Who’s not following the presidential nomination campaigns, at least a little bit? It’s been here, it’s happening, a year early, as much because of what’s on line as what’s happening on the ground. We got a taste of these new things in 2004, but this year, all the campaigns have embraced myspace-style social networking, come to terms with youtube, and grasped the importance of blogging. And at the center of each campaign, we see large scale online organizing and community building web sites.

Websites like those of this year’s presidential contenders are not entirely new. In 2004, Howard Dean’s “deanspace” and moveon.org web sites caught many people’s eyes if not their political energies.

And after that campaign year, in our own work, we encountered our first wave of community organizations and advocacy groups we worked with saying, I want to do (some of) what they did.

The 2008 election will have an even more sweeping effect on expectations about web sites than the 2004 Howard Dean and moveon type experiences.

If you haven’t yet, take a visit to barakobama.com or hilaryclinton.com or any of the other campaign sites. Taken as a whole, these sites have taken a giant leap forward in campaign technology and strategy. They offer tons of things to do, ways to learn, and opportunities to connect.

Looking at them page by page and element by element, these new generation web sites are not that far beyond what any organization of moderate resources can bring together using the new wave of open source content management systems available to anyone.

Consider five key elements of these popular sites that equally challenge any organization or business with a mission or constituency today. Those elements are: easy posting of news, powerful discussion and spreading the word about your news, engaging your constituency, social networking, and community-building. The campaign sites have it all. Yet more and more of what you see there can be done through the main content management system offerings that existing as open source (free to use) software, including those we favor, Drupal and Joomla.

First, easy and organized posting of content. When you see the “learn” or “issues” tabs on the campaign web sites, you see organized, clear ways to get a lot of content out before the public, flexibly, timely, presumably directly in the hands of the team responsible for those topics. Sites today still on Dreamweaver often start out with a strong commitment to have program managers keep things up to date. As staff changes, with loss of training and commitment, the content grows stale. The site decays.

Second, well-defined, supportive means of discussion and participation in the posted content. Content management systems make it easy to give supporters, constituents, community partners the ability to comment on news. They make it easy to allow site visitors to subscribe to sections of the site, so those users get notices of new things that interest them in their email or news reader. News personally filtered and adapted to each site visitor has grown in importance as many people find themselves drowning in email yet are not going to visit a wide range of sites regularly to see what is new there. Content management systems make it easy to cross reference topics, keep track of which things attract the most interest, collect reaction, encourage users to forward to their friends, collect support and so on. The traditional campaign position papers come alive on these new generation sites.

Third, take action and provide financial support. Presidential campaign and other new generation web sites have elaborate and integrated means for supporters to volunteer, donate and become part of an activated constituency. Sure, traditional web sites also increasingly have mechanisms for doing these things, but typically, the donations button, or sign-up button or other functions don’t connect with each other. Organizations have trouble building a single database of names and interests, much less correlating it with the issue discussion highlighted in the last paragraph. Like the taking action function, even the smallest organization today can easily add a “donate now” button. Yet more organizations today seek the same kind of integration of donor management with other constituency features. Content management systems have moved beyond just the content to integrate other support and engagement tools large scale sites offered by the presidential campaign sites.

Fourth, social networking. In the new way of thinking, it’s not just about the organization initiating activity and inviting volunteers to join in. It’s creating the space for like-minded people to meet up with each other, share interests, start groups that all contribute to the overall organizational mission, whether it’s the campaign victory or a community initiative. General social networking sites like myspace, facebook, youtube, change.org or care2 lead the way. Organizational sites don’t need to replace those general realms. Instead new generation content management system sites can use the tools they have to take advantage of what is happening out there, and connect it back to activities and networking within the organizational site.

Fifth, build community collaboration. By community-building, we mean the kinds of features that we often provide to organizations that don’t show up on the public site. These are the places for internal development of policy ideas and strategy as well as practical committee and project planning. For a single, staff oriented set of people, traditional methods including email and face to face meetings may work just find. But new web technologies offer tremendous collaborative opportunities for extended networks, whether it’s a national campaign around the country or a network of community organizations working together on an issue or service area.

Again, some organizations, including those I talk with, have discovered the virtues of various “a la carte” tools, from building wiki sites, using Google documents, or commercial systems like Base Camp. We are putting a big emphasis on enabling organizations to use the private part of their web site to do the same kind of collaborative development of knowledge and planning. By having it there, where all the other engagement activities take place, makes it easier for organizations to transition private ideas into public ideas, and to integrate that private planning with the overall initiatives the organization is taking.

One perspective on significant these last two shifts are in particular comes from some of the political obits for Karl Rove. Aside from speculation on what it all means as far as war in Iraq and other Bush dilemmas, we see some discussion about Rove’s leaving as the end of an era. Rove grew up as part of the generation of Republican activists who made money and political fortune from direct mail and other facets of earlier technology-driven campaign methodologies. Rove brought that kind of “command and control” centralized, modernized style to Bush’s so-called victories in the last two elections. In this election, the speed and decentralization of idea development and organizing epitomized by independent political blogging as well as the campaign sites is rapidly putting an end to the old centralized style. Aside from finally being rid of Rove himself, it should be exciting to all of us to see the opening up of greater opportunities for collaboration and initiative. This political model will surely affect the organization and planning of community services and advocacy for years to come, and we’re excited to be working on the strategy and tools to make it happen.