WNBC's Gabe Pressman, in a 6 July 2007 column, [Will Moynihan's Dream Come True?] joins with Senator Moynihan's widow, Liz, and daughter, Maura, in supporting the Vornado and Related Companies [unnamed in column] plan for development. He also dismisses unspecified criticisms from 'civic groups' in a manner that would probably not please the civic-minded senator.

Pressman acknowledges the contributions of Senator Moynihan:

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a dream to convert the old Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue into a new Penn Station. Moynihan, a scholar, an intellectual and a man who never shirked a fight for a good cause, deplored the fact that the old Penn Station had been destroyed to make way for Madison Square Garden. Whenever he recalled how the wrecker's ball had destroyed the beautiful facade of the old Penn Station, it made him angry.

He continues:

Moynihan also deplored the seeming inability of New York to undertake grand projects. But now, after many stops and starts, the future of the station that will be named after the late senator seems assured. His widow, Liz Moynihan, told me: ''If it doesn't happen now, it never will. This is the best chance we'll ever have to rebuild the West Side."

He cites the support of Governor Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg for this plan:

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg are strongly behind this plan -- and, in celestial terms, they are two key stars that need to be aligned. But there are a few other problems that may hold things up. The developers have some reservations, but it appears that ultimately they'll go along with the grand plan. Also, some of the civic groups that deal with major changes in New York's landscape have been nitpicking on some minor details.

Finally, he offers his support and dismisses any criticism of the plan:

But it's time to brush aside all the naysayers and nitpickers. It's been 44 years since this architectural homicide took place.

It's good that Pressman finds this an exciting project and that he respects the contributions of Senator Moynihan and his family. Let's just be sure that his rejection of criticism does not impair the quality of this development. Open the review process to the sunlight of public review and ensure that the new Penn Station does not suffer from the assaults that buried the current Penn Station under Madison Square Garden.

The New York Times editorial [Senator Moynihan's Legacy] asks New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to respect the legacy of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the history of the Farley Post Office. It starts with the recent good news:

For years now, plans and sometimes mere illusions about ways to replace New York City's dismal and disheartening Penn Station have been debated, mostly behind closed doors. Now comes the good news that developers Stephen Ross and Steven Roth will finally make public their proposal to revive the drab area around Penn Station and create a grand new terminal, named for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

They then raise the critical question for all concerned about this development:

When the plan is revealed New Yorkers should focus on one concern: whether the historic public spaces are being shortchanged once again in favor of private developments.

They also point out the less than promising news that has been leaked so far:

With each bit of news that seeps out about these plans, it looks more and more as though the Garden will be allowed to take over most of the magnificent Farley building, including its dramatic stairway entrance and the elegant lobby that stretches along most of a city block. One main wall of the central terminal might also be used for Garden advertising.

Let's join the Times in opposing what could be a terrible fate for the New Penn Station:

One can only imagine Senator Moynihan's eloquent disappointment if he thought that the Farley building he worked so hard to protect would not be a soaring entrance for the trains and the city but a route through a public treasure to a privately owned coliseum.

Vornado Realty Trust and its partner The Related Companies LP hired Cassidy & Associates to lobby the federal government, according to a disclosure form, the AP reports.

The firm will help facilitate communication with Amtrak and congressional members, according to the form filed Tuesday.

It looks like it's time for supporters of a sane Penn Station development to communicate with Amtrak and members of congress as well. Let them know what the public seeks in this development.

In a July 4 article by Charles Bagli, New Grandeur for Penn Station in Latest Plan, the New York Times notes:

In the next three weeks, two of the city’s largest developers will unveil new plans for rebuilding the station, moving Madison Square Garden, replacing the Hotel Pennsylvania, and erecting a pair of skyscrapers, one of which would be taller than the Empire State Building, over the site of the existing station.

Though the new plan is broadly similar to a proposal offered a year ago, it is different in several important ways, starting with the cost: $14 billion, double that of the original plan, a real estate executive who has seen the plan said. It is also bigger than anticipated: the entire plan, involving buildings on six adjacent blocks, would create 10 million square feet of new office space off West 33rd Street, as much as in the old World Trade Center.

The developers, Stephen M. Ross and Steven Roth, have also burnished their vision for the station, which would be renamed after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who championed the original idea. Civic groups and the head of the City Planning Commission, Amanda M. Burden, had complained that last year’s plan treated the underground station as an afterthought, without a grand public space worthy of the country’s busiest transit hub.

The new plan would try to recapture the imposing aura of the original station inside the James A. Farley Post Office across the street, with a vast, street-level waiting room under a glass canopy that would spill sunlight onto the concourse two levels below.

