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.

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.

Andrew Rasiej and I are in Cambridge, MA today and tomorrow at the Berkman Center's "Internet Politics 2008" conference. Several techPresident contributors are here, including Gene K., Ari M., Garrett G., Chris R, and David A. and tons of friends and colleagues. The conference is semi-open in the sense that we are allowed to blog about it under the "Chatham House rule," which means that we're not supposed to name people (hence my semi-cryptic references), but that we're free to use the information shared, unless someone says something is completely off the record. Some of the conversations are being recorded and will be eventually posted to the Berkman website, however. So, consider yourself forewarned, I'm somewhat handcuffed here...

News continues to dribble out of Chicago on the future of Obama for America. First, Obama blogger Christopher Hass says there are now some 4,000 house parties occurring this weekend across the country to foster discussion of the movement's future--a healthy jump from a week ago. Second, attendees at last weekend's summit meeting in Chicago have received the following memo by email, which they've been urged to share widely. A copy made its way to my in-box and I reprint it below: