The Realist Idealist

A colleague just introduced me to BrightKite.com and as I’ve been playing with it all I can think of are the nearly infinite possibilties for it.
First and foremost the service is going to need to be integrated with others so that it doesn’t exist in a vaccum. Don’t know if they plan an API [...]

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One of my favorite organizations of the last six months is Avaaz.org - who I learned of through one of their staff, Ben Wikler, based here in DC.  They are essentially the MoveOn.org for international issues.
So far this week Avaaz has amassed over 450,000 signatures in a petition to Chinese president Hu Jintao that [...]

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The more you dig into the actions of the Chinese against Tibet, the more cold and systematic their cultural genocide begins to appear.  Indeed “cold and systematic” is exactly what genocide is in the first place.  (Just ask the Rwandans whose recognized genocide took place in 1994, but which had indicators and events happening as [...]

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Last year I spent several weeks in Northern Uganda, Rwanda, and Eastern Congo - all bordering each other, and all three having been ravaged by genocide in recent years. In the case of Eastern Congo, the conflict is ongoing. I sent letters and wrote a few short pieces about my time there.
To be [...]

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My great friend Marissa and I were talking on Wednesday about how actually accomplishing many of the best things we want to see in the world will probably mean a lot of – for lack of a better term – “suckiness” and time to get there.
Earlier in the day I was at an event [...]

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Last week my boss asked me a question for which he claimed there was only one correct answer. No pressure, right? His question was, “is 100 million dollars a lot of money?”
Coming from the executive director of a medium-sized nonprofit (at least medium in budget size), I felt it was a bit of [...]

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