Gateway to Gov - Research and Discussion Blog

Starting a non-profit is as hard, if not harder, than starting a for-profit — and for all the financial risk and hard work invested starting a not-for-profit public service organization, very little (if any) chance of a financial return, no less any form of remuneration for the years of effort invested. If I’d only known how difficult it would be to get things started… but I suppose hindsight is 20/20.
Approximately 28 months in now, I know I’ve got a pretty clear picture of the sector - I’ve read about, seen or used a majority of the different e-democracy/online advocacy projects that a variety of different organizations, universities, governments and individuals have undertaken over the past ten years and have had first hand exposure to nearly every US-based effort undertaken in the past three years. I’ve read hundreds if not thousands of pages of papers, reports, proposals, studies and various other publications… and attended dozens of conferences, meetings, workshops, un-conferences, camps and every other variation of gathering one can imagine, meeting literally hundreds of people along the way, many dozen of which I can see significant potential for collaboration with, and several I’m actively engaging with, working together, trying to find a way forward -

Thats all well and good -  and while I’ve cross-pollinated many ideas along the way (like a bee to flowers?) I have yet to make any direct, substantiative, developments on the core proposal(s) Gateway has been putting forward …and grow increasingly fatigued at the prospect of writing/refining yet another grant proposal. Fundraising is, apparently, not my forte.

Many potential funders (read: dozens of program managers / foundation execs),  while intrigued enough to spend 60-90-120 minutes on the phone, apparently didn’t hear the secret-passphrase or such… and in the end, our project, while intriguing, was deemed to fall outside their core funding area… or they really wanted to “wait and see”.

Well, risk-adversity and angel/seed investment might not be the best bedfellows — and quite frankly, I sometimes I wonder if everyone wouldn’t have benefited more if I’d played the for-profit tech-startup-lottery (making the next eBay or such) potentially putting myself in the position to *be* the funder for projects like ours, as opposed to wasting countless hours asking other people to fund what I could have funded myself if I hadn’t put countless hours into asking other people for funding! Argh. Anyhow, sorry about that - needed to get some steam off my chest.

Well, this blog post is starting to get quite lengthy… thanks for reading and I’ll be back with more *positive* blog posts soon. Best to all -