Brad Rourke

Brad Rourke’s Blog

  • 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…

  • How Blob Marketing Works

    I’ve been fiddling around with social media for a while now. Long before that, I was active online. I had a blog before the word was invented. And I promoted that blog (it was an occasional column about California politics I called Content) through a simple email list that I grew to a couple hundred…

  • Iranians' Success Against Censors Shows Need For "Capacity Building"

    The turmoil in Iran and the efforts of the nation’s citizens to overcome government censorship provide a good argument for why it is important to build capacity in communities. Since at least 2004, Iran has been censoring social networking sites. So, according to this New York Times article, people have had about five years to…

  • My New Facebook Public Profile

    I’ve been dithering about this for months now, even though my friend Angelique has been telling me I need to do it. But I finally went ahead and created a “public profile” on Facebook. The difference between that and just a regular profile is that anyone can “become a fan” of my public profile, while…