The very word “pandemic” can sow panic, activating dystopian nightmares of mob rule and societal breakdown keyed to cultural memories of movies like Outbreak and 28 Days. As the swine flu epidemic kills scores of people in Mexico and leaps borders and oceans in this modern transcontinental age with alarming ease, it’s tempting to bite [...]

CauseWired readers know that I really like “flash causes,” quick and nearly instant efforts to organize, activate, raise money and gather attention online. So I’m really enjoying the rapid roll-out of a nifty little Thanksgiving campaign on Twitter and the web. The folks at EpicChange.org and my friend Avi Kaplan have launched TweetsGiving, a Twitter-based [...]

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” [...]

Just three weeks ago, social networking gurus Nancy Scola and Allison Fine of techPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum tossed out a big idea: why not use mobile technology and the kind of short-messaging techniques capturing hearts and minds among the digerati to help keep track of irregularities on Election Day. Here’s how they put [...]