Granny D — Doris Haddock — died at age 100 on March 9, 2010. When she was 89, she walked 3,200 miles across the country on behalf of campaign finance reform, a law undone a few months ago by an activist conservative Supreme Court. Dennis Burke was her friend and co-author. I’ve posted Dennis’ eulogy for her.

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Ethan Zuckerman ponders what good is knowing if it doesn’t lead to effective action…and he isn’t asking this rhetorically. You want to read this because Ethan himself is an extreme knower, an extreme care-er, and a full time agent of change. I found that this post caused me to have an internal dialogue in which I kept interrupting myself. The world is just so hard to change, even when the need is so obvious and urgent, and yet we can’t let ourselves believe that knowing and caring can make no difference at all. What’s at issue here (at least in my internal dialogue) is that the model of knowing, caring, and acting isn’t explaining our experience. Or our hope.

Then there’s Evgeny Morozov’s review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution in the Boston Review. Evgeny likes Andrew’s book although he thinks it doesn’t explain enough about why Wikipedians wikipede. The comment thread is also well worth reading.

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The Financial Times asked four concerned experts how a CEO should handle a mob outraged at his or her corporation’s behavior. All four recommend some form of conversational engagement, including the possibility of changing corporate policy if it is discovered to be wrong. The hard part, of course, is what you do if rational minds simply disagree, and if the stakes are high enough that conversation fails and confrontation remains. At least one of the four commenters acknowledges that the CEO may just have to push back, and Oxfam says it engages in dialogue even as it also runs campaigns.

(Disclosure: I am consulting to Edelman and am friends with the Edelman person who is quoted in the piece. Also, we regularly donate money to Oxfam and I hope you do, too.)

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