Some lucky nonprofit or social entrepreneur is going to win a free free laptop and printer bundle courtesy of HP and CauseWired Communications!

But you’ll have to answer a key question first, in order to win: “How we’re going to use social media and web technology to change the world.” Drop your ideas and thoughts into comments, no more than 500 words please – and include a link to your organization or website.

Here’s the skinny on this give-away. It’s part of the HP Create Change effort. For every purchase from the Create Change site that is part of the HP direct purchase website, HP will donate 4% to one of the following seven nonprofits that you can designate. The nonprofits are: American Red Cross, CARE, DonorsChoose.org, Junior Achievement, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure, World Wildlife Fund.

You can download a widget for the HP Create Change effort form their site and follow their conversation on Facebook.

So what’s the deal with the contest? HP has asked me and a few social sector bloggers – Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, Katya Andresen’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog, Jolly Mom, and Amy Sample Ward – to ask our readers a question about social change. And then each of us bloggers will pick a winner from the comments on our blog.

Note: we’re not receiving anything. Only contest winners get the equipment. So let us know what you think!

A week ago, Idealist founder Ami Dar sent a warning note to friends and supporters. After 15 years, the site and its incredible range of listings and services, was in trouble. Here’s what Ami wrote – and Tweeted:

Very briefly, here’s what happened. Over the past ten years, most of our funding has come from the small fees we charge organizations for posting their jobs on Idealist. By September 2008, after years of steady growth, these little drops were covering 70% of our budget.

Then, in October of that year, the financial crisis exploded, many organizations understandably froze their hiring, and from one week to the next our earned income was cut almost in half, leaving us with a hole of more than $100,000 each month.

That was 16 months ago, and since then we’ve survived on faith and fumes, by cutting expenses, and by getting a few large gifts from new and old friends. But now we are about to hit a wall, and that’s why we decided to ask.

To may way of thinking, Ami and Idealist saw the good cause in the early Web and pursued a path of service to nonprofits and causes. Its decade and a half of service should not be ignored with a pat on the head and a retirement certificate; indeed, the rest of the ‘CauseWired’ web stands – in large part – on Idealist’s shoulders.

Sure, the business model may need tweaking in a classified world dominated by Craigslist and a device-centric landscape of iPhones and Droids. But let’s chip in to give the Idealist crew that time to explore and grow and survive. I’m fond of telling corporate leaders than the social web – and by that, I mean the philanthropy sector – is actually ahead of consumer brands in using social media and building and supporting communities. Let’s prove that right by helping Idealist.org right now.

GlobalGiving has been a marketplace for charitable projects since 1997 and has a history of supporting programs on health, poverty, agriculture and the environment in Haiti – and the site swung into action yesterday, working with key on-the-ground partners to rush medical supplies and emergency aid to the stricken nation. As the GlobalGiving team raced to direct resources to Haiti, I spoke briefly with Mari Kuraishi, the co-founder and president.

What’s GlobalGiving’s perspective on what Haiti faces during these terrible days?

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and in 2009 ranked 149th out of 182 countries according to the UN’s human development report. That’s to say that one in five Haitian children is underweight for their age and GDP per capita is $1,155—2.5% of US GDP per capita ($45,592). This is a country that is least able to recover from a natural disaster like a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. On the one hand that seems obvious. When you’re poor, everything becomes harder to recover from, because you just don’t have any slack in the system.

What do you think philanthropy’s role will be?

We don’t know the scale of the losses yet in Haiti. While it’s impossible to compare, the cost of the 1995 Kobe earthquake (a 7.3 earthquake) has been estimated at $100b in property and infrastructure damage. Human losses in Japan were 6,400 killed and 15,000 injured. The cost of recovery in Kobe? As of 2006, $3b in insurance losses, and $9b in long-term private finance to rebuild.

Most Haitians don’t have access to formal credit markets—even at a fraction of the Kobe earthquake costs (huge amounts of productive economic assets were destroyed in the Kobe earthquake), the resources they need will not be coming from the capital markets. Philanthropy and official foreign assistance will have to fill the gap for Haiti. And given the weakness of the government in Haiti, I think official foreign assistance can only go so far to help—the role of NGOs becomes even more important. That’s where I think the generosity of the American public and the power of NGOS that have long experience in Haiti, from Partners in Health to the Lambi Fund, will come into play.

