting experience: I don’t think a start-up charity initiative has ever been able to draw on such a wide array of aid expertise in one public venue (but I would be very happy to stand corrected on that). Some thoughts and impressions.

One million shirts as a confusing meme

I don’t think a charity has ever been propelled into meme status in such a short time frame. The problem with this is that there are actually five memes but that they all use “1 million shirts” as their catch phrase:

1. The project and the organisation itself as a concept.
2. The project (and similar projects) as a great idea on how to do good.
3. The project (and similar projects) as a horrible idea that will not help and perhaps even harm the people it purports to help.
4. The project as a good example on how to harness social media for a cause.
5. The (possible) change in attitude and practice by the project and its founder in the face of the attention in the (social) media as an example of how scrutiny of aid might change for the good.

This confusion is one of the reasons why I have tried to avoid the hash tag #1millionshirts on Twitter. It seems to have seeped through into the meeting as well: from my perspective as an observer, it looked as if the participants came in with different ideas on which of these memes the convo would address. This has led to some cross-purpose dialogue, which in turn ate up a lot of the (very short) time that we had.

The beginnings of a conversation?

The main organiser, Katrin Verclas, told me in a tweet that “… the point of the call was really to have the beginnings of a CONVERSATION as opposed to twitter and blog shouts”. This was my expectation, too. However, conversations had already started before, and turned out to have advanced much further than I expected. In fact, they had outstripped anything that was going on during the call itself, superseding much of the discussion that occurred.

Does that make the meeting itself superfluous? I don’t think so. First of all, I have a strong suspicion that the then upcoming meeting catalysed at least one of the conversations, if not more; it put pressure on what otherwise could have been a very long and drawn-out process that might not have led to the same results. Secondly, I think it has been a great success as an experiment, giving us much to think about on how these convos can really help and how they can be done to best result.

So what has changed?

I don’t think the discussions during the call made much of a difference. As far as I could see, none of the positions grew any closer; any rapprochement had occurred before. Jason Sadler showed again his mastery of the media by getting Teddy Ruge and Marieme Jamme on board beforehand, but whether that will lead to real change remains to be seen. Judging from post-convo tweets and blog posts, both participants and audience mostly walked away with the same opinions they originally brought in.

My main worry, however, doesn’t deal with the participants or the audience: it concerns the two charities that originally advised Jason, H.E.L.P. International and WaterIsLife.com. They have a lot to answer for but did not participate. I am not aware whether or not they were in the audience, but if they were they did not identify themselves. My question is: did they and similar charities learn from this? What will be the reaction next time somebody knocks on a charity’s door with a well-intentioned but badly conceived idea? Has anything changed for them?

And for our next trick…

I think the round table was a great initiative, and I am truly grateful to the people who made it work. It has been an unprecedented event in the history of international aid (at least, as far as I know) and has given us much input for future similar events.

There are a couple of lessons for future, similar convos that I think we can take away from this meeting:

