A long post on (very liberal) firedoglake about Obama’s local-level organizing techniques. Very long piece but worth reading regardless of your political orientation, as it seems likely to define how campaigning will be done in the future, and doesn’t delve (much) into the politics behind the candidates/movements themselves.
Key take-away: the campaign is trusting volunteers to take roles that would never have given to volunteers in the past, and using new communications technology (and training) to help coordinate them. Result: vastly increased reach and increased levels of participation and ownership. Parallels to self-organizing (potentially fragile?) open peer production communities will be self-evident to anyone who has participated in one of those. Money quote: “Movements aren’t built on individual people—they are built on relationships.”
There’s a risk to doing things this way, for example when tens of thousands of Obama supporters used the social-networking features of Obama’s own site to attack his position on telecom immunity. But it’s served him well.
There is always risk when you give away control; hence my ‘(potentially fragile)’ aside. But yes, so far, so good for him.