November Learning: Expanding the Boundaries of Learning

Rahaf Harfoush

New Media Expert; Member of President Barack Obama’s Social Media Team, Geneva, Switzerland

Rahaf Harfoush is a social media strategist on the rise. Her interest in technology’s impact on governance, education and the workplace began as an analyst at Don Tapscott’s thinktank, where she published whitepapers on topics including the Net Generation and women and the web. Harfoush helps organizations build effective online strategies that create meaningful conversations with employees, consumers and the general public. Her clients include InnoSpa-Unilever, British Telecom Wholesale and the Web Foundation. She speaks to corporate and non-profit groups on the increasing use — and vital importance — of online technologies and the powerful ideas of community that animate them.

She recently accepted the position of Associate Director of the Global Cooperation Initiative at the World Economic Forum, in Geneva. In this role, she will co-lead the development of the Forum’s online community platform. Prior to this, Harfoush spent three months with the Obama New Media team in Chicago. An active member of Toronto’s technology community, she is involved with associations like The Movement, an organization of people committed to collaborating on projects for social good, and The Overlap, a community that combines cross-disciplinary expertise to tackle the challenges of sustainable innovation.

In love with the written word, Harfoush is the author of Yes We Did (2009), a book about the grassroots groundswell inspired by the Obama campaign. She is the Research Coordinator to the critically acclaimed Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and a contributor on both Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing your World and Everything I Needed to Know About Business I Learned from a Canadian.