“..Act I was co-founding Facebook while at Harvard with this roommate Mark Zuckerberg.
Act II was taking a leave from the social networking behemoth and joining Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, where the fresh-faced Southerner from Hickory, N.C. became part of an A-list new media team.
There, he served as the architect of My.BarackObama.com — or MyBO, the most successful network of volunteers and grassroots army that American presidential campaigning had ever seen.
And Act III?
“I knew I wanted to do something at the nexus of what I call global development and technology,” Hughes told HuffPost Tech in a phone interview yesterday.
“By global development, I’m talking about a broad umbrella — health care, agriculture, education.
I just knew I wanted to do something in that space .. and I spent the last year traveling” (in countries such has Kenya and Senegal, which he fell in love with) “and talking to people” (like Jeff Sachs, the prominent economist at Columbia University who’s been named one of the “100 Most Influential People In The World” by Time magazine — twice).
Hughes added:” I spent the past year researching, studying, learning everything I could in the space.”
Today, he announced the “soft launch” of Jumo — which, in the African language of Yoruba, translates to “together in concert.”
Think of the site as philanthropy, volunteerism and social networking all rolled into one.
It’s a platform that will connect people and organizations around the world ..
.. and Hughes is arguably the most well-known tech entrepreneur to enter the still evolving global space.
Currently just a few pages, the site will launch fully in the fall, sometime between September and October.
In an e-mail blast early this morning, Hughes wrote:
‘.. just wanted to let you know about my new startup called Jumo.
We’re announcing today that we’re building an online platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.
We believe we can leverage the participatory web to foster long-term engagement with the issues and organizations that are relevant to each individual.
Jumo has the potential to unlock a great deal of time, skills, and financial resources previously unavailable to organizations around the world.
When you get a second, take a look.
We’ll be launching the site with full capabilities this fall, but I wanted to let you know that we’re officially getting underway.
If you know anyone who may be interested in working with us, please send them our jobs page to get in contact with us.
Talk to you soon,
Chris
P.S. I’d love for you to forward this email to friends, become our fan on Facebook , and let your friends on Twitter know.
The more people that know about what we’re doing, the stronger the team we’ll be able to build..”
go to source/story>>Jose Antonio Vargas: Chris Hughes’s Act III — Jumo.com, A Social Platform For Global Volunteerism