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BUILDING BARACKOBAMA.COM

New media director Rospars came to the campaign as a veteran of Howard Dean's blog team. (In the 2004 Democratic primary, effective use of the Internet gave Dean the aura of a front runner, but his campaign collapsed immediately after the first caucus in Iowa.) Rospars is also one of the founders of Blue State Digital, a digital consulting firm that is one of the campaign's major technology vendors. Along with CTO Michael Slaby, Rospars joined the staff of the campaign exploratory committee on Jan. 31, 2007, and they pulled the Web site together in about 10 days, basing it on a suite of software Blue State had assembled over the past couple of election cycles.

The functionality barackobama.com boasts today, including the my.barackobama.com personalized pages and community tools, largely was in place before Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy.

A supporter could register, establish a personal profile page, network with online friends, form or join groups and chapters based on either geography or issues and interests, and set up a personal fundraising page with a "thermometer" showing that person's goal and how close they are to reaching it. They could post events and track RSVPs. Every registered supporter also got their own blog, with the ability to cross-post entries to the community blogs of the interest groups they joined. In addition to its blog, each interest group was also assigned a "listserve," or Internet mailing list.

The campaign Web site incorporates open source technologies including Movable Type for the campaign blog, group blogs, and blogs for individual members, with many custom features built on the PHP programming language and MySQL database.

The campaign staff organizes itself using many of the same tools, such as community blogs and event scheduling, that the volunteers use, Rospars says. "That's one way we keep ourselves honest."

But the secret sauce is not so much the software as how the campaign uses it. The Web tools that let volunteers organize themselves happen to mesh particularly well with Obama's message. Listen to any of his speeches and at some point you'll hear some variation of "this is your campaign, this is not about me."

"This was us calling Americans to get involved and really own a piece of the campaign," Rospars says.

Lisa Daly was one of the people who answered the call. "It still seems to me to be vastly under reported, the significance of this," says Daly, who became an unpaid volunteer coordinator for Central New York. "Yes, Howard Dean got lots of small donations on the Web, which was a big deal at the time, but using technology to nourish all these little groups in all 50 states and overseas had never been done before. There were all these people like me who wanted to get involved, and they made it so easy."

The approach "was particularly well tailored to a national political campaign," Daly says, and wouldn't necessarily work the same way for marketing anything other than a charismatic presidential candidate. "It requires that people trying to seek you out, too."

Having gotten advance warning, she actually signed up on the Web site "like 11:30 or midnight" of the night before Obama's announcement and immediately created interest groups for Syracuse and New York State. Within hours, "there were already thousands of people furiously creating groups and sending email."

These volunteers would prove a critical element of Obama's success at sustaining momentum through an extended primary season and letting him contain the victories of his principal competitor, Hillary Clinton. In states that Clinton was always expected to win —such as her Senate power base of New York - volunteers would have to carry the campaign almost singlehandedly, with minimal help from paid staff, and the volunteer efforts kept the delegate split from being as lopsided as it might have been otherwise. For example, Obama captured 40% of the vote in the Feb. 5 New York primary, compared with the 28% predicted by a USA Today/Gallup poll taken on Jan. 28. His gain came largely at the expense of other candidates then in the race, given that the same poll showed Clinton with the support of 56% of New York voters and she actually got 57%.

And in places like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Oregon, whose primaries might not have mattered as much if the race had been decided quickly, volunteers who found each other through the Web site organized their own freelance pro-Obama efforts long before the first campaign staffer came to town.

"Absolutely, that's key," Hughes says. "The whole underlying approach is that you're not waiting for the campaign to come to you." The campaign nurtured independent action by building a functional, purposeful online community "and making sure people weren't just rummaging around on the Web site," Hughes says by gently redirecting supporters away from unproductive activities. "We made it a priority, with several full-time staff members focused on it from the very beginning."

"Chris was there from the start; I interacted with him right away," Daly says. In the very beginning, Hughes was very hands on, personally responding to bug reports and requests for new features, she says. "Then I think he got overwhelmed after a while because there was so much activity going on, so he withdrew a little bit and had other people do that for him." Early on, someone formed an administrators group where group administrators could help each other with ideas about what was and wasn't working, as well as a Web site feedback group. Hughes and his team also actively participated in those, Daly says.

One key application that Blue State provided is the tool for making phone calls from home. It was a new component of the software suite, so it was "in pretty rough shape when I got here," Hughes says, and has gone through "all sorts of modifications" to make it more useful, including tools for better management of the scripts and lists, and better back-end integration with voter databases.

In its default interactive mode, the tool presents the first name and phone number of a person to call, and sends the user down a different path through the call script depending on whether the volunteer reaches the voter, and, if so, whether that person likes or dislikes Obama or is undecided. Volunteers also record bad and disconnected numbers, which helps to clean up the voter list for future use.

One important improvement has been the ability to preview the script (including all its conditional branches) so the volunteer can run through it before starting to make calls. Alternatively, if the volunteer has a shaky Internet connection, or the Web site is overloaded and responding slowly, the site lets users print the script and a list of numbers to call offline, then post the results of those calls later.

Scalability, however, has sometimes been a problem. In the days leading up to February's Super Tuesday primaries, the phone banking tool "was completely overwhelmed to the point where it was almost useless," says Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a campaign volunteer from Los Angeles. "So that was a problem. On the whole, it worked pretty well." He learned to print out his lists when he wasn't sure the Web site would be reliable. "You never knew if 1,000 people would be trying to call at exactly the same time."