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 [...]

The timing seems right. In the midst of the deepest American recession since the Great Depression, peer-to-peer microlending pioneer Kiva.org has opened the doors to its long-planned domestic lending program – connecting its network of lenders to small businesses like Enrique, a New York cobbler seeking a $5,000 loan for leather, rubber soles and general [...]

Okay, so it’s not formally a guest post per se – but we think this section of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech to gradautes of Barnard College yesterday touches as much of a ‘CauseWired’ chord as any talk by a major political figure of late: Some months ago here in New York, I had [...]

Next week, I’ll be hosting a panel discussion at the Skoll World Forum at Oxford University that takes its title from one of my favorite John Lennon songs: Power to the People. The discussion will center around online social activism and peer-to-peer philanthropy via networks, and it features a great line-up of social entrepreneurs who [...]

onPhilanthropy: Articles: In Tough Times, It's Time to Step Up Susan Carey Dempsey: "A hopeful sign for philanthropy is that those who are making the biggest mark in the field are using their recognition to encourage others to follow suit. And it couldn’t come at a better time. With markets gyrating, companies disappearing, and wealth [...]

Photo by Maneno.org Spot.us, a new platform for community funded journalism, officially launched this week! Spot.us enables the “public to commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories.” It’s a great idea with an awesome and well though-out execution. Spot.us is also the first open-source action platform, which may enable others to [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

One trend I’ve noted of late is the extent to which social causes tend to figure in forward-looking media technology developments. Take Australian tech writer Nick Galvin’s year-opening top 10 list of “things that will change your future” – two of the 10 are explicitly social causes, Kiva and Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child [...]

The Bergen Record has a big piece on online microfinance today, with a strong focus on Kiva. Nothing new there – Kiva’s press has been brilliant for a year and I’ve contributed to that trend myself -  but I liked the focus on young professionals. Those of us with more years under our widening belts [...]