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Sarah Granger, 11/21/2008 - 10:45pm

Almost as soon as the polls closed, e-mail flurries began regarding how to make President-Elect Obama accountable for promises made during his campaign. In this difficult political and economic climate, organizations with decisive missions need to make sure their voices are still heard during the transition. As a result, progressive nonprofits have been scrambling to congratulate and challenge the incoming president to make sweeping change in his first 100 days in office using online tools to make their cases.

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Matthew Burton, 11/21/2008 - 5:37pm

The Washington, DC government just procured 47 Web-based tools in 30 days, all for just $50,000.

This is good news in any year. But this year, it is a blessing.

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Nancy Scola, 11/21/2008 - 12:50pm

Obama Campaign's Trickle Down Belief in the Bottom Up; GOP Insurgents Stump for the Fierce Urgency of Getting Wired Now; Political Discourse, YouTube-Style; Huh, Looks Like Facebook Really Can Get You a Job; Fixing the FCC Begins at Home (Page); The Most Depressing Tweet You'll Get All Day; Summit on Social Networking for Social Change; and more.

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Micah L. Sifry, 11/21/2008 - 7:14am

The folks who gave us ObamaCTO.org, which has attracted thousands of participants in a conversation about the priorities for Obama's Chief Technology Officer, have branched out and added a new forum for debating options for the future of Obama's movement. It's early in the process, and as I reported yesterday, organizers are meeting in Chicago now to try to hammer out the answer to this question. On http://ideas.obamacto.org/pages/obama_movement you can add your own suggestions and vote on the ones already there. This could get interesting...

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Nancy Scola, 11/20/2008 - 12:22pm

They'd Check the "It's Complicated" Box; The Oppositional Approach to Getting from Here to Five Million; Transition's Tech Team Taps Beltway and Beyond; Government Guide to Marijuana (Vendors); Nanobama, the Microscopic President; DC's Apps Contest Names Winners; Progressives' Annual Participatory Debrief; and more.

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Micah L. Sifry, 11/20/2008 - 11:03am

Monday I was up at Harvard to give a talk to Nicco Mele's class at the Institute of Politics on "The Making of the President 2.0: How the Internet is Changing the Political Game." (The powerpoint is here.) While I was there, I was fortunate to get an hour with Marshall Ganz, who teaches public policy at the Kennedy School and is attached to the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations. Ganz is a giant in the field of community organizing, with seminal experience going back to the civil rights movement and working with Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. More important for the present moment, Ganz was the architect of Barack Obama's grassroots organizing juggernaut. He played a central role in the "Camp Obama" training sessions--three-day intensive workshops attended by something like 23,000 local organizers--and his teachings on the theory and practice of community organizing were widely influential on the campaign's local efforts.

The full interview is about 45 minutes long, and it's going to take me a little while to get it all up on the web. We covered a lot of ground, ranging from the role of the internet in supporting the campaign's organizing program to the debate over whether online community networks are a form of community organizing. I've excerpted a chunk from the middle here, because it's on the topic that everyone is thinking about: What next for the Obama movement?

Ganz makes three really important points: The first is that we've never had a president enter office with an organizing social movement attached to him, and there's no precedent for thinking about how the participants in that movement have a voice in his presidency. The second is that this movement isn't going away, and the critical question isn't "who's going to get the list" but how will this movement govern itself. The third, which is somewhat of an open secret, is that there is a group of organizers meeting in Chicago right now trying to figure this out, and Ganz believes that their deliberations should be more open. "I think it's important to create the public space for this kind of discussion," he told me. So, with that purpose in mind, here's the interview and a rough transcript below.

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Nancy Scola, 11/19/2008 - 1:30pm

When my aunt and uncle-in-law emailed me on November 6th, asking for some advice on what they can do to help Barack Obama "address the great challenges that he and our country face moving forward," I was embarrassingly stumped. Err, there were plans in the works, I knew, to ramp up Americorps and even start some new -corps, like one for inner city teachers. Frankly, though, my relatives aren't looking to devote their lives to Obama. They just wanted to help the country along a bit in their spare time.

Luckily, I remembered something that might just be perfect. During the campaign, Barack Obama had promised to inaugurate just such a part-time volunteerism system, an idea the campaign catchily called "a Craigslist for service."

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Nancy Scola, 11/19/2008 - 1:00pm

Covered: Online Right Sees a Chance to Take Root; While the Online Left Considers the President Elect; The Agenda Returns, Somewhat Tamed; Inside a Team Meeting; From World of Warcraft to Washington; Jobs in Internet Defense; and a good deal more.

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Sarah Granger, 11/18/2008 - 3:22pm

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google and Chairman of the Board of the New America Foundation, spoke earlier today about technology, innovation, the economy, energy, and how they are all linked. Schmidt is on the short list for Obama's CTO, and he is a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, so here's an opportunity to learn a little about how he thinks on these topics, through a transcript from his talk.

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Nancy Scola, 11/18/2008 - 12:05pm

During the campaign, presidential hopeful Barack Obama put volunteerism front and center -- quite literally, dedicating valuable home page real estate to, for example, calls for help during Hurricane Gustav. The practice helped to define him as a compassionate "brother's keeper" candidate, and President-elect Obama seems intent on taking with him to the White House; when it comes to the first national CTO, are we not actually talking about a Chief Information Officer -- that is, less a nuts-and-bolts technologist-in-chief and more an executive-minded leader with a vision of how government handles its IT duties; and a good deal more.

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