DIRECT LINE
By now most students of the recent Presidential Election know that one of the important catalysts in the Obama victory was his campaign's use of the internet and mobile phone technologies.
Specifically, the campaign early on tapped some of the key folks in Silicon Valley like Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, to plan and implement it's strategy online, not just in the context of a uniquely successful fund-raising initiative, but also to allow bottom-up organizers to get out the vote, via it's website MyBarackObama.com.
As Havas Media Lab Director Umair Haque put it in a recent piece,
"So how did this unlikeliest of candidates do it? How did Obama utilize radically asymmetrical competition to shatter Washington's toxic, bitter 20th century status quo?..."
"Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday's political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday's corporations..."
"...We're used to
thinking about organizations in 20th century terms: do we design them
to be tall, or flat?
But tall and flat are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think - spatially and literally - in two dimensions: tall organizations command unresponsively, and flat organizations respond uncontrollably.
Obama's organization blew past these orthodoxies: it was able to combine the virtues of both tall and flat
organizations. How?
By tapping the game-changing power of
self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than
spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing
cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at
the fuzzy edges.
The result? Obama's organization was able to reverse tremendous asymmetries in finance, marketing, and distribution - while McCain's organization was left trapped by a stifling command-and-control paradigm..."
"...yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things."
The entire piece is worth reading, but the last two sentences say a lot.
The question after the election, is what happens next with Barack Obama's online strategy? Chris Hughes provides part of the answer in a post on the site.
"Over the past 21 months, millions of individuals have used
My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack
Obama. The scale and size of this community and its work is
unprecedented. Individuals in all 50 states have created more than
35,000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200,000 events, and made
millions upon millions of calls to neighbors about this campaign.
There can be no question that these local, grassroots organizations
played a critical role in Tuesday's victory.
What has made
My.BarackObama unique hasn't been the technology itself, but the people
who used the online tools to coordinate offline action. My.BarackObama
has always been focused on using online tools to make real-world
connections between people who are hungry to change our politics in
this country.
And the site isn't going anywhere. The online
tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters will
continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact."
We get additional information of where the strategy is going via this piece in the Guardian, talking about Barack Obama's newest online initiative, Change.gov:
After watching Barack Obama's effective and innovative digital strategy use social networking and mobile phones to communicate with his supporters and also give them ways to channel their enthusiasm into action, I was left thinking what he might do with that digital network once he was elected..."
"I was left wondering what Obama would do. What was the next step in his digital strategy? We're getting a sense of what that looks like with Change.gov..."
"There isn't any indication that Change.gov is tied to my.barackobama.com, and I don't know if there any regulatory issues in using the the database of names he has collected for his campaign with this transition project. The transition team, responsible for the site, is listed as a 501(c)4 organisation. That's a reference to US tax code for non-profit organisations..."
"There are still a lot of questions about to what extent Obama will leverage the social network he created during the campaign, but for the time being, I'd have to agree with Adam Ostrow at Mashable:
"For the moment, Change.gov is a pretty simple site that is more or less a continuation of the Obama campaign, but it's encouraging to see the President-elect moving quickly to keep his supporters as engaged after victory as they were during it."
The new Obama administration has a unique opportunity to continue engaging citizens more directly in it's upcoming Presidency, using online technologies. Looks like the thought has occurred to them already.
A big part of the opportunity of course is to connect with the whole host of folks who didn't vote for Obama. As the President-elect said in his acceptance speech,
"I need your help, and I will be your President as well."
Change.gov or a site like that could be a good way to start connecting with them as well.
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