During the past several months, coverage at LA Philanthropy Watch has increasingly focused on issues related to advocacy, civic engagement, and political participation – and decreasingly on the nonprofit sector more generally.

Civic Intersection will focus on the region where nonprofit and voluntary organizations (mostly in Los Angeles) are connected with the public sector through the political process.   The new blog will continue to provide coverage of the issues and themes that have been familiar to readers of LA Philanthropy Watch in recent months – including reports on the Greater Griffith Park Neighborhood Council.  Except the links and comments will appear at Civic Intersection – a new and improved blog.  I haven’t just changed the name – there will be a number of new features as well.

Check it out.

This afternoon NPR’s All Things Considered featured a story on the first communication via the ARPANET.  On October 29, 1969, a programmer at a UCLA computer lab sent a two-letter message to a techie in a computer lab at Stanford Research Institute.  It was the first two letters of the word, ‘login.’  When he hit the ‘g,’ the computer crashed.  An hour later, so the story goes, l-o-g-i-n was successfully transmitted.

That ought to be worth a celebration – or at least a moment of recognition.

I recommend the 6 minute 38 second report.  It’s worth a listen just to gain a perspective on how far this communications revolution has come.

(The image is from Wikimedia Commons.)

Update, October 30, 2009:  While we’re celebrating the technology that made blogging – and the whole familiar world wide web – possible, here is the link to an article I ran across some time ago by Chris Andersen, ‘Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity,’ which reviews technological changes over the past 40 years.

It is a pleasure to introduce a guest post by Debra Levine, co-founder of Save Film at LACMA, to provide an insider’s account of this savvy campaign, which (as she puts it) “lived almost entirely in cyberspace.”  The Save Film at LACMA story offers insights for anyone interested in grassroots organizing in the era of social media.

Debra’s day job is heading Levine & Associates, an LA-based marketing communications firm.  Debra, a former dancer who is passionate about the arts, blogs at artsmeme.com.

Debra Levine’s post, “(Not) The Last Picture Show or Good Writing Wins the Day for Save Film at LACMA,” follows this post.

By stopping to record interviews with folks that most of us would encounter (if at all) only fleetingly or from a distance, Horvath humanizes people who live on the streets and in tent cities – people not so different from us and our more familiar world.

Horvath embarked on Road Trip USA last week – to record video stories in 24 cities across the county – from the West Coast to the East Coast and back again.  His return to LA is scheduled for October 7.

The Times story (online) links to Horvath’s InvisiblePeople.tv blog and recounts Horvath’s experience with homelessness in Hollywood a decade and a half ago.  He had worked in the television industry before his descent into alcoholism.  The article credits the Dream Center with helping him overcome his dependency, after which he began helping churches boost their media presence.

The Times article illuminates Horvath’s commitment, in spite of threatening encounters, to document homelessness; it doesn’t mention his personal blog, where he talks a bit about his faith.

In addition to the Dream Center (which I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous posts) the Times article mentions a couple of other local nonprofits combating homelessness: PATH Achieve of Glendale and the Union Rescue Mission.

One of the most popular social change blogs on the web, Triple Pundit, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  3p offers a daily fresh helping of interesting and useful ideas on creating a sustainable environment, society and business.

If you’re interested in a sustainable environment, and practical ideas for businesses and organizations, check it out.  It’s a lively site (created by “critical optimists”) that will lift your spirits.

Update: this post on the popular Have Fun – Do Good blog, is the first in a series on social change blogs, especially California-based blogs.

The list may draw wider attention to the ranked blogs. I certainly intend to check out the blogs that are new to me.