How can the outpouring of online concern, donations, and activism translate into real relief on the ground?

At GlobalGiving we’ve dealt with massive disasters like the tsunami in 2004, and more localized disasters like the Szechuan earthquake in 2008. We’ve observed that disasters, more than any other event, mobilizes a huge swath of the American public to give. What’s more corporate partners of ours—from Liquidnet to Gap to Nike to Hasbro have all responded immediately that they will match donations, some for their employees, others for the public in general. So I have high hopes. As of 2pm today (Jan. 13), we were coming up close on matching the number of donations on the first day of the China earthquake disaster.

Longer term we MUST focus on increasing resilience of the poorest countries to disasters like this. While earthquakes are not climate change induced, we know that climate change will increase the frequency of weather related disasters. And it turns out that while it’s possible to invest to a certain extent in “disaster preparedness,” actually one of the most important things you can do is invest in female empowerment, specifically education.

To this point, David Wheeler at the Center for Global Development has just published a very interesting paper that touches on extreme weather events and countries’ ability to adapt to or recover from them. The fact is that the cost of a disaster is not just borne by a country in the abstract, they are borne by real people. And data from weather related disasters suggests that women suffer disproportionately from natural disasters—David quotes Oxfam pointing out that “In the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone … four times more women died than men.”

What can we – should we – learn from this?

Haiti has long been a “fragile” state. We’ve known this for a long time. We also could have known, if we’d thought about it, that it was incredibly vulnerable to external shocks precisely because its has so little slack in the system. It’s a time bomb that’s gone off, and honestly, it’s not the only one. All the climate scientists tell us that extreme events will increase—so I think while the current disaster is a human tragedy that the world will be tested to respond to in anything resembling a timely fashion, this should be a wake up call to look into what we can do to defuse future time bombs.

To assist Haitians in their hour of need, please visit:
http://www.globalgiving.org/haiti-earthquake/

Or see onPhilanthropy’s round-up of charitable relief efforts:
http://www.onphilanthropy.com/

1. Last year, Pick. Click. Give. raised more than half a million dollars for Alaskan nonprofits – how did it work and how was it unique to Alaska?

ALIZA: The entire Pick. Click. Give. awareness campaign is based on something inherently unique to Alaska: our Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) or the annual payment each Alaskan receives as part of a pay out to share in the state’s oil and gas profits. No other state provides a similar fund or payment to citizens of their state.

The overarching goal of the Pick. Click. Give. campaign is to draw attention to and explain the Permanent Fund Charitable Contributions Program. The program began officially in 2009 to allow Alaskans to donate a portion of their PFD to qualifying Alaska nonprofits of their choice while they filed online for their PFD. An underlying goal is to encourage individual philanthropy in Alaska.

Additionally, through social media, the Pick. Click. Give. campaign is working to give exposure to the program and motivate Alaskans to participate and to encourage their friends, family and followers to participate as well.

The previous year (2008) was spent assessing Alaska nonprofits based on a number of criteria to ensure that they qualify for the program as well as to set up the technical aspects of adding a list and way for Alaskans to check the organizations on that list they wished to support with an amount of their choice.

2. You’re using social media to spread the word – which platform works the best for you? What have you learned about how causes and social media work?

ALIZA: We’re on our third year of learning about not only social media for cause-related missions and messaging but also of using social media for not only hyper-local outreach but hyper-rural outreach as well. In partnership with first Rasmuson Foundation and then the Pick. Click. Give. program, we’ve explored Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Causecast as well as blogs as social media tools for education, outreach and activism.

While it is hard to say exactly which social media platform is working the best for actually driving Alaskans to pick the organizations to support when filing for their PFD, we can say the following:

The Blog – Each post averages over 100 views. The post about Facebook for nonprofits exceeded 200 views. Currently, there is little comment participation but we can assume people are reading the information and interested in reading the blog.

Facebook – We’re at 352 fans. In the scheme of Alaska nonprofits, this is a solid number. Compared to other Alaska-related for-profits, this is small although even Alaska companies struggle to break 1000 fans.

Twitter – We’re at 213 followers. Twitter is still relatively nascent in Alaska but we are also finding we are struggling to get Alaskans on Twitter to follow and retweet. This may be a learning curve on the part of Alaskans who tend to be very conservative about following others on Twitter. They tend to use Twitter more like Facebook – conversations with actual friends.

