They wwant to begin what organizers hope will be a long dialogue with the "partners," many from the high-tech industry, a group that backed John Kerry in last year's presidential election. According to Hans Nichols, writing in Front Page Magazine, the participants have begun to refer to themselves as the Phoenix Group.

Soros warned the group that if they want to realize long-term political and ideological yields from an expected massive investment in "startup" progressive think tanks, they will have to be patient.

The meeting of venture capitalists, left-leaning moneymen and a select few D.C. political strategists was convened by Rob Stein, a former official of the Clinton Commerce Department.

He advised the participants on how to seed pro-Democratic think tanks, media outlets and leadership schools to compete with such established conservative institutions as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Leadership Institute.

Nichols reports that senior Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials were quietly briefed about the meeting in recent weeks. He says that DNC Chairman Howard Dean, a friend of Stein's, was aware of it, but one senior DNC source said that otherwise the organizers "kept that list [of attendees] kind of tight."

Sarah Ingersoll, spokeswoman for Stein’s Democracy Alliance, which will act as a clearinghouse and is expected to channel much of its money to new organizations and existing ones such as John Podesta’s Center for American Progress and David Brock’s Media Matters for America, said it was "a very preliminary meeting of committed donors interested in building a community to support progressive infrastructure."

The money details are several weeks away, she said. "There aren’t dollar figures at this point," Ingersoll told The Hill newspaper. Soros, a Hungarian-born financier who donated more than $23 million to pro-Democratic 527 groups in the 2004 election cycle, gave the main presentation, said Ingersoll, who declined to name the other presenters.

"Primarily, we’re looking at making recommendations and thinking through with these donors on how they can form an alliance," she added. "This is about creating a network of individuals to share information to be effective in whatever they do going forward."

Among those present were former White House press secretary Mike McCurry and New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg.

One source at the DNC with direct knowledge of the agenda told The Hill that the Phoenix Group had three specific goals at the outset. To create: