The Realist Idealist

And maybe sooner than we think.
Just about the time the entire world is starting to get access, the internet could possibly be made obsolete by a new “grid” system which is 10,000 times faster than broadband connections.
The Telegraph reported this morning on the new network designed by scientists in Switzerland.
Without an equivalent TCP/IP system for [...]

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My programmatic highlight of SXSW Interactive a few weeks ago, by far, was the keynote address given by Jane McGonigal - a noted game designer and games researcher, specializing in pervasive games and alternate reality games.
In all honesty, before the speech, I wasn’t in any way interested in games or what Jane had to say. [...]

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http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
As we all know Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So in true realist-idealist fashion Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first [...]

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I am a Flickr addict. It’s no secret. And I have no shame in proclaiming it.
I’ve been known to spend hours on end, mouth agape, staring at some of the amazing work people around the world are able to capture and share with each other. This is one of my favorite contacts. [...]

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Sitting here in Red Rock coffee shop in downtown Mountain View, CA - the fabled home to tech giants like Google and innumerable startups - you can almost feel the innovation pulsing through your veins. It permeates the air. You suck it in with every breath.  Like politics in DC.
I’m in a chair [...]

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Mashups make great sense when it comes to getting things done. I mean, why build it when you can mash it? Nonprofits, however, have mostly been slow to jump in the mashable fun.
As a meeting I was at recently of foundations at the Aspen Institute suggested, the majority of nonprofs are still asking questions [...]

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At the end of the day, fundraising is the engine that drives the nonprofit sector. In general, if you’re running any organization - for-profit or non - and you’re not thinking about money, you’re wrong. With the overwhelmingly vast majority of nonprofits, if you’re not thinking about fundraising, you’re wrong.

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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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I’m a cyclist.
Stick with me here; this is relevant.
One of the things I’ve always loved about cycling is that if you care enough about the sport you can have access to the exact same equipment or tools that the best riders in the world use. That is to say, I can [...]

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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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