YouTube and Causecast – Because of the video PSAs created for the campaign last year and this year, we wanted to leverage those on the most popular video sharing site (YouTube) as well as the one dedicated to causes (Causecast). This year, we added some simple clips of representatives from several of the nonprofit organizations that received donations from the program last year to explain specifically how they’d be using the money. We wanted to emphasize that the money from Pick. Click. Give. was making very specific impacts and define what those were.

MySpace is a mixed bag right now, often feeling – and behaving – like a red-headed stepchild, but I’m a firm believer of leveraging that network for it’s multimedia capabilities and to reach another strata of Alaskans who may not be on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Were smaller organizations able to keep up with the larger ones? How did they do it?

Some of the charities that did the best succeeded for several reasons unrelated to the size of their organization. In the case of a certain animal rescue group, for example, this was the first time they had put themselves out there for support from individual Alaskans and people jumped at the chance. Still others had tremendous success by sending out reminders in newsletters, via email, and dipping their toe into social media for the first time.

4. The Permanent Fund Dividend is unique to Alaska, but what can nonprofits take from the campaign?

ALIZA: There are several takeaways for nonprofits from a social media standpoint:

- Be Targeted. Social media can be effective as not only a global or national communications tool but can also be calibrated to be hyper-local and even hyper-rural. For smaller nonprofits whose scope doesn’t reach beyond a state or a region or a town, social media can still prove useful and can be that finely targeted.

- Pick the Right Tools. While I firmly believe we have the right mix of tools for a strategic social media-powered campaign, we did set out with additional tools that we’ve pared down because they were too time consuming with little return. Holding onto MySpace is only possible because it takes less resources to maintain than Facebook or Twitter. Holding onto Twitter while the numbers are smaller is a strategic move to be ready for the 3rd year of the program when I believe more Alaskans will be used to Twitter communications.

- Coordinate Efforts. Social media tools can be linked together and coordinated in such a fashion that they can be utilized with a very small staff. Last year, I ran the bulk of social media efforts alone as just one campaign of many that I ran simultaneously for other clients I consulted. This year, we are lucky to have one additional person devoted to social media a few hours a week and have better internal coordination with our project partners such as Rasmuson Foundation and the Nerland Agency (the ad agency that developed the programs brand and the PSAs).

JORDAN: No matter which state you live in, the success of the fundraising depends on making a personal connection with your existing and prospective donors. It’s one thing to create a broadcast message about a new tool for giving, but it’s entirely another when the homeless shelter makes a personal pitch to you asking for help. The beauty of Pick Click Give may be that it reminds people that they can make a big difference in peoples’ lives, so when they get “the ask” from the nonprofits they’re more inclined to act.

5. What could a grant-making foundation learn about the campaign – for instance, could some of the best practices be replicated?

JORDAN : Grant-making foundations are in the unique position of being able to facilitate long-term change. A foundation can help pull together the key players and invest in the big ideas. This allows the individual nonprofits to focus on delivery of their services and programs, rather than shouldering the responsibility of managing a campaign.

6. What was the most surprising result of the campaign?

ALIZA: From a social media standpoint, I was surprised at how many Alaskans we could reach on Facebook, especially in VERY rural areas. I was also surprised by how few we are reaching – and galvanizing – through Twitter. Again, I don’t believe Twitter is a lost cause here in Alaska because Alaskans are on an upward curve of learning and adoption. But I was hoping this would be the year that we’d do gangbusters on Twitter and it has yet to happen. Still, we have an excellent foundation to continue using Twitter for communications about this program over the next year so I see this as an important step to the overall social media picture.

Stacy Monk of EpicChange, who organized this virtual birthday shindig, probably said it best:

I can only imagine how many changemakers Beth supports, challenges and connects every day.  Aside from her own work in Cambodia, her thought leadership and support has surely influenced thousands of changemakers and nonprofits who are more impactful because of the work she’s done to teach us how to effectively use social media and technology to create social change.

Only one question: where’s the cake?

In this the season of peace on earth and goodwill toward men – and women – the CauseWired team is truly grateful for the opportunity this past year to work side by side with so many truly committed people – nonprofit, foundation, corporate and philanthropic leaders who dedicate themselves to making life better for others. It’s an honor to help them as consultants, and to play even a small role in supporting the causes they champion.

