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#foundations — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #foundations, aggregated by home.social.

  1. We can use ‘godlike’ technology for good, says Norrsken founder

    Niklas Adalberth, Norrsken Foundation (right), interviewed by Nick Lockley, PEI Group The impact investing community can still harness…
    #UnitedStates #US #USA #AI #america #Climate #climatesolutions #energytransition #financialinclusion #financialreturns #Food #foundations&endowments #healthcare #impactinvesting #science #technology #unitedstatesofamerica
    europesays.com/3006974/

  2. Firm Foundations Faithful Bridges by Carol Bellavance is now available on Amazon will be on Audible in 72 hours or less

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Lx4JEypZ3vk https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GRMWY3XY The Bible is filled with many stories about firm foundations and faithful bridges from Moses to Christ. As children of God we must for a firm foundation of faith and a faithful bridge in Christ in our lives in order to be a servant of God. With a firm foundation we can't accept the bridge that carries us to safety.

    midnight-publishing.org/2026/0

  3. Part of a company, foundation or other organisation that does #OpenSource?

    The #EU are seeking feedback to prepare their proposal for "Security Attestations for Open Source", a potential revenue source for Open Source #foundations and Communities!

    We'll share more info on the Commission's proposal soon!

    Give your feedback here ⬇️

    ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/C

    [JM]

    #CRA #CyberResilienceAct

  4. Copyright litigation over Anne Frank’s writings likely to impact the fate of VPNs in the EU

    “The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although the diary and Anne Frank’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are well known, few are aware that the text has a complicated copyright history – one that could have […]

    #advocateGeneral #anneFrank #circumvention #cjeu #eu #europeanCommission #foundations #geoblocks #infringement #intellectualMonopoly #litigation #netherlands #publicDomain #switzerland #vpns walledculture.org/copyright-li
  5. “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth”*…

    It’s all about leverage… perhaps nowhere more painfully than in the philanthropic sector: so many problems; so little bandwidth!

    Dick Tofel (a media advisor who was founding general manager and first employee of ProPublica, and its president from 2013 until 2021) weighs in with a “modest proposal.” It’s largely aimed at his field (public media, writ large), an altogether worthy focus; but the general principal is surely much broadly applicable…

    I read a fascinating history over the recent holidays and it made me wonder about whether we ought to be fundamentally rethinking institutional philanthropy in this challenging moment. Because that philanthropy provides critical support to so much of nonprofit journalism, I think the question is worth exploring here this week.

    The book is The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America [here] by John Fabian Witt [here], a professor at Yale Law School. It charts the history of the American Fund for Public Service, a progressive foundation (to use our contemporary lingo) that operated in the 1920s and ‘30s, and produced some remarkable results with fairly limited resources (roughly $36 million over its entire run in current dollars).

    The American Fund was rocked by conflicts between what we would now call progressives and literal Communists, and it made a few foolish grants, including some funding for Stalin-era Soviet agriculture, but it also accomplished an astonishing number of big things. It provided critical support for the NAACP, from its early anti-lynching campaign to launching the litigation program that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, and including the earlier first moves toward salary equalization for public school teachers and desegregation of public graduate schools in the South; funded lifelines for Sidney Hillman’s industrial unionization drive that eventually produced the CIO, and for A. Philip Randolph’s pathbreaking Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and supported the defenses of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scopes “monkey trial” and the Scottsboro Boys.

    In all, as Witt concludes, “People and movements touched by the American Fund did more for twentieth-century American liberalism than all the money of the era’s much larger and more famous foundations.”

    Here’s what got me to thinking: Over well more than a decade, the American Fund spent only $67,000 (about $1.25 million today), or 3.5% of its total spending, on its own operations—the rest went to gifts and grants. This was possible because the Fund hired essentially no staff, with its work being done by its many impressive directors, including Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, James Weldon Johnson, leader of the NAACP, Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate (he got almost 900,000 votes in 1932), Freda Kirchwey of The Nation and attorney Morris Ernst. Among the giants they consulted were W.E.B. du Bois, Felix Frankfurter and Reinhold Niebuhr.

    And here’s what it made me wonder: Especially in this moment of overwhelming needs across the social sector, as the federal government withdraws from so many crucial activities it had undertaken and supported for a half century, should institutional foundations recast themselves in the model of the American Fund, dispensing with their large staffs and instead restocking their boards with leaders who could directly disperse their largess?

    Before you object that that’s simply impractical, you need to reckon with the fact that this is actually the operating model of most of what we call “major donors,” wealthy individuals, occasionally with family foundations, some of them making very large grants. Mackenzie Scott is the overwhelmingly largest funder of this sort, but in our own field such funders have included those who sparked Voice of San Diego, ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, the Marshall Project, CalMatters, Mississippi Today, the Flatwater Free Press, Baltimore Banner, Tulsa Flyer and others. The track record for initiatives spurred by institutional foundation funding is, well, a bit less stellar.

