You have to admire the ideals of Chris Hughes, the young co-founder of Facebook and one of the key strategists behind President Obama’s successful 2008 campaign online. Hughes is the founder of Jumo, a new online community that aims to connect people with causes and nonprofit organizations. “The more connected that individual is to an [...]

More than a decade ago, when I first began to consider how great causes might be integrated into the wildly-expanding but still new commercial Internet, the big dream among marketers was contextualization. Surf “content” about, say, the New York Mets and you’d be offered “advertising” to buy tickets or gear. It was all very new [...]

Tomorrow, I’m hosting a small working lunch at Changing Our World for Social Actions, the terrific online social venture that sometimes asks me for advice. We’ll have folks from Meetup, Avaav.org, Change.org, DonorsChoose, Idealist, ModestNeeds and other organizations – kicked off with a presentation by Peter Deitz and Christine Egger from Social Actions. I’m really [...]

Congrats to the Social Actions team on the launch of their new widget, which recommends ways to take action on behalf of causes related to the content of any web page. Tailor-made for blogs (and I’m going to experiment with it myself), the widget is powered by the new Social Actions open API – so [...]

The book’s title has one thing going for it – it tends to make people curious. “CauseWired, eh?” they’ll say, perhaps rubbing a chin or two. “What’s it about?” The easy answer is “the rise of online social activism,” but that’s too short for anything but the quickest of elevator rides. So I thought I’d [...]

Plug-ins and widgets get released every day on the social web, but I think Friday’s release of the new Social Actions DonorsChoose plug-in for WordPress is an important milestone in peer-to-peer online social activism. For one, it’s a big step forward in the sharing of both data and opportunity in what I firmly believe is [...]

The industrious team over at Social Actions – that would be founder Peter Deitz and new arrival Joe Solomon – has created a wiki to collect ideas around what applications, mash-ups, and tools to build using the Social Actions API, which aggregates giving and volunteering opportunities from 19 different online activism platforms, including Kiva, DonorsChoose, [...]

We’re rolling out CauseWired in panel discussion form at the fifth annual Summit onPhilanthropy in New York on Tuesday. Joining me to discuss the topic (what else?) “CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World” will be an all-star group of social media activism experts. Dig this lineup: Micah Sifry, Co-founder & Editor, Personal Democracy [...]