In its early years, the Clinton Global Initiative often seemed to present a kind of Democratic administration in exile – a gentle yet important correction to the Bush White House. The former President acted as a dealmaker supreme, bringing together big corporate interests, major philanthropists, heads of state and their governments, and global nonprofits in [...]

On Sunday night, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network will be one of the two or three betting favorites for the year’s best picture at the annual Academy Awards extravaganza in Hollywood. The film tells the (largely fictionalized) early story of Facebook, wrapped in the coming-of-age tale of founder Mark Zuckerberg and the compromises he chose [...]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is calling on President Barack Obama to resign. But I’ve got a better idea. It’s time for Assange himself to go. After all, if he truly believed in the original mission of the controversial site, he’d remove himself from the glare of international attention and let the clear light of day [...]

Putting the imperative issue of civil rights and justice around the world for women and children front and center at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative required intense coordination between CGI and the Obama Administration – starting of course with the world’s foremost power couple. But it also relied on some special sauce that was both [...]

President Barack Obama brought a strong message to the audience of a thousand heads of state, diplomates, CEOs, major philanthropists, and movie stars at the Clinton Global Initiative this evening:  “Real progress doesn’t just come from the top down – not just from govt – it comes from the bottom up, from real people.” Kicking [...]

Last month around the inauguration of President Obama – and the day of the service centered on the celebration of Dr. King’s life  -  there was a ton of focus on creating a lasting online movement for citizen-powered change. As the economic crisis deepens and the new Administration deals with that challenge on a day-to-day [...]

The accepted storyline on President Obama’s souped-up hot rod of a super-secure executive branch Blackberry runs like this: Presidents too often exist in a bubble, insulated from real people and the world outside the sturdy White House gates. There’s some truth to that, of course, but much of that isolation has tended to be self-inflicted [...]

Blog for Change » Presenting the Winning Ideas for Change in America Josh Levy: “With almost 8,000 ideas, more than 600,000 votes, and more than 175,000 participants, the Ideas for Change initiative has shown the widespread interest across the country in renewed civic participation and direct engagement in policymaking.” (tags: obama socialmedia change.org) techPresident – [...]

As Craig Newmark notes in an article on Huffington Post, President-elect Barack Obama ran on a platform that included a call for a national “craigslist for service.” But as Newmark writes, he’d like craigslist itself used “only a metaphorical reference to the need for greater service to others, with the spirit and culture of trust [...]

Understandably, there’s been a lot of discussion in the last two weeks about the future of the powerful Obama Internet operation. Does the vast, empowered constituency serve as a virtual public advocacy campaign for Obama policy initiatives? Does it work toward the mid-terms in 2010? Re-election in 2012? Or does it inspire a “flash cause” [...]

If President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team are looking for a model that uses the power of social networks and citizen democracy to open up government, they ought to bring their own homepage – Change.gov – and replace the g-o-v with a little o-r-g. Online social activism portal Change.org, whose origins predate (by just [...]

BBC blogger Bill Thompson included CauseWired in his election night post last week, and his point about over-hyping the “first real Internet election” is a very good one. After, ask yourself what the candidates spent the most money on. Answer: television advertising, with staffing a distant second. Writes Thompson: If anything, the election has shown [...]

[Cross-posted from onPhilanthropy.com] In a victory that holds deep lessons for how nonprofit organizations and cause-driven ventures will organize volunteers and build support in the future, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States Tuesday in a near-landslide victory keyed by state-of-the-art social networking and online organizing. The story of the Obama triumph is [...]

By this time tomorrow, the United States will likely have a new President-elect – and just as likely, he will be the product of the most socially-wired campaign in American history. Maintaining tight message control at the top while freeing up supporters to create their own media, their own campaigns, their own constituencies has paid [...]

I’ve been thinking about this since the Republican convention a month ago: isn’t the CauseWired movement the virtual empowerment of thousands – and potentially millions – of community organizers, that class of do-gooders so derided by the GOP nominees in Minneapolis? Sure, I know their derision was about knocking down a portion of Barack Obama’s [...]