In the next three weeks, the public will get its first, albeit sketchy, look at the new plan when the Spitzer administration takes the first step in an environmental review of the project’s potential impact on the neighborhood.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I think the stars are aligned to do this," said Patrick J. Foye, co-chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, the state authority overseeing the project.

Thus the story of the new Penn Station, Moynihan Station, begins again. The Times article presents some of the issues, but there are many more to come in a project this important. Among them are the cautions offered by community watchdogs including the Municipal Arts Society. Bagli notes:

But Kent L. Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, a civic group that has met with the developers, said that it was "inappropriate" for the state to put the project on the fast track and begin an environmental review before "the design, the financing and all the implications are on the table."

I hope that the Moynihan Station development is an example of New York City learning from its past mistakes and taking a wiser direction. A few years ago Grand Central Terminal was threatened by unwise development. Wiser heads prevailed and we now have a restored train hub that is vital with retail shops and restaurants and is a ceremonial gate at the south end of Park Avenue. Let's use this chance to make Moynihan Station a place where New York cleans up the embarrassment that is the current Penn Station and makes some restitution for the destruction of the original Penn Station forty years ago.

I have been building Everyone Serves a campaign to encourage the next president and congress to create a program of mandatory national service for all Americans between 18-40. The two-year "service draft" will bring young people into service roles before they go to college or enter the full-time workforce. Join us at Everyone Serves and sign the Everyone Serves petition to our next national leadership.

Guidestar, the indispensable resource of information on United States nonprofit organizations and foundations, should be acquired by a company with Internet interests and be made into a true hub of nonprofit information and community. An acquisition by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IAC, or News Corporation, for example, could bring real Internet and community smarts and produce a site that is more useful to donors, nonprofit organizations, foundations, interested citizens, scholars, and anyone seeking to know more about the vital social sector.

The inspiration for this proposal came from a careful comparison of the current offerings of Guidestar and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). As it became clear that Guidestar could be improved by the adoption of many of the approaches of IMDB, it occurred to me that it might also benefit from a similar corporate structure.

To any movie-loving, Internet geek who is also interested in nonprofits, it's natural to wish that Guidestar would be more like the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Though these two Web sites have very different audiences, their purpose has some similarities and Guidestar could benefit by adopting even more similarities in how they create and share information.

First, a bit of my history. In the early 1990s I was an eager Internet pioneer. After using CompuServe in the late 1980s (and getting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to list a small number of products on the CompuServe "Electronic Mall" in 1987-88), I was an early subscriber to The Pipeline, a text-based Internet service in New York City (founded by author James Gleick). I also subscribed to Wired Magazine (which started publishing in 1993) and would eagerly look forward to its "Net Surf" column which would list two pages of finds on the Internet including news groups, public information, and ftp sites. These resources would occasionally give up their secrets to my inexpert explorations.

A few years later, the World Wide Web and Netscape's browser changed the way we used the Internet. One of the first useful sites I found was the Cardiff Internet Movie Database, which was based at a university in Wales. From what I have since learned, the IMDB grew out the activities of an Usenet newsgroup and a number of lists assembled by users. Like many community sites celebrated today (e.g. the online encyclopedia wikipedia.org) IMDB was created by the collaboration of movie fans from around the world. Discovering and using it led me to a few insights. One, my wife and I would not have to buy copies of the annual encyclopedias of movies (or the Microsoft Cinemania CD-ROM) in order to plan our video rentals or efforts to watch the work of a particular director or actor. Two, I learned about the power of the Web to allow disparate people to contribute to a common collection and create a resource valuable to thousands more. I remember using IMDB as a practical, understandable example to explain the usefulness of the Internet and the Web.

In 1994 Philanthropic Research, Inc. was founded and shortly thereafter began to do business as "Guidestar." The mission of the nonprofit is "to revolutionize philanthropy and nonprofit practice with information." Its Web site also notes: "GuideStar was created to support charitable entities through the free flow of information in a public forum, to enable supporters and nonprofit managers to research and benchmark organizations' missions, programs, and performance." [Guidestar FAQ.]

Though Guidestar allows nonprofits to register and post information about their mission, governing boards, goals and accomplishments, I see it primarily as a powerful front end for the IRS 990 tax returns of the nation's nonprofit organizations and foundations. The 990 form is the only public form that is required of all nonprofits (with budgets greater than $25,000 and excepting some religious institutions) so it is valuable for anyone trying to learn about individual organizations or compare a number of them.

