The Politics of Digital Participation

Wired.com has a great piece on Barack Obama’s utilization of the Internet and custom social networking tools to fuel his ‘Net-centric campaign which it calls “the most ambitious, and apparently successful, internet campaign effort in any presidential race in the web’s short history.”

Inside Obama’s Surging Net-Roots Campaign looks at how the campaign has gone well beyond the tried-and-true realms of Facebook and MySpace to create a its own platform that enables volunteers to meet-up, mobilize and phone-bank from anywhere in the country. This goes far and beyond the ‘Net efforts of Ron Paul, the Internet’s first darling candidate of the ‘08 campaign, to organize (in the most traditional sense of the word) at a size and scale that we haven’t yet seen online.

Obama’s web Precinct Center is just one example — a surprisingly robust web application that enable volunteers to sign-up, manages canvassers and allows them to track and log their efforts. Ditto for the virtual Phonebank Application that allows volunteer to call into battleground states from the comfort of their own homes.

The other prime Obama Internet tool is my.barackobama.com, a custom social network that combines organizational tools of MeetUp with the networking of Facebook.

We are often asked by clients — or at conferences — to define Web 2.0. My response is always something along the lines of “sites/tools that use the Web as a platform to enable people to participate and interact with both content and each other”. You would find few better examples than Obama’s internet campaign. Whether or not it pans out for him in the Democratic Primary, the genie is out of the bottle this year as far as online politics goes. There has never been a better medium to galvanize communities and harness the power of the network. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the ‘08 campaign turns out.