Foundation and Competition

The nature of a non-profit is much like a for profit in many ways, and the Encyclopedia Foundation is no exception. Business plans and budgets are as needful for either. And non-profits – like for profits – actually compete. Sounds funny, but they do. Same as churches, though that sounds even funnier.

But consider. Each person only has so much money. Much will be spent on living expenses, some on luxuries, and if the person is blessed, some will be available for doing charitable works. There are tens of thousands of charitable non-profits though, and he can’t give to them all. So non-profits (and churches) try to market themselves.

For a non-profit, this would be the claim that your charitable dollar goes further with them then other charities. Or perhaps they are filling a specific niche you like that others aren’t. Donating to the Red Cross might be good if you value reliability, but if you value some unusual charity like “blankets for handicapped puppies” you’ll have to look further!

Churches must be competitive, too. One of the nice evolutions of Christian thought since the founding of the United States is simply this – they are nicer. When churches were a single unified whole, and attendance was law, they were very harsh in the message. But when freedom of religion was established, and people only came to your church if they wanted to, you had to stop with the scary talk of hell for unbaptized babies, and start with what had been the original peace and light message. It made them better. Competition usually does.

What of the Encyclopedia Foundation? Well, we’re different than other foundations. And other charities. And churches and businesses.

You see, in our business plan, we specifically do not worry about competition. In fact, we actively wish it. We are a Foundation in which the more “competition” we have, the happier we are. We want our ideas taken and used by others, whether they credit us or not. We want our plans for the preservation of knowledge to be looked over by others, and put to those people’s use. We want tons of competitors, each of them looking over our shoulder to learn the best ways to preserve books.

We want them all to “steal” our hard won knowledge, we want them to make use of all of our efforts, to do their own book preserving projects!

Our ideal dream would be that some rich celebrity gets behind this cause, but either doesn’t hear of us, or doesn’t care, and makes it his or her own. And goes on television telling everyone exactly how to preserve knowledge for ten thousand years! And, taking all the credit, starts a movement in which metal disc books are hid in safe rooms and vaults in at least 75% of the houses in America!

Are we crazy? No. It’s just that the point of the Encyclopedia Foundation is not to “make money” like a for profit, or even to “get a larger portion of the charitable donations available” like a regular non-profit. The goal is to preserve knowledge, and the more people doing that, the more likely it is that at least one of them will succeed.

Don’t misunderstand, we are as human as anyone. Given a choice between “knowledge preserved with people knowing it was us” versus “knowledge preserved because some B-list starlet claimed our idea as hers” I suppose that we’d prefer people know it was us. Kind of. Probably not as much as you think. For unlike that hypothetical B-list celeb, we know something she would not. “Sic transit Gloria mundi”, or “this earthly glory is fleeting”.

No one cares who thought of what. That it’s thought and done is all that counts. “The deed is everything, the glory is naught” said Goethe. And what if in 200 years, due solely to the idea of preserving knowledge, that the B-list celebs name was known instead of ours? It wouldn’t matter. It would only be a name. They would no more “know” her – or us – than you “know” any name from the past. You know a name, you never know the person.

Ever hear of “Sargon”? Sure. And you might – if you were pretty well educated – rattle off some data. But do you “know” him? And does your knowledge or lack of knowledge of him in any way change that he’s dead?

If you don’t understand that, don’t worry, it’s not that important, but the point is that we understand it. The deed is everything. The point is to have the knowledge last ten thousand years – and in our very business plan we state that if someone is inspired by us to do that, then we count that as a win! And we do. We also are the first to point out that it isn’t actually our idea, anyway. The late great Dr. Isaac Asimov dreamt it up for a fiction book! And others before him had the idea – such as anyone who ever helped on the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt!

We don’t even claim that we are unique in welcoming competition. There are other long range Foundations (notably “The Long Now”) that are thinking in terms of ten thousand years, and we are very, very glad of that. At least when we have an abundance of metal discs we can send some to them. That way even if we don’t succeed, they might, and their success will be our success, too!

The Encyclopedia Foundation welcomes competition, and hopes that any who wish to do exactly as we are doing contact us. We will be happy to tell you how. It will take you a lot of good hard work, that will never end in your lifetime or your great-grandchildren’s lifetime, and that you will probably never be recognized for. But you will know it is worth it. Those who know and love you will know it is worth it.

And if the knowledge is one day needed, those you save in some distant future will know it was worth it.

“The deed is everything…”