On first glance, the similarity of Guidestar, which chronicles American nonprofit organizations, and IMDB, which chronicles movies worldwide, might not be obvious. On the other hand, both aim to present a collection of information about one set of entities that have many "moving parts." From my use of both sites, and my participation as an active nonprofit executive and user of the Internet I propose that Guidestar could make its offerings more effective by being more like the IMDB. Following are areas where Guidestar could make the biggest improvements.

Open the Database to the Web

Guidestar should make its basic pages of information open to all visitors, without registration. It should also open these pages to search engines and their "spiders." The result of this would be that more information on nonprofits would be available to more people, and combined with the point on community participation, Guidestar could become the definitive source for nonprofit information. For example, if I wrote a story or a blog posting about the American Red Cross or Sequoia Community Initiatives I could link to the organizations' pages on Guidestar. IMDB follows this practice. Its entries on movies, actors, directors, etc. are open to all visitors and Web spiders. As a result, when people write about movies they include a link to the IMDB entry for related information. And because the information is open to search engines, when people use Web search engines to search for movies they get IMDB information at the top of the results. You can see from the results below what a difference this open access makes to the availability of information on search engines.

Where does the site appear in a Google search for material it covers?

We chose a set of topics we expected the IMDB and Guidestar to be able to provide information on and conducted the searches on Google. Below are listed the rankings of the site in question for each search topic.

Search for top five movies on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Greatest Films.

Search for top five nonprofits in the Chronicle of Philanthropy annual Philanthropy 400 survey, October 2006

[Note: In order to provide links to the Guidestar pages for the sites listed above, I had to use JustGive.org, one of partner sites that uses Guidestar's information. If I linked to the Guidestar page and you were not a member who was logged in, you'd get a login page and no information. Here's the Guidestar link for United Way of America. By coincidence, the one organization that has a good result in the Google search, the AmeriCares Foundation, shows up there with a JustGive link. It's a small demonstration of the usefulness of an open database.]

The comparison of these two sets of searches makes clear the advantages that Guidestar could gain if its information were widely available. Today, the likelihood that a searcher at Google will find a Guidestar listing is pretty slim. On the other hand, a Google searcher will almost always find the IMDB page for a movie in the first 5 listings. (It's clear that the newest movie in our first search is more than 35 years old. To see if the IMDB position held for most recent movies, we searched for the top five movies by sales for the most recent weekend, 1-3 June 2007. IMDB was found on the 3rd listing for three of the top five and on the 4th listing for the other two. See below.)

Relax the Login Restrictions

Currently, a visitor to Guidestar cannot get any specific information about a nonprofit organization without registering and logging in. There is no charge for this basic information, and the registration process is not too onerous. On the other hand, it is hard to understand that Guidestar gains more than it loses with this requirement. I have been registered to Guidestar for several years and I do not recall receiving email from them as a result of my registration. I respect this discretion and the respect for my email choices, at the same time I wonder why they require my registration when they seem to do so little with it?

I propose that Guidestar make its basic information available to all visitors (people and machines, as mentioned above) without a registration requirement. See the IMDB and how much it offers to any visitor. Guidestar can then continue to require registration for its higher levels of membership, and also for the participation I describe in the next section.

Invite Community Contributions

As a movie fan living in New York City I have had the chance to see lots of films in limited release, old films presented at nonprofit repertory houses, and to attend film festivals hosted by Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tribeca Film Festival. As an amateur of film I have found some errors and missing information on the IMDB and I have submitted corrections. Those items are now part of the site and available to all who visit. Guidestar should do the same and allow people add information or comments about a nonprofit. Today it allows only nonprofit representatives to maintain information about their organizations. It could expand the quality and quantity of the information in its listings if they allowed others to post information on the organizations they know. This would have to be administered with some central review, and requirements (for sources) set, but the net effect would be a strong site.

If Guidestar chose to, it could greatly expand the information that its users contribute. For example, it could track grants made by foundations, or accomplishments of organizations in the field. With an more open system, the wisdom of the wider nonprofit community could be tapped.

Consider Selling Out

In 1998 the IMDB was acquired by Amazon.com. In the process, the volunteer-run site became professionalized and people were hired into full-time roles to build and expand the site. Guidestar has been working to build a sustainable organization and shift its funding from contributions to earned income. Its 2006 financial reports [PDF] show that it has made progress in that effort.

Today Guidestar has a professional staff and has established rigorous methods for capturing information from the Internal Revenue Service and making it useful for specialized audiences. With more financial support and a new approach to making its information accessible, it could become the essential hub for things nonprofit. If it does not take a number of these suggested steps it may find itself left behind as the availability of digital tax filing information grows.

