Mike--

Thanks for that very cogent and frank analysis of how social networking tools are, or aren't, being deployed by the leading presidential campaigns.

You put your finger on one of the most important and little-noticed changes in presidential politicking: the idea that it might be good to enable your supporters to connect laterally to each other, let go of some control, and gain enhanced grass-roots volunteer involvement in return. In 2004 Dean did this largely by accident rather than design; now at least a few major campaigns are doing something truly unprecedented. Imagine if a large membership group (MoveOn, Common Cause, the NRA) decided to introduce its members to each other at the local level and then get out of the way.

It's not a coincidence, I think, that Obama's campaign has such a good platform for doing this. Its pedigree flows from the Dean campaign, where various people envisioned a "DeanSpace" that enabled registered volunteers to connect with each other...to the efforts of Dean's follow-on organization, DemocracyforAmerica, to refine the tool (see DFALink: http://www.dfalink.com/)...to the work of former Dean folks at Blue State Digital on such projects as Colorado's ProgressNowAction (http://www.progressnowaction.org) and the DNC's Partybuilder. One common thread in that pedigree is Joe Rospars, who is now Obama's internet director. They saw the power of lateral connection and campaign-as-network, as now you are seeing it blossom around Obama.

At the same time, we shouldn't write off what Edwards is doing in this arena. His site isn't as elegantly designed as Obama's (and one might argue whether that is a strength or weakness--I personally find his home page overwhelming but there sure is a lot of life demonstrated by all the content displayed), but if you join OneCorps--or even if you don't--you can very quickly zero in on fellow Edwards supporters in your immediate area. Not everyone is divulging personal information, but I found one guy a few miles from me who put up his name, his picture, his IM, where he works, what town he lives in, etc. So, in terms of enabling lateral connections, Edwards is doing as much, if not more, than Obama.

There's one additional wrinkle to Edwards' use of social networking on his site that hasn't gotten much attention: the use of points to reward people who do things on the site, and thus involve the community in helping filter content. Mike, you've written a couple of times about how campaigns that let go of site control will have to deal with the vandals who maliciously post obscenity, etc. Edwards seems to have a smart solution to this problem, at least as relates to what blog posts make it to his front page--they need to be recommended by a certain number of people first, and you gain points for doing so. I'd like to see a concise explanation of their points system (couldn't find it on a quick glance around their site), but it appears they have developed a hybrid solution that could very well be extremely useful in helping the campaign ID its most active volunteers.

The tools are far ahead of anything available on the GOP sites. It pains me to say that, but it's not even close. There far ahead of anything on the Democrat sites as well.

"Democratic Sites" see also Democrat Party Phrase

myspace.com/AlGore08

That was actually supposed to say "Democrats' sites", but blame the partisan in me. It comes out inadvertently sometimes... My apologies.

Haha. No Problem, as long as it didn't go unsaid.
myspace.com/AlGore08

It might be worth mentioning that the reason Obama has appeared to have learned so much from Dean in 2004 is that Obama has hired a fair number of the Dean web team. This explains a lot.

As a software developer and Obama supporter, I can tell you that the Obama tools represent at least 1000 man hours of development time. It's possible that parts are built upon open source software, but there's still a lot of investment here. My point is that there's simply no way that development of the website wasn't started well before his January pre-annoucement. In fact, my personal belief is that it was probably started before the November election.

Whether or not this was in an offical capacity for OFA or whether these key people had built the system over the past couple years on their own is anyones guess. If I had to guess, I'd say it was the latter, and the fact that they had a proven track record and a mature code base probably got them the job to begin with.

I have to disagree with you that the internet tools on the DeanForAmerica.com site were an "accident."

Software doesn't organically mutate from lesser life forms. It needs to be designed and written. After it's deployed, specific features are added in an organic way, based on community feedback, but it took vision to pull off what they did.

I know you weren't trying to minimize the efforts of the DFA team but I think it's a mistake to characterize them as just stumbling upon a winning internet formula.

There are some gaps, but this is my sense of the rough geneology of the tools:

1) Moveon has tool for people to create their own events
2) Moveon coder Patrick creates "get local" for Dean campaign
3) I hired Clay Johnson to build "deanlink" (social networking tool) for Dean campaign
4) Clay Johnson, Jascha and others from Dean campaign start Blue State Digital.
5) Blue State Digital is hired for post-Dean software development, in return gets full ownership of code base from Dean campaign
5) Blue State Digital builds software for DNC, and one of its principals (Joe Rospars) works for DNC
6) Blue State Digital adds group functionality to its code base for Progressnow.org.
7) Jim Brayton (Dean alum, Obama's webmaster) hires Joe Rospars of BSD as New Media Director and buys iteration of code base for Obama

You can see these tools described here:

http://www.bluestatedigital.com/2006/01/groups_and_chapters.html
http://www.bluestatedigital.com/2006/01/personal_fundraiser.html

These are years, not hours, in development. I don't know that the coding is the hardest part, but the development of a smooth social experience.

You are so my personal hero.

I quit my job in November 2003 and drove to Hanover, NH and volunteered out of the Upper Valley office. I did a lot of Vis/door knocking/etc but I also did a lot of really rudimentary excel programming that pulled numbers from the campaign website and gave the area organizers the data they needed. Especially in the January GOTV efforts.

I really appreciate your rundown of the Obama apps. I did say "At least 1000 hours" because that was the least possible amount of time I figured a project like that might take.

Seriously, what you did at DFA was the best thing I've ever been a part of. I've never been happier to sleep on a floor and suck down $1 cheeseburgers as I was for those few months.

Part of what's excited me about Obama is the familiar faces.

Thanks for the note! It was an amazing campaign to be a part of, that's for sure.