Gideon Rosenblatt's Blog
Executive Director of ONE/Northwest shares his thoughts on networks, civic engagement, technology and other stuff
Gideon Rosenblatt
Executive Director
Since
joining the organization in early 2001, Gideon has led ONE/Northwest
toward an increased focus on communication and citizen engagement
services and on programs aimed at strengthening cross-organizational
ties within the environmental movement. His Movement as Network paper serves as the framework for much of this latter work.
Before
joining ONE/Northwest, Gideon held a variety of senior management
positions in marketing and product development over ten years at Microsoft.
While there he pioneered some of the company’s earliest work on the
Internet and founded CarPoint, one of Microsoft's most successful
consumer businesses. He received his MBA in marketing from the Wharton School in 1991 after several years doing business consulting in China.
Aggregating Civic Engagement at "The Point"
The Point is a social platform for people to solve problems they can’t solve alone. The service addresses the problem of breaking past various forms of tipping points that can stop people from becoming involved in various forms of civic engagement. I would love to see you implement this in a more distributed way (e.g. like the ChipIn widget) that doesn't tie it so tightly to your website, but makes this cool functionality more widely available in lots of websites and online social networks.
Engagement that Influences Decisions
The purpose of almost all forms of engagement is to influence decisions. Decisions represent a critical moment in time when a person internally commits to a particular course of action. The decision is the lever that, once pulled, sets in motion a chain of activities that get you to your end goal. These decisions are the levers of change. To move them is to move mountains. For when a person commits to something on the inside a powerful shift occurs; one which brings you together working in shared purpose. Wielding that kind of influence is not easy. It requires investment and focus in strengthening an organization’s “engagement capacity.”
“Engagement” – What Is It?
Engagement is the focus of ONE/Northwest's new work. What do we mean by engagement? To engage someone is to attract them, build connection and commitment with them, and facilitate working together with them in shared purpose. It means a balance of relating and doing...
Long Tail meets local in the “Local Tail”
Local information is now discoverable in ways never before possible thanks to cell phones, Google Maps, GPS and online social networks. A new flavor of the "Long Tail" is now emerging - I call it the "Local Tail". (republished from an earlier post on my old blog from 2005).
Plone for a blog...
Plone can be a great way to blog. Gideon Rosenblatt uses it to restart his contributions to the blogosphere.