It’s been an exciting year since we launched last January – and busy. Tom’s book flew off the shelves, and he was a sought-after speaker, traveling to Toronto, Oxford and Florence to share his expertise. Susan worked closely with our sponsors at Changing Our World, Wiley and Grant Thornton to continue bringing thought leadership to the sector through onPhilanthropy, as well as our Summit, where Ali Velshi led an outstanding roster of speakers. And we were honored to work with colleagues like Allison Fine, Steve Manzi and many others on great projects.

We know we could not have had such a great year without friends and supporters like you – it’s been an adventure and a real blessing.

Happy holidays and a wonderful New Year to you and your families, friends and colleagues – you’ll hear more from us in 2010.

Susan and Tom

Last year, we loved the work of the folks who put together the first Tweetsgiving – an online fundraising and advocacy campaign for the children of Tanzania, through the work of the excellent EpicChange.org. This year, they’re back again with ambitious plans to raise more money, engage more supporters, and bring people together in events across the country. The donor stewardship – an old school term, to be sure – was particularly cool after the Tweetsgiving campaign last November. The EpicChange team had video (like the one above) and photos ready of the classroom that the Tweetsgiving donors paid for with more than $10,000 in gifts – complete with donors’ Twitter handles hand-painted on the walls by students. That pretty much assured repeat donations, at least for this click jockey. Check out the campaign and volunteers in your city by following this link.

And watch this video:

TweetsGiving 2009 from LittlePurpleCow Productions on Vimeo.

Putting the imperative issue of civil rights and justice around the world for women and children front and center at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative required intense coordination between CGI and the Obama Administration – starting of course with the world’s foremost power couple.

But it also relied on some special sauce that was both unpredictable and incredibly effective: the distribution, discussion and amplification of social media.

This year’s CGI, which brought together more than 1,200 movers and shakers in New York in the cause of social change and international development, became a virtual boombox empowering women…and it’s a two part-story that reaches from the motorcades and presidential suites to digital alleyways of Twitter and blogland.

First, the top-down power messaging.

Fighting abuse and human trafficking of women and children is the signature issue for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared in her closing address: “we will put women at the heart of our efforts.”

Her husband, former President Clinton put the theme out front on the meeting’s first day: “Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property. Whether the issue is improving education in the developing world, or fighting global climate change, or addressing nearly any other challenge we face, empowering women is a critical part of the equation.”

And President Obama tied the work of his late mother in microfinance to the “spirit of the Clinton Global Initiative” and work empowering women and assisting children. His Administration was omnipresent at CGI, which coincides each year with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Besides Secretary Clinton, speakers included Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, economic adviser Larry Summers, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

One of the highlights was a peppery panel the first day, hosted by Diane Sawyer of ABC News, featuring Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International, and Edna Adan, director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital in East Africa, along with the head of the World Bank and CEOs of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. And the panel brought about one electrifing moment: when Salbi challenged ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s statement that funding isn’t the problem – a fairly typical assertion these days. Retorted Salbi, whose organization provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

You sensed some “shareholder value” vs. “humanity’s needs” tension on the panel, and indeed throughout this year’s CGI – where perhaps the corporate titans are taken for the infallible gurus of finance they were before the recession. Blogger Emily Davila at beyondprofit captured the panel’s vibe, the classic CGI combination of corporate powerhouses with practitioners:

On one hand, the unprecedented high-level private sector participation means that the women’s agenda has gone mainstream; real change will not happen if only women are talking to each other. On the other hand, the panel would not have succeeded if it hadn’t had two women from the trenches who could keep the discussion grounded in the life and death realities many women face.

Those life and death realities were emphasized in a news conference with Secretary Solis, who vowed that the Labor Department would pursue companies with slave labor in their supply chains, and Ambassador Verveer, who said that “modern-day slavery is a global scourge – no country is immune.”

Verveer and Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who monitors human trafficking or the Obama Administration, clearly positioned the State Department as a new activist player on the issue. Indeed, Verveer wondered aloud if civil rights for women around the world hadn’t reached a “tipping point.”

If it has, the combination of star power on display at CGI and the bottom-up effect of social networking are playing complementary roles to U.S. government policy – a rare moment when an administration’s policy is in near-total sync with NGO and grassroots activists.

