"Vote 2010: Plouffe Profiles Plans for Peer-to-Peer Politicking"

[Clio the Leo]

Vote 2010: Plouffe Profiles Plans for Peer-to-Peer Politicking
Nancy Scola | May 4, 2010

At 4pm EST yesterday, Organizing for America held what they called a "2010 Strategy Session" online with Obama campaign director David Plouffe and OFA executive director Mitch Stewart, with a major focus on turning out out the millions of first-time voters who made it to the polls for Obama in 2008. Plouffe, in particular, spent a good deal of time hitting on the importance of "peer-to-peer contact" -- or turning people into supporters, then voters, by connecting with them through their existing social networks online and off.

And yesterday's chat featured a neat little geo-targeting innovation on the discussion threading front that echoes the idea that online networks can be channeled in politically useful ways.

To start, Plouffe admitted that in '10, more than '08, volunteers are critically important. "Right now, we have a great, hardworking staff, but it's skeletal," he said. Both he and Stewart put a considerable, even striking, amount of emphasis on how important online social networks -- from Twitter to your Gmail contact list -- will be for connecting with people who, for whatever reason, hadn't made it to the polls before 2008. "A lot of first-time voters don't receive news through normal channels," said Stewart. "So social media is going to be incredibly, incredibly important." Stewart went on: "A lot of you are going to have to take this impetus on yourselves to identify where these people are now," saying that all the great online organizing tools in the world won't make much difference if people aren't finding them.

As for the intriguing new twist to yesterday's "strategy session" itself, OFA rolled out a new use of the Disqus commenting system. People who RSVP'd for yesterdays chat found themselves directed to a comment thread solely for their state, based on what their IP address revealed about their location on the planet (tweakable in cases where the system got the place wrong). OFA state staff and local volunteers were on hand to mix it up in the chats, answering questions and engaging with supporters.

http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/vote-2010-plouffe-profiles-plans-peer-peer-politicking