Brad Rourke’s Blog
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Choosing Between The Inbox And The Stream
Like it or not, the stream has entered the workplace. While this may fill some with anxiety, and others with derision, on balance it is a good thing. Since its use exploded in the late 1990’s, the email Inbox had dominated and controlled most professional people’s lives. It is a never-ending to-do list, created by…
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Do Nothing
I’ve been posting to this blog daily for some time now. I am doing it to keep a rhythm, but sometimes it’s rough finding material. Yesterday I saw a perfect item for days when the Muse isn’t striking. It’s from Seth Godin: I had, as I do every year, [an April Fool’s] post written and…
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The Downturn Hits Nonprofit Fundraising
As my friends know, I only work with organizations that hold a public trust — typically non profit organizations. Many colleagues have been talking to me about how concerned they are about the latest downturn. The Chronicle of Philanthropy is reporting on one of the more solid pieces of evidence that the economic downturn is…
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What Theater Can Teach Us About Interactive Meetings
I enjoyed linking in to President Obama’s “Open For Questions” online town hall last Thursday. The format has much to recommend it, especially the fact that over 100,000 people cast over 3.5 million votes to pick the most relevant and useful questions. But, as I outline in this boring video, my immediate reaction was that…
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Judged By Mischaracterized Intentions
One of the greatest pathologies of public life today is its pervasive gang mentality. We are constantly labeled by others — and at the same time do that very same labeling. By our actions, we divide ourselves up into tribes, Us and Them. It’s our hatred of Them that continually leaves us far, far short of…
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The New Anti-Panopticon
My friend Lars Hasselblad Torres (who may have the coolest name I know) pointed out a really fascinating project. It’s “The Intellectuals Circle” — a circular bench designed to encourage “a clear form of verbal communication without visual cues or theatrics between participants.” As it has been a long time since I’ve been a to…
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Using New, Widely Available Tools At The White House
The White House is experimenting with using a freely-available, “crowd-sourced” tool as part of the backend to the “electronic town hall” it announced earlier this week. You can go here to see it in action. The Town Hall is set for this morning. Here’s the White House blog post about it. The system is using…
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White House Meeting On Transparency
As some of my readers know, I am a peripheral part of the NCDD network. That’s the National Coaltion for Dialogue and Deliberation, a network run by Sandy Heierbacher. Sandy is one of the most impressive civic entrepreneurs I know, having bootstrapped NCDD into the pre-eminent collection of people doing work in this “field.” Sandy…
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Our Nation's Uncomfortable History With Race
As many of my readers know, I write “issue guides” — discussions of difficult public issues designed to elicit small group dialogue. In my work on such guides, sometimes I develop fragments that are useful but just don’t fit into the ultimate publication. I came across an old passage I wrote that outlines our nation’s…
Brad Rourke 