Archive: Category: TechPresident

Andrew Rasiej and I are in Cambridge, MA today and tomorrow at the Berkman Center's "Internet Politics 2008" conference. Several techPresident contributors are here, including Gene K., Ari M., Garrett G., Chris R, and David A. and tons of friends and colleagues. The conference is semi-open in the sense that we are allowed to blog about it under the "Chatham House rule," which means that we're not supposed to name people (hence my semi-cryptic references), but that we're free to use the information shared, unless someone says something is completely off the record. Some of the conversations are being recorded and will be eventually posted to the Berkman website, however. So, consider yourself forewarned, I'm somewhat handcuffed here...

Some information is starting to filter out of this past weekend's "summit" in Chicago of about 300 key organizers from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign (evenly divided between regional field directors, field organizers, and team leaders). Tony Loyd, an organizer from Racine, Wisconsin, reports on the YesWeCanRacine website back to the members of his local group: Here are the outcomes of the meeting. 1. There is a process that is still forming, based on your input. Let’s be honest: we’re making this up as we go along. We want to take the time to get this right. 2. The process has been and will continue to be open and transparent. We’re trying to make sure you hear about...

While most of the country's attention is focused on the transition underway in Washington, another vitally important transition is taking place right now in Chicago. I'm referring, of course, to the future of the Obama movement and network, or what some organizers refer to as "OFA2" (as in, Obama for America II). Thanks to reporting by Peter Wallsten in the Los Angeles Times, we know that "This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit at a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan." What exactly...

"Today we're trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues -- with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top." Ordinarily, you wouldn't get too excited about reading those words on a website. But when they are on the official blog of the President-elect, things are a little different. In fact, this is a big deal. When you consider that for the last eight years, the occupant of the White House has essentially told the public "you get input once every four years, after that I'm the decider," this is huge. A...

Jose Vargas rightly got a lot of attention last week for the stunning numbers he was given by the Obama internet team about their online success. As he reported: "3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once." This looks and sounds like a revolution in how presidential campaigns can be financed, but now comes a valuable reality check, from the Campaign Finance Institute, run by veteran campaign analyst Michael Malbin. At first glance, the foundation of Obama's fundraising juggernaut looks like...

The folks who gave us ObamaCTO.org, which has attracted thousands of participants in a conversation about the priorities for Obama's Chief Technology Officer, have branched out and added a new forum for debating options for the future of Obama's movement. It's early in the process, and as I reported yesterday, organizers are meeting in Chicago now to try to hammer out the answer to this question. On http://ideas.obamacto.org/pages/obama_movement you can add your own suggestions and vote on the ones already there. This could get interesting...

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...