It seems everyone is talking about the new Barack Obama campaign site. It's full of Web 2.0 goodness - from "on-site" social networking tools (user profiles, blogs and location based event planning and volunteer co-ordination) to "off-site" viral media tools (Flickr, YouTube and Facebook) to a shiny Brightcove powered video channel.
More interesting than the fact that a US Candidate is riding the Web 2.0 wave are two issues that Michael Arrington almost pointed to in the two TechCrunch posts about http://www.barackobama.com - the history of social networking tools in US Presidential Campaigns and the difficulty that everyone faces when hosting open communities online:
- While TechCrunch pointed out that the site "launched basically feature - complete and bug free", not much was written about the forerunner to this sort of lobbying - the Howard Dean campaign. Guys like Zack Rosen put together DeanSpace (which later became Civicspace) to essentially take the choas that was the grassroot support for Howard Dean and provided a framework for activists to use to manage volunteers, events and even whole campaigns. I'm certain that the DeanSpace (which was built on everyones favourite CMS, Drupal) experience provided valuable insight and lessons to whoever envisioned the Barack site.
While the technology is important, the vision to fully exploit it is something different all together.
- TechCrunch then went all crazy about a derogatory group that someone formed on the site (alluding to all sorts of mysterious explanations like hackers or pissed off developers). Gosh! Someone abusing an online community? Who would have thought...
Now one would have thought that Michael, the "gatekeeper" of Web 2.0 companies would have at least pointed out that the formation of this derogatory group on the Barack site is one of the main issues that user-generated communities have to deal with on a daily basis. The question of what is acceptable and what isn't; of what is allowed and what isn't; of whether to censor or whether to allow complete uncensored and unmonitored free speech; the issue of the limits of that free speech are all issues that anyone who has a blog that allows comments or a discussion forum has to deal with on a regular basis. Dealing with these issues isn't always easy - moderate too much and you lose your community. Moderate too little and you lose your community.
What I would really like to see is how effectively this fancy shiny website translates into on the ground action. I guess it's time to find a few new RSS feeds to watch.
Comments
Yeah I've heard some good
Yeah I've heard some good things about Barack Obama. I heard he had an Iraq de-escalation act. Even people who supported the Iraq war when it began, would probably now agree that it resulted badly, with civil unrest and violence still occurring in Iraq: so probably Obama's policy is favourable, there. I heard he also wanted to improve the schools, and increase literacy rates, and all of that. I guess I'll have to read what some of his detractors have to say, to learn the negative side. I'm trying to decide whom it would be best to vote for!