In addition to his day-to-day advocacy campaigns that are tied to the news cycle, Alan Rosenblatt also works on a number of long term projects and is deeply embedded within the DC community of policy thinkers. With his PhD in political science, he teaches a number of classes at the Georgetown, John Hopkins, and American universities, and used to teach full time at George Mason. It’s not uncommon to run into Rosenblatt at any number of happy hours and tech events in the city, and he’s often leading panel discussions on social media advocacy.

He told me about a recent incident in which the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page faced potential jeopardy. If you’ll remember, Khaled Said was a small businessman who had been dragged into the streets by Egyptian authorities and beaten to death last year. After his death, activists had created the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page, and it’s often credited with helping to spark the political uprising that led to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s ousting.

Nadine Wahab, a communications director for the Rights Working Group, contacted Rosenblatt out of concern that the Facebook page would be taken down. Because Facebook does not allow anonymous users, there was fear that Mubarak’s supporters could use this rule to either oust the page’s creator or get the page shut down completely. Rosenblatt has connections with Facebook employees and after introducing Wahab to them they were able to secure the page while also protecting her identity. Not long afterward, Mubarak formally announced he would step down.

But Rosenblatt isn’t just content with using social media to influence these political uprisings in foreign countries; he wants to be able to predict them. He helps organize an Internet Advocacy Roundtable — made up of dozens of policy experts — and this month will be leading an event that explores how the lessons from Egypt could allow them to use social media to map the future of the political landscape. “We’ll tackle how we can use social media to see how the different players are organizing themselves to get a sense of what the results will be,” he said. “Which groups will be players in the formation of the next Egyptian regime, and how can we use that model of using social media to predict uprisings and their aftermath for other countries so we can get ahead of the game on some of this stuff.” The panel will include experts from Harvard, MIT, and, of course, Nadine Wahab, the savior of the “We Are All Khaled Said” page.