Star power also played a role. Film star Julia Ormond, who founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking at CGI two years ago, said that “meeting with victims and hearing their story just seals the deal.” And singer Ricky Martin made it personal – and advanced the storyline – during a shutter-clcking appearance in a special session, well-captured by Ari Melber in his Nation blog:

When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton’s 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.

“I feel that my heart is going to come out of my mouth,” he said, recounting his sadness for the “millions of children that didn’t make it.” Martin was followed by testimony from a woman who, along with her two children, was kidnapped and held for four years of forced labor.

Martin made his remarks in what an interesting venue for Twitter reach. His own tweets – “on the CGI it’ll b my honor 2 present heroes tht r doing gr8 thinx agnst human trffckng.will xchange ideas n learn what else needs 2 b done!” – reached more than 338,000 followers.

But the Twitter king – actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) – was also making the CGI scene with his wife, Demi Moore (@mrskutcher); he has a Twitter-leading 3.6 million followers, whilst she pitches short messages to 2.1 million more. The couple tweeted their commitment:

Hubby & I have started The Demi and Ashton Foundation or The DNA Foundation as we like 2 call it. We’re ready 2 help bring an end 2 slavery

And Kutcher sent his followers to the live CGI video stream for the plenary on human trafficking. He also found time to tweak a more senior delegate to the meeting:

Listening to John Glenn mock the social web because he doesn’t understand it. I wonder if people mocked his space program.

Meanwhile, Moore introduced her followers to the nation’s leading journalistic voice on the issue:

Sitting in listening 2 a panel speak on investing in Women & Girls at CGI. In Nick Kristoff’s words Women are the solution not the problem!

Celebrity tweets clearly go to a rather broad audience, but I think they help to reinforce a potential cultural shift in how we view sex trafficking and women’s civil rights. Repetition from the likes of an A-list TMZ-type couple can puncture the social permafrost around a difficult issue like this, and deliver it to the mainstream.

Besides, there’s a core audience for information from CGI that is not celebrity-obsessed: writers, analysts and bloggers who work in and around the “social sector” year-round. To a large degree, they carry a lot of the heavy baggage for CGI in terms of disseminating and discussing ideas and innovation with a wider audience.

It’s this group that sent a couple of dozen correspondents (including me and my CauseWired partner Susan Carey Dempsey) into the chaotic and tightly-controlled CGI press pool – a large-scale operation that is understandably focused primarily on the video and still cameras, there to capture the bigshots and stars. And it’s this group that now uses blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to spread some of the bigger thoughts and developments to an activist group beyond the (occasionally oppressive) Sheraton press room. And you could see a the big theme of women and girls sprouting everywhere you looked.

For instance, tweets with both the #cgi09 hashtag and “girls” appeared more than 200 times over the last week, #cgi09 and “women” was tweeted more than 450 times, and #cg09i and trafficking more than150 times. This doesn’t include the celebrities, who tend to use Twitter more as a broadcast medium and don’t tend to use the hashtags to organize the conversation.

Relatively small numbers – #cgi09 never “trended” into the top ten of Twitter tags – yet the audience for international development and human rights was paying attention around the virtual network. And that’s important for an issue that’s just arriving at its moment, getting its wider organizing chops together under a new Administration with an activist State Department.

That’s important to an undertaking like CGI, I think. Despite its success and the billions committed to helping people around the world, building a network to carry its causes onward – even at smaller scale – is crucial to getting beyond the limitations of one organization, however large and high-powered. Upwards of 30,000 people watched the proceedings via the live stream, which CGI made available this year as a widget anyone could use on their own sites to carry the proceedings.

It isn’t about making the power brokers haul out their iPhones and tweet from the inner circle. As Bill Clinton said in his summation: “Twitter. That’s a funny word.” But he still got the importance of distributing the discussion; he said CGI generated 80 tweets per hour, and that the social network – inside and outside the hall – is heling to power the bottom of the innovation pyramid.

Chat Catcher

Kicking off this fifth annual gathering with a speech that publicly cemented his growing partnership with Bill Clinton – the husband of his former political rival – the President stressed his community organizing experience and the non-governmental work of his late mother.