• Plan more time. One hour is really too short to start a meaningful conversation on issues as complex as these. Of course, we have to deal (as almost always) with limited resources. Within those limitations, I think it is better to have just a few longer meetings than many short ones.
• Be clear and extremely specific about the subject and goal of the meeting: not “1 million shirts”, but e.g. “how can 1millionshirts.org use collected t-shirts more effectively”, or “how can we avoid that future well-meaning entrepreneurs make the same mistakes as 1 million shirts did”. This will at least partly avoid the confusion that I mentioned above.
• Taking into account the subject and goal, decide who will be participants. Although I like the ‘unconference’ idea of wide participation, I think this does not work as well for a teleconference as for a physical meetup. Participants should be limited in number and selected for their role (e.g. Jason), specific expertise (e.g. Teddy), or both (e.g. TFtH). That does not mean that the audience should not have any input; but this should be moderated input via the … well, who else but the moderator; in fact, it would be a good idea to have a two-headed moderation team, so one person can concentrate on the discussion between the participants while the other can deal with the audience. Twitter seems to work well for this, but basically anything that can work as a back channel is fine.
• Set a clear, specific agenda and stick to it. Make sure that all participants agree with the agenda (another reason why a limited number of known participants is important). When Katrin originally sent me the agenda, I thought it was fairly specific and clear (and I would assume she did as well). However, less than five minutes into the meeting it turned out that point 2 of the agenda (“Overview of 1 Million Shirts (Jason)/Goals and plan”) would not be covered at all because it had been superseded by events.
• Moderate extremely strictly. Even in longer calls, time is precious and is easily wasted. Set strict time slots for each introductory presentation, impose time limits for questions and answers, don’t allow people to talk when not called upon by the moderator, ensure that people stick to the agenda contents and answer the questions asked instead of going on tangents, and ruthlessly mute anybody who does not play by the rules. Nobody will like you for it, but then, a moderator’s task is not to be liked.
• Coverage of the meeting should go through several channels and be as ‘live’ as possible. I think the live tweeting by Linda Raftree and parallel use of an Etherpad was very helpful for audience engagement (especially those who did not have access to live audio), and something similar should be planned for future convos.

Other thoughts?

This has been an interesting and possibly revolutionary event. I have jotted down some of my thoughts, but I am sure that many of you will have very different or additional ideas. Please fire away in the comments!

More reading

The audio of the meeting can be downloaded from Katrin’s blog, Things I like (which, BTW, is a title I like); there is a transcript on Unicef’s Etherpad, and you can find live tweets in Linda Raftree’s twitter stream. A tweet archive with all tweets marked #1millionshirts can be found at Twapperkeeper. Rachel in Goma comes up with the first original idea after the convo of how Jason could do an incredible amount of good. Saundra Schimmelpfennig wonders whether there will ever be an end to well-intended but ill-informed ventures like this (my take: no, but that doesn’t mean we should give up the fight). Danielle at Ecoblips muses on some of the more negative lessons from the convo; Linda responds with the positive.

Related posts:

1. Diversion/rant: T-shirts, child trafficking, and how to lose friends & alienate people
2. Round table teleconference on the T-shirt affair

The day after I published my post on gifts in kind, a minor eruption rocked the aid blog-and-twitterverse: a new charity tried to get 1 million t-shirts to ‘Africa’. See the gifts-in-kind post at the bottom for more information.

Katrin Verclas from MobileActive has graciously organised a round table teleconference in which one of the initiators as well as a number of experienced aid wonks will participate. In Katrin’s words:

Here are the details:

Friday, April 30 at noon Eastern Time/US.  Log in online at http://readytalk.com and use code 3979111. The call-in number is  866 740 1260 / 3979111.  Alternative number is 303-248-0285.  Local numbers can be found at http://www.readytalk.com/support/international-numbers.php (though, unfortunately, Liberia is not on the list, but skype call-in works)

We will be talking with you all (I hope!), Jason Sadler of One Million Shirts, @talesfromthhood, @tmsruge, Christopher Fabian (@unickf) and Erica Kochi (@uniemk) of UNICEF, @penelopeinparis, Laura Seay (@texasinafrica), and anyone else who would like to join in about this project, sustainable and responsible aid work, and the questions that the #1millionshirt project has raised about aid and development.  We expect this to be a lively but respectful conversation in the spirit of a fruitful conversation. Please join us.

Suggested agenda for the 1-hour call:

• Introductions of roundtable participants
• Overview of 1 Million Shirts (Jason)/Goals and plan
• Comments from the aid community and response/local manufacturers/others
• Discussion and questions/comments from the audience (submitted through Ready Talk online to keep it manageable)
• Closing remarks

This promises to be a very interesting meeting, for which I will gladly give up a night’s sleep (it will start 2 AM local time where I live). Join the discussion and see how we can turn this into a project that will really help some people.

[Image: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.]

Related posts:

1. Diversion: the shirt meeting and lessons we can learn from it