Archive: Year: 2008

Monday I was up at Harvard to give a talk to Nicco Mele's class at the Institute of Politics on "The Making of the President 2.0: How the Internet is Changing the Political Game." (The powerpoint is here.) While I was there, I was fortunate to get an hour with Marshall Ganz, who teaches public policy at the Kennedy School and is attached to the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations. Ganz is a giant in the field of community organizing, with seminal experience going back to the civil rights movement and working with Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. More important for the present moment, Ganz was the architect of Barack Obama's grassroots organizing juggernaut. He played a central role in...

There have been a number of good critiques of President-elect Obama's one-way use of YouTube to broadcast his weekly radio address (see especially my colleague Ellen Miller and John Dickerson's takes) and so I'm not going to repeat them here. By posting the address on YouTube--even without comments or ratings allowed--Obama is allowing us to see something that we couldn't see before when presidential addresses were just on radio: who cares to listen and who cares to link. I was impressed to see that as of this morning, the YouTube of his three-minute talk already has 500,000 views. We're going to start keeping track of these numbers, because they're one more way of getting a rough and ready sense of how...

Uh-oh. The day has finally arrived, when future White House employees must ask themselves, "Is that Facebook wall post still up where I ______?" "Did X tag me in that photo on Flickr, or will people not recognize me?" The possibilities are endless, and frankly, absurd. But, as the New York Times reported this morning, the incoming Obama Administration is asking applicants such questions as "if you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public," and "please provide the URL address of any websites that feature...

TalkingPointsMemo has the scoop on the Obama transition's internet outreach team. Greg Sargent writes: A transition source tells us that that Macon Phillips, a key Obama campaign Web official, has been tapped to head new media for the transition, and Jesse Lee, a leading Web operative who handled Rahm Emanuel's DCCC internet outreach operation during the 2006 take-back of Congress, has been hired to do online communications. Obama's transition team confirms the hires. Phillips helped run Obama's general election new media shop, which raised huge sums of money and used social networking tools to organize in all sorts of innovative ways. Lee, meanwhile, is highly regarded by liberal bloggers. He wrote the first-ever blog for the House Speaker, and in the closing days...

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion. The first one, out yesterday, is a new site called ObamaCTO.org. The site is basically a feedback forum centered on one question: What should be the CTO's top priorities? ObamaCTO is built on Uservoice, which enables anyone to create an account, post their own idea, comment on any idea, and distribute up to 10 votes to help rank all the ideas posted. ObamaCTO.org just went live, so the...

Lots of people are wondering what will happen to the Obama campaigns huge network of online supporters and on-the-ground organizers. For example, Gara Lamarche, the president of the Atlantic Philanthropies is...

I'm still mulling what I'm going to say tonight at "The Organizing of the President," but here are two hints. First, let me recycle this long Obama quote from the post I did earlier this year on "Obama's Organization, and the Future of American Politics." "One of the things that I'm really proud about this campaign," he told an audience in Indianapolis on April 30, "is that we've built a structure that can sustain itself after the campaign." He then talks about how he won so many states, including states like Idaho. It was because of volunteers, he says, "they built the campaign." We didn't originally have big plans for Idaho, he tells his listeners, "but people made this structure." "Our database, it...

Today's announcement of the formation of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, covered in detail here by DemConWatchBlog, left me wondering about two things. 1. If the transition senior staff includes a communications director (Dan Pfeiffer, who was communications director in the campaign), why doesn't it include an internet or new media director? 2. What kinds of interactive components will the transition website include? The announcement included a note saying that "the official website for the transition is www.change.gov and it will be live later today," but so far that site isn't live, at least not for me. One thing I think we do know: it looks like Blue State Digital, the same powerhouse Democratic internet firm that handled Obama's online needs during the campaign,...

What one word described your state of mind on Election Day? The data wizards at the New York Times have a mesmerizing interactive application up that offers a dynamic picture of its readers' emotional state as they answered that question yesterday, which you can slice and dice by Obama supporters vs McCain supporters. There's not a lot of explanation on the site as to how it works, but I assume the larger words were the more popular ones. Here's the view from 1:00am last night:...

I'm going to be speaking on a panel tomorrow organized by Al Giordano and the FieldHands, along with Nate Silver and Sean Quinn of 538 and Tara Brownlee, the head of Obama's Illinois Field Department. The topic, which Al has already been doing a lot of writing and talking about, is "What's Next for the Obama Movement? The Organizing of the President." It's this Thursday, in Chicago, at 7 p.m, at DePaul University's SAC building # 254. 2320 N. Kenmore Ave. Al's got more details here, along with downloadable flyers for the event. I'm not sure if there will be a live feed of some kind but I'll shlep my Nokia N95 with me (that's a joke) and hope that I can...