Take the opportunity, Google, to acquire a valuable operation collecting and making information available. Open it up to the world and expand the usefulness and reach of that information. Or, Yahoo, build on the database and establish nonprofit communities around the Guidestar core. Or, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, acquire this resource and build a giving platform around it. This is underexploited asset, a gem waiting to be uncovered. Open it up and build on it now when both the need for effective nonprofits and the growing possibilities for charitable giving are so strong.

Congratulations to Fast Company Magazine and consulting firm the Monitor Group for expanding the number of organizations they recognize as winners of the 2007 Social Capitalist Awards. Last year I complained that by naming only 10 or 15 organizations and allowing them to repeat they limited our exposure to terrific organizations doing good work.

This year there are 43 winners. All of last years winners are included again, but a solid group of new organizations are added, including Civic Ventures and DonorsChoose, two of my favorites. Here are the profiles (with links to make a contribution) of all 43 winners.

ACCION International (4-time winner)
A Fighting Chance
Aspire Public Schools
BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) (2-time winner)
Calvert Social Investment Foundation (2-time winner)
Ceres Citizen Schools (3-time winner)
City Year (4-time winner)
Civic Builders
Civic Ventures
College Summit (4-time winner)
Corporation for Supportive Housing
DonorsChoose
EcoLogic Finance
Endeavor Global
First Book (4-time winner)
Global Fund for Women
Grameen Foundation (3-time winner)
Hands On Network Heifer International (2-time winner)
Housing Partnership Network (3-time winner)
Jumpstart (4-time winner)
KickStart (2-time winner)
New Community Corp (2-time winner)
New Leaders for New Schools (4-time winner)
Nonprofit Finance Fund PATH (4-time winner)
PeaceWorks Foundation
Pioneer Human Services (2-time winner)
Population Services International
Raising a Reader (2-time winner)
Rare (3-time winner)
Room to Read (4-time winner)
Rubicon Programs Inc. (4-time winner)
Scojo Foundation
SEED Foundation
Springboard Forward
Teach for America (2-time winner)
TransFair USA (3-time winner)
Unitus (2-time winner)
WITNESS (4-time winner)
Working Today (3-time winner)
Year Up

The New York City-based Acumen Fund is seeking applicants for its second group of Acumen Fund Fellows. Applications for the year-long program are due by 31 January 2007.

In an email announcement, Acumen Fund Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz wrote:

While capital is a constraint to building systems to make critical goods and services accessible to the poor, an even larger constraint is people. The world needs to build an "entrepreneurial bench" of top talent with strong financial and operational skills as well as the moral imagination to build appropriate enterprises with local stakeholders.

The program begins in September 2007, and fellows will spend eight weeks in New York City in an intensive training program where they focus on business models for the poor and their own leadership – both theoretical and practical. At the end of the training, each fellow will be assigned to work with an Acumen Fund investment in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, India or Pakistan, and given a concrete set of deliverables for the following nine months. After these assignments, fellows return to New York for a month to share experiences, exchange lessons learned, and focus on potential job opportunities.

The Acumen Fund seeks "individuals with exceptional business skills, proven international interests and a great ability to work with people." They add that fellows must "have the talent to do almost anything in their careers, and the vision to see themselves making significant change to challenging social problems." For more information and to apply, see the Acumen Fund Web site (and its many PDF files).

Are you frustrated with links to the New York Times that expire when they are moved into the archive? There is a way around this that I have been using for the last few years. This past week I told two savvy nonprofit Web users about it. Both were pleased to learn.

To create a New York Times link that will not expire, visit the New York Times Link Generator (presented by Reddit). Follow its directions and place the link it creates into your postings. (I have some links on this site that have remained active for more than two years. On this article I posted in April 2004, the link still works.)

The link generator page listed above links to a Dave Winer page that provides some explanation for why the NYT would allow links into its archive. It looks like Dave used his role in developing and hosting early RSS feeds to get the arrangement. Let's hope it continues to work.

P.S. Sometimes the link generator does not work. I have found that if you tack "&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss" to the end of the article URL it will often work.

My week has been marked by two looks at entrepreneurship -- one for those in later life, the other for those under 25.

Later Life Entrepreneurship
On Monday I attended the "Later Life Entrepreneurship Conference," sponsored by AARP and UJA Federation of New York, and hosted by the Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business. The small meeting brought together experts on aging and entrepreneurship to explore how the topic might best be studied. [Read more.]

Best Entrepreneurs Under 25
BusinessWeek Magazine ran a 30 October 2006 special report on the Best Entrepreneurs Under 25. Included are two recent Pace University graduates, Vitaly Feldman and Alexander Koretsky, who launched Metrohorse in June 2006. Metrohorse provides a marketplace for business and personal services where buyers and sellers can meet to do business with minimal hassles.