    The costs of the current model are also much larger than you may imagine. The Ford Foundation, in 2024 alone, spent more than $212 million on its own operations, while making $840 million in grants and gifts (about 20% of the total). Nor is Ford an outlier in this respect: the MacArthur Foundation spent almost $68 million on itself, while paying out $356 million (16%) and the Knight Foundation incurred $32 million in expenses to grant and gift $148 million (18%).

    I’m not complaining about these “overhead” rates as such—they are not at all unreasonable by contemporary foundation standards. (The 2024 rate for the Rockefeller Foundation, where I once worked, was 38%!) But for just these three major news funders, the aggregate cost comes to more than $300 million in one year alone. (Of course, news is just one of many things these giants fund.) That total spent on running three foundations is more than half of the rescinded federal support of public broadcasting. The difference between the American Fund’s 3.5% and the 18% median rate for Ford, MacArthur and Knight would be $250 million available for additional grants each year from these three funders alone.

    I headlined this column a “modest proposal” because I do not expect it to be adopted, nor perhaps to be taken entirely literally. But I do hope it is directionally provocative. As I have said more than once with respect to public broadcasting, revolutionary changes require an extraordinary response. Essentially every objective of the major institutional foundations is under unprecedented pressure. In that setting, doing business in the usual way may no longer make sense. Looking to the American Fund suggests another path might be possible…

    Repurposing overhead: “A Modest Proposal for Big Philanthropy in a Tale from the Past,” from @dicktofel.bsky.social.

    For a broad history of philanthropy from the 16th century, see here.

    [Image above from “Philanthropy on the Defensive,” also worth a read for a conservative take that inches toward some of the same conclusions…]

    * Archimedes (brandishing his lever)

    ###

    Lest we even imagine that philanthropy can do it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that the first Social Security check– for $22.54– was issued to Ida May Fuller.

    The Social Security Program had been created in 1935, with qualification for eligibility (covered earnings) beginning in 1937. So Ms. Fuller, a teacher-turned legal-secretary, had been accumulating credit for three years. She lived to 100 years old and collected a total of $22,888.

    source

    #culture #foundations #history #IdaMayFuller #journalism #overhead #philanthropy #politics #socialSecurity #society
  6. @whitehouse-47.bsky.social You're a fucking #idiot. Who the fuck is #Soros when the #Governor of #Illinois has more influence? Aren't you done melting yet you piece of crap? -- #George #Soros / #Open #Society #Foundations: Providing the "air cover" for grassroots organizations ...

  7. Learning AI doesn’t start with massive models.
    It starts with learning how to predict numbers from data.

    Linear regression is one of the simplest — and most important — foundations.

    #instamodels #neverstoplearning #start #education #learning #foundations

  8. Learning AI doesn’t start with massive models.
    It starts with learning how to predict numbers from data.

    Linear regression is one of the simplest — and most important — foundations.

    #instamodels #neverstoplearning #start #education #learning #foundations

  9. Learning AI doesn’t start with massive models.
    It starts with learning how to predict numbers from data.

    Linear regression is one of the simplest — and most important — foundations.

    #instamodels #neverstoplearning #start #education #learning #foundations

  10. Learning AI doesn’t start with massive models.
    It starts with learning how to predict numbers from data.

    Linear regression is one of the simplest — and most important — foundations.

    #instamodels #neverstoplearning #start #education #learning #foundations

  11. Learning AI doesn’t start with massive models.
    It starts with learning how to predict numbers from data.

    Linear regression is one of the simplest — and most important — foundations.

    #instamodels #neverstoplearning #start #education #learning #foundations

  12. We've just added tags to the @TetraLogical blog, so now it's possible to point to things like all the posts in our Foundations series:
    tetralogical.com/blog/tag/foun

    #accessibility #a11y #foundations

  13. 🐘 When Algebra Took the Floor — and Geometry Was Asked to Sit Quietly

    Why an imbalance in mathematical language may have slowed progress.

    We may not have lacked mathematics in fundamental physics — we may have over-privileged algebra at the expense of geometry.

    Algebra is superb at conservation and symmetry.

    Geometry tells us what is possible.

    When geometry was demoted to “intuition,” we: • over-valued static solutions
    • flattened scale dependence
    • fragmented processes that were actually unified

    Tunnelling, horizons, negative energy, spacetime shortcuts — same process, different geometric cost.

    This isn’t anti-maths.

    It’s a course correction.

    #Physics #GeometryFirst #Foundations #QuantumGravity #Spacetime

  14. The greybeards and the second sell-out of the #openweb

    There is a familiar voice resurfacing in today’s debates about the future of the web, its measured, reflective, earnest, often grey-bearded., and it has funding. These are the people who were there in the Web 2.0 era. The #Flickr builders. The early platform designers. The conference speakers who once talked about “community”, “social objects”, and “public infrastructure”. Many of them now occupy foundations, NGOs, advisory boards, and policy circles. And they are doing […]

    hamishcampbell.com/the-greybea

  15. Today's #Workout was the Foundations class for a change

    Mobility: 15 min GoWod

    Warm up:
    - 3 rounds
    - 6 narrow (feet together) air squats
    - 6 normal air squats
    - 6 sumo (wide) air squats
    - 10 banded side steps e/s
    - 10 weighed single leg glutes bridges e/s (15 - 17,5 - 22,5 kg)
    - 3 rounds
    - 10 alternating Cossack squats
    - 10 walking lunges
    - 10 goblet squats (15 - 17,5 - 20 kg)

