This session originated with a paper by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen that I saw him deliver more than a year ago at the Politics Web 2.0 held in England at the University of London, Royal Halloway. His paper was called "The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication and Communicative Overload," and while he disguised his ethnographic field research somewhat in the paper, it was clear that he was describing the chaos of a presidential campaign in the final weeks before a big-state primary.

Further discussion revealed that he was talking about the Obama campaign in New York, and in particular how its staff did (or didn't) deal with the overwhelming flood of volunteers and groups that sprung up in Manhattan to support his candidacy. As he puts in a synopsis of his paper:

I demonstrate how the supposed wonders of new technologies, including the low-cost communication they provide, comes with new and peculiar problems that are only really visible on the ground, prices that are only paid in practice. Even in a case like mine, where resources like money, skills, and volunteers were amble, and everyone involved in a race in a state with much at stake had the incentives to make the whole thing sparkle, internet-assisted activism turns out to be more laborious in practice than in theory and hyperbole.

What Rasmus discovered is worth more discussion by everyone entranced by internet-assisted activism. In essence, what he discovered was that in the final days of the campaign, effective and accurate communication and coordination broke down. The more activists the campaign attracted, the more communications faltered. I'll leave it to Rasmus to share the details during this session, but suffice it to say that he is pointing his finger at a tricky problem.

Of course, communication overloads aren't the only dilemma faced by online organizers, and the other speakers on this panel--Deanna Zandt, Tanya Tarr and Judith Freeman--will offer different insights into how to manage the explosive potential of internet-assisted mass participation in politics.