Brad Rourke

Brad Rourke’s Blog

  • Thematic Taxonomy Of Social Media Tools

    At the No Better Time conference, my friend Joe Peters and I will be running a session called “Tech Savvy Citizenry.” That could mean a lot of things, but for us it means we are going to talk about different ways of using social media to engage the public. One thing we’ll be doing is…

  • People Care About What Touches Them

    Yesterday Michael Jackson was buried. I have a terrible confession to make: the hoopla around dead celebrities has always left me cold. Perhaps it is my cranky and contrarian nature, I don’t know. But I find myself muttering inwardly, “What did he ever do, really?” Even the great icons – I’ve always thought that, when…

  • What Gibbs Could Have Said: Humility and Openness

    Here’s an interesting exchange yesterday between reporters (primarily Chip Reid of CBS) and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: The reporters are complaining that in the upcoming White House “town hall” in Annandale, VA, the questions and audience seem too-tightly controlled. They’re frankly up in arms over it, and they do have a point: The…

  • Against "Scale"

    The White House announced yesterday that the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation “would fan out to every region in the country” (according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy) to search for worthy recipients of the $50 million social innovation fund created by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The idea is to find…

  • Leaving Time For Yourself

    The hand wringing, eyebrow-raising, and joke-making over Mark Sanford’s trip to Argentina is beginning to run its course. Having read the emails between him and the Other Woman, it’s hard to mark this one down as just venal corruption and hypocrisy. The whole episode clearly filled Sanford and his love with anguish — moral anguish.…

  • Kids These Days: In Praise Of Trivia

    I had a fascinating conversation with a young person and it gave me a new insight into how different people use social media. Like a lot of young people, her Facebook stream has its fair share of adults mixed in. There’s her parents, and some of her parents’ friends, and other relatives.All jumbled up. She…

  • Yes You Can Destroy Your Organization Responsibly

    As many of my readers and friends know, I am a firm believer that not all organizations need to exist in perpetuity. Especially in the community benefit sector, my feeling is that most organizations would do well to plan to close their doors in fifteen years from inception. Even if you aren’t planning to close…