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 [...]

[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 [...]

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 [...]

The question for philanthropy says former President Bill Clinton, is whether “people give more or less” during the unfolding American financial crisis. “I think there’s at least a 50-percent chance they’ll give more,” he told a small group of bloggers Monday night during a meeting in his suite at the Sheraton New York, site this [...]

When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President on Thursday night, he capped a long and inspiring campaign that set records for fundraising and personal involvement – and he also put the exclamation point on the first national campaign where the winner was determined online. The numbers simply don’t lie – by any of [...]

When 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan died on Dec. 20th while awaiting a liver transplant her insurance company refused to pay for until it was too late, her case moved beyond one family’s desperate struggle to save a young life and become a cause for thousands of people who discovered her case on the Internet – on [...]