“My mother understood that whether you live in the foothills of Java or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we all share common principles:  justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” said the President. “And we all share common aspirations, for ourselves and our children:  to get an education, to work with dignity, and to live in peace and security.”

That meshed well with Clinton’s remarks while waiting the Obama motorcade to wind its way through a gridlocked midtown: the President was the first to come into office with experience nonprofit experience “and that’s a very good thing.”

President Obama praised the CGI attendees and took note of the gathering’s five-year record of achievement, including its 1,400 commitments affecting the lives of 200 million people around the world.

“That’s how we’ll confront the challenges of our time,” he said. “Standing together, working together, building together… That’s the spirit that I see here tonight — the spirit that says we can rise above the barriers that too often divide us.”

The President began his remarks on a light note, razzing President Clinton on his golf score an about monopolizing his wife’s schedule. “I’ve always appreciated President Clinton’s valuable advice and the ideas he’s offered my administration.  I do understand that the President has been having trouble getting a hold of my Secretary of State lately.  (Laughter.)   But I hope he doesn’t mind, because Hillary Clinton is doing an outstanding job for this nation and we are so proud of her.”

Then he praised the former President choice to found CGI. After leaving office, said Obama, Clinton asked, “What can I do to keep making a difference?”And what an extraordinary difference he, working with all of you, have made.  For the victims of disaster, from the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina, he’s made a difference.  For those in need, from parents and children battling HIV/AIDS to your efforts today on behalf of the people of Haiti, he’s made a difference. It’s no exaggeration:  Around the world, Bill Clinton has helped to improve — and save — the lives of millions.  That is no exaggeration.”

And CGI, said the President, is increasingly important in an interconnected world. “We need a new spirit of global partnership,” the president said. “That is the spirit that guides this organization. I hope that is the spirit that guides my administration.”

Here at the Sheraton, security is as tight as the bedsheets in the presidential suite upstairs – President Barack Obama is due this afternoon to help kick off the 5th annual Clinton Global Initiative, the massive who’s who gathering of heads of state, movie stars, philanthropists and corporate titans (if any can be said to exist in 2009).

Yet the word here in the blogger and media bunker a couple of floors below the CEOs and Nobel types is that Bill Clinton’s dizzying annual confab of development and do-gooderism is more “open” than before.

Oh, not in the most obvious ways: you generally still have to be somebody of serious accomplishment or pony up for a large-scale commitment to the developing world or domestic poverty to get a delegate’s badge. At CGI, Brad Pitt’s the leading voice on New Orleans. And that’s no accident – star power drives this show, which is all about bringing attention to the world’s problems. That is succeeds wildly nearly nine years after President Clinton left office is testament to both his contacts and continued energy – and to the people who make this thing run. Super Bowls have fewer moving parts.

So yes, it’s very much a top-down affair from a messaging standpoint. What President Obama says, what Bill Clinton highlights, what Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ashton Kutcher promote, what Al Gore,  Queen Rania and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comment upon – those items will drive the headlines and the video spots on cable TV.

Yet that summation would ignore a trend that’s as plain as the code on the CGI webcast of the sessions: a Twitter app that allows anyone to ask questions of the participants. It’s a small foot in the door, I think, for a conference that ranks with Davos in high octane policy-making and is unsurpassed in attendance by heads of state from around the world.

This year, you also sense that the Tweetstream – and its ubiquitous #cgi09 tag – isn’t limited to a handful of symbolic tweets from the movie stars and the constant updates from bloggers; many of the delegates are posting as well from their iPhones and Blackberries. Then too, bloggers are now allowed access to some of the smaller speciality sessions – like ‘The Infrastructure of Human Dignity: Protecting the Most Vulnerable’ on Thursday – that we used to have to watch closed-circuit television to listen in on. And last night, President Clinton hosted another late-night roundtable with bloggers; I couldn’t make it this year, but was at last year’s and it’s generally a free-wheeling session on an incredible variety of serious policy topics. This year’s CGI is also streaming video outside the Sheraton more completely than in year’s past – an overt attempt to carry the conversation beyond the hotel walls.

This will never be Bar Camp or Netroots Nation. It’s not exactly the barbarian’s storming the gates, either. Yet despite the wall of hard-nosed security on the way in, CGI is opening up. And given the importance of this gathering to social entrepreneurship and international development, that opening may encourage more bottom-up involvement.