Sparktop

» see sparktop.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In October 2003 I was nineteen and a couple of years into an engineering degree. Sparktop was built for eight-year-olds in American schools, so the games are not the part of it I can speak to. What I can read is the balance sheet behind it, and the balance sheet is the interesting half anyway.

It went up that month, made by the Schwab Learning unit of the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation. Charles Schwab, whose name is on a very large brokerage, is dyslexic and did not read comfortably until well into adulthood. The site existed because of that, aimed squarely at children between eight and twelve with dyslexia or ADHD, and it was free with registration optional. What was on it was mostly games, plus advice from mentors and specialists that had all been read by a human before it went live.

It worked, in the sense that things aimed at children rarely do. By October 2007 it had drawn four million visits from more than 140 countries, which for a nonprofit site with no advertising budget and no franchise attached to it is a genuine number.

That same month the foundation announced it was getting out of the business of running websites. The new model was grants: give the money to organizations already doing the work instead of operating the work yourself. In December 2007 the Professor Garfield Foundation, which belongs to Jim Davis, the cartoonist who draws the cat, announced it would take Sparktop over. By 2008 the site was being kept alive by a team of five contractors.

It ran another six years like that. On 28 March 2014 the front page was replaced by a note pointing visitors at the Professor Garfield site, where most of the material continued in some form. Sparktop stopped being a place and became a section of somebody else's place, which is the softest of the deaths recorded here and still a death.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who it was actually for ~

Most of the web built for children in that decade was built for a brand. Cereal companies and movie studios had both worked out that a website full of small games was a cheap way to hold a child's attention for twenty minutes, and the games were the container the marketing arrived in. Sparktop had none of that. Nothing on it was selling anything.

What it was doing instead was telling a specific child that the thing making school miserable for them had a name and a lot of company, and that it did not describe the ceiling on what they could do. The founder's own biography was the argument. That is a hard proposition to fund because there is no revenue at the end of it, only a foundation deciding each year to keep paying.

~ the handover to garfield ~

The transfer in December 2007 looks odd written down. A brokerage billionaire's education charity gives its flagship site to a foundation owned by the man who draws Garfield. It makes complete sense in context: the Professor Garfield Foundation was built around literacy and reading for children, using a character every eight-year-old in America already recognized, which is exactly the distribution Sparktop did not have.

What it did not come with was the original endowment. A site handed to a smaller organization gets maintained rather than developed, and five contractors reviewing every upload is a maintenance posture. The six years between the handover and the shutdown were the site running on inertia, still useful, no longer growing.

~ what a foundation website is ~

Commercial sites die when the money stops arriving from customers. Foundation sites die when a board changes its mind about strategy, and that decision has nothing to do with whether the site is working. Sparktop was at four million visits when the foundation decided its model should be grantmaking instead of operating. Both statements were true in the same month.

This is the thing to know about any free resource carrying a philanthropic name. There is no user number that protects it, because you were never the one paying. The strategy document is upstream of everything you can see, and you will find out what it said about a year after it was written.

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