Inside Obama's Surging Net-Roots Campaign

[babylonsister]

Inside Obama's Surging Net-Roots Campaign
By Sarah Lai Stirland Email 03.03.08 | 3:00 PM


Obama supporters Amy Beech, her daughter Madi, her son Sam, her husband, Douglas, and son Jacob (right) rely both on real-world events and web tools such as e-mail lists and web video to get the word out about their candidate.
Neal Lauron/Wired


Mario Champion, a 37-year-old web application designer and political activist, spent the weekend pounding the pavement in his home neighborhood in southern Austin, Texas, to promote Barack Obama.

One of 10 captains in precinct 416, Champion knocked on the doors of 60 addresses ladled out from the Obama campaign's online precinct-captain training tool, a web application that manages volunteer canvassers and tracks their efforts. Once Champion and the other precinct captains returned from their "block walks," they entered the results of their expeditions back into the database, logging which households had Obama boosters, who's caucusing, and who's willing to volunteer.

"It allows us to see the names and contact info of people who have said, 'I will help Obama in our precinct,'" Champion says. "So it's trivial to e-mail or call them."

Champion is just one cog in a massive grass-roots get-out-the vote effort undertaken by the Obama campaign in the potentially decisive states of Ohio and Texas, where voters go to the polls Tuesday. At the center of it all is a hub of online networking tools enabling a wide spectrum of volunteers all over the country to get together in self-organized groups to help their candidate.

From controlling the canvassing operations to corralling e-mail lists, organizing meetings and overseeing national phone drives, Obama's web network is the most ambitious, and apparently successful, internet campaign effort in any presidential race in the web's short history.

"It's sort of MeetUp meets Facebook meets MySpace in one area," Champion says.

The websites are part of a strategy that Obama announced in an online video, in February 2007, even before he formally launched his presidential campaign. He asked his online audience to "use this website as a tool to organize your friends, your neighbors and your networks."

More than a year later, it seems that Obama, through a combination of soaring rhetoric at campaign rallies, YouTube-captured moments, television advertising and on-the-ground organizing, has excited and inspired much of the electorate to take up the tools to do just what he asked them to do.

more...

http://www.wired.com/print/politics/law/news/2008/03/obama_tools

[jakem]

1. those latte drinkers seem to have a lot of energy to campaign~! nt

[babylonsister]

2. Yea, those whippersnappers!

:D

[Scurrilous]

3. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Window]

4. Yeah, baby!

Peace:thumbsup:

[Labors of Hercules]

5. I'll have a half-caff double mocha venti with a spritz of caramel...

in my blue Obama mug to match my laptop...

[Barack_America]

6. I am in Pennsylvania, and in the last 10 MINUTES...

I have gotten FOUR e-mails.

-3 regarding a West Philly headquarters...does it exist? where is it? what can we donate? (I shot an e-mail back to one of the people that we know a guy who's looking to donate space, so we need to work on this)

-1 mass e-mail from the PA Field Director (totally great and focused guy), encouraging me to get involved with a neighborhood Obama Team. (I'm already on 3, lol)

That was 10 minutes worth of net roots! And Philly is just getting started! =)

[caseycoon]

8. WOW! Way to go Kristi! :o) n/t

[Barack_America]

10. Not way to go me, way to go Obama team!

For setting up such an amazing grassroots effort!

I'm just another volunteer that got sucked up into it, lol. ;)

[caseycoon]

12. Yes, the Obama team is outstanding, but

they wouldn't be if not for folks like you!
I'm glad you got "sucked up"
:rofl:

[Barack_America]

9. Since I posted this...

Two more e-mails (from two separate groups)! :)

[caseycoon]

7. K&R! VERRRRY COOL! GOBAMA! n/t

[workinclasszero]

11. Awesome!

GOBAMA!!