    Workout: "Squat Focus" 20 min EMOM
    - min 1: 8 incline narrow stance goblet squats (20 kg)
    - min 2: 6 pistol squats to 16in box e/s
    - min 3: 6 front squats (35 kg)
    - min 4: 6 Bulgarian split goblet squats (8 kg)
    - min 5: rest

    Nothing like showing up to the Foundations class and loading up the weights to motivate the newbies

    #CrossFit #CrossfitForYoga #Wod #WorkoutOfTheDay #Fitness #GymLife #StrengthTraining #OlympicLifting #Fitodon #Foundations

  16. "(M)uch of the internet as we know it is the product of random guys making choices that didn't seem very high stakes at the time."

    --Ingrid Burrington, aka @ingrid,
    buttondown.com/perfectsentence

    #foundations
    #InternetHistory
    #enshittification

  17. 🎨 Oh look, another #groundbreaking #revelation that #data stored in a #GPU is one-dimensional and, surprise, you need to map it to #multidimensional #space. 🙄 Next, they'll tell us water is wet. #Categorical #Foundations for Cute Layouts: solving #problems only a #PhD would create. 📚💥
    research.colfax-intl.com/categ #HackerNews #ngated

  18. Card Name: Giada, Font of Hope
    Set: Foundations
    Description: Flying, vigilance
    Each other Angel you control enters with an additional +1/+1 counter on it for each Angel you already control.
    {T}: Add {W}. Spend this mana only to cast an Angel spell.
    Artist: Scott M. Fischer

    EDHrec: edhrec.com/commanders/giada-fo #magicthegathering #mtg #GiadaFontofHope #ScottMFischer #Foundations

  19. Card Name: Giada, Font of Hope
    Set: Foundations
    Description: Flying, vigilance
    Each other Angel you control enters with an additional +1/+1 counter on it for each Angel you already control.
    {T}: Add {W}. Spend this mana only to cast an Angel spell.
    Artist: Scott M. Fischer

    EDHrec: edhrec.com/commanders/giada-fo #magicthegathering #mtg #GiadaFontofHope #ScottMFischer #Foundations

  20. If we close everything, we are left with the evil – A bad outcome

    What should be open? What is okay to be closed? Let’s begin from a traditional liberal framing: Most social interactions should be OPEN, some private or sensitive interactions may be CLOSED. This isn’t radical. It’s been a functional principle across free societies for the last century. But in our current digital culture, this simple framing is often flipped or ignored. Many developers, activists, and even funders uncritically push for closure, often in the name of privacy, safety and […]

    hamishcampbell.com/if-we-close

  21. If we close everything, we are left with the evil – A bad outcome

    What should be open? What is okay to be closed? Let’s begin from a traditional liberal framing: Most social interactions should be OPEN, some private or sensitive interactions may be CLOSED. This isn’t radical. It’s been a functional principle across free societies for the last century. But in our current digital culture, this simple framing is often flipped or ignored. Many developers, activists, and even funders uncritically push for closure, often in the name of privacy, safety and […]

    hamishcampbell.com/if-we-close

  22. If we close everything, we are left with the evil – A bad outcome

    What should be open? What is okay to be closed? Let’s begin from a traditional liberal framing: Most social interactions should be OPEN, some private or sensitive interactions may be CLOSED. This isn’t radical. It’s been a functional principle across free societies for the last century. But in our current digital culture, this simple framing is often flipped or ignored. Many developers, activists, and even funders uncritically push for closure, often in the name of privacy, safety and […]

    hamishcampbell.com/if-we-close

  23. If we close everything, we are left with the evil – A bad outcome

    What should be open? What is okay to be closed? Let’s begin from a traditional liberal framing: Most social interactions should be OPEN, some private or sensitive interactions may be CLOSED. This isn’t radical. It’s been a functional principle across free societies for the last century. But in our current digital culture, this simple framing is often flipped or ignored. Many developers, activists, and even funders uncritically push for closure, often in the name of privacy, safety and […]

    hamishcampbell.com/if-we-close

  24. Unfinished business

    "A shameful death after a supermarket scuffle shines a light on Australia’s unfinished business. From compensation for the Stolen Generations to Indigenous recognition, Australia must follow words with actions."

    "There is unfinished business in this country, and there can be no excuses for not knowing or understanding. We need to change direction and remove the burden from the most vulnerable."

    "In a land of home improvers surely the principle of fixing the foundations first if you want to really close the gaps is obvious."
    >>
    theguardian.com/commentisfree/

    A First Nations Voice to Parliament. Australia’s Constitutional Referendum Explained
    >>
    verfassungsblog.de/a-first-nat
    #FirstNationsPeoples #IndigenousAustralians #recognition #Voice #Constitution #foundations #referendum #law #violence #Civics #education #Australia #TruthTelling