If you've been watching the US presidential race, you know that this past week included a late Tuesday night as many people stayed up to track the state primary results in Texas and Ohio.

A discussion with friends the next day reminded me of the most common questions I received at LIFT08: Which candidate do I support? And who do I think will win? While that's not the point of this post, I'm sure many LIFTers are likely interested in the intersection of participatory culture and the candidates' campaigns this year.

The Complexity and Social Networks Blog recently highlighted a Boston Globe article on the Obama campaign's use of technology in mobilizing supporters. You may be familiar with its social networking platform, my.barackobama.com, and its spectacular capacity for fundraising. (Consider this post over at Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing blog on Obama's 1,000,000th campaign donor.) What caught my eye was this observation by Professor David Lazer, Director of Harvard's Program on Networked Governance:

"There are a few key ingredients, it seems to me, to the strategy. First is the facilitation of the meeting of people with shared interests and goals. Second is creating a forum for people to express their views. Third is the provision of scripts and plans for the mobilization and coordination of action."

[Full disclosure: I'm a student in Prof Lazer's course, "Building Organizational Social Capital: Informal Networks Within & Between Organizations."]

It's this third item, scripts and plans for action, that's most intriguing to me. I had heard about virtual or distributed phone banking, but - not having thoroughly explored the site myself - I hadn't pictured organized opportunities bridging the gap between web and telephone as a feature of my.barackobama.com.

Via Rob Dolin, here's a perfect description from a few weeks ago:

"In addition to the basic groups and social networking features of http://my.BarackObama.com, they have an interface for potential volunteers to do download a list of calls and a call script for virtual, distributed phone banking. This evening, there were opportunities to call into Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Wyoming and specific opportunities for women, Spanish speakers, and students."

If you're interested in the design of a campaign tech strategy and the capabilities added by this distributable voter file system, the Voter Activation Network, I highly recommend yesterday's "Power to the Edge: Obama's California Field Operation from the Future" by Dan Ancona at techPresident.

Let's say you begin with a social networking platform, allowing participants to self-organize amongst themselves. And, in addition to distributed phone banking mentioned above, imagine pushing down to the lowest levels the ability to create database-generated walk and call lists for local leaders' use in their own communities. Ancona's description of last month's vote in California:

"A total of about 4.88 million votes were cast in the Democratic primary. More than a fifth of the voters got a personalized contact from the Obama campaign, and for more than half of those, that contact came from a neighbor."

However, as fascinating as the mechanics of participation can be, let's not overlook the fundamental philosophies that are brought to the development of campaign machines.

In January, techPresident's Micah Sifry compared a "many-to-many" networked campaign to a "one-to-many" campaign based on massive mailing lists, which he associated with the Clinton team. LIFTers won't be shocked to read in his post, "Internet Politics 101: The List vs The Network," that:

"Now we're in a networked age, where everyone can connect to everyone else and expects some degree of interactivity and reciprocity. Further, the power is shifting away from the speaker at the top towards the network of connections forming among all the participants."

More recently, MIT's Prof Henry Jenkins, known for his study of fandom and participatory culture, offered this characterization of Obama's campaign:

"Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement. Campaigns are very much top down organizations focused on short term results -- let's get this person elected president -- while movements are constructed bottom-up with more long-term goals -- let's reshape the American political landscape. What Obama has been building can last longer than the individual campaign because it is as much structured around connections between voters as it is around connections between the candidate and the electoriate.

...

What Obama embodies is something different -- a networked model of the relations amongst all of us who are involved in the process of transforming American society."

For those of you following the race, what are your thoughts? What kinds of participatory internet activity do you anticipate in your country's next national election?