New causes run on borrowed credibility- from advisors, endorsers, funders, alma maters, or partners. What orgs/teams/inititiatives/individuals lack in a specific track record, they make up for through association. That's normal and mostly fine.
What's the failure mode of excessive signaling without work to back it up? Legitimacy is cheap to imply and expensive to verify. Over the past year, we've noticed this trend a lot. A new initiative featuring partners of partners on their landing page, or casually mentioning the names of influential orgs as endorsers (when in reality they've sent a cold email), or name-dropping experts in the cause without permission, using ambiguous language.
Eventually, the initiative/persons responsible for it start believing their own misleading narrative. And this bleeds into outreach and activities. So we get a programs page built from introductory calls, listing orgs/people who would be surprised to learn they advise/recognize anything formally.
When this kind of signaling gets too loud, people who are new to the region/context/space have no choice but to encounter it the first time they search something online, and in turn form a view of the entire domain based on that first-touch. Accordingly, the initiative uses unverified association as collateral for the next, and the loop compounds.
Oh, but discourage new initiatives? Because the chance of counterfactual harm to the credibility of an entire ecosystem of work, built over years, is larger than the ego-driven credibility need of an initiative that's operating outside of basic professionalism rules.
This is a boring and cheap thing to fix. Do due diligence, both as a new initiative and as someone talking to a new initiative (whether you're based within or outside India).
More such boring but necessary takes to come in the coming months!
