I'm confused by this article. The whole thing is positioned like they are blowing the whistle on some scandal, but what scandal? That a public figure donating a large sum of money wants to make sure it brings some good PR? Is that a surprise?<p>Or that the money was donated with specific uses already in mind? Shouldn't someone who donates that much money be allowed to condition it on the changes they'd like to see made? If you don't like their ideas, don't take the money.<p>Or is it that the bulk of it is to pay teachers bonuses? That sounds like a good thing?<p>Seems like sensationalization of a non-issue
What a terrible guy Zuckerberg is. He donates 100M to charity. Then he makes a lot of effort trying to get a platform to incentivate others to donate. Finally he convinces other millionaires to donate money and worst of all he tries to push them into donating more. What an awful guy..
There is no story here. They donated money and had it run through PR to get the right amount of public impact, like anyone would do with that amount of money.
Amazingly Zuckerberg has people that manage his PR and so on, and they've worked to make him look as good as possible. What a surprise.<p>I imagine even Gates has people who do things like this even though he's effectively retired now. Doesn't matter if there's a PR spin on it, $100m was donated.
New link: <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3004509/how-100-million-really-gets-donated-mark-zuckerberg-style" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcompany.com/3004509/how-100-million-really-ge...</a>
Innovation is a really scary thing for public agencies. Democracies and public bureaucracies are set up specifically to mitigate risk. Yet risk is an essential factor in the success of innovative companies, many of which are now all dealing with gov't regulations and bureaucracies (think Uber or Airbnb). Here's how New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg put it in the Aug. 2011 issue of Fast Company:<p>"The public," Bloomberg says, "insists, and arguably has a right to insist, that it knows where its money's going. [They] have a very high expectation of results." He is talking about how the government spends its funds. "That is not the way innovation works. Innovation--the essence of innovation--is you don't know what you're going to build, what it's going to be called, how much it's going to cost. You cannot use public monies unless you can answer virtually every one of those questions, which is why government tends not to innovate. The public wants that accountability in advance, that justification in advance. But that's not going to work for certain things."
Question for Americans: why did Mark choose Newark for this charity money? Is it because Mark grew up there, or is it in a very sorry state compared to the rest of the country, or..?
Has anyone found a link to the raw transcript? The editorializing here seems rather pandering, but It would be interesting to read what actually went down.