Lots of people are wondering what will happen to the Obama campaigns huge network of online supporters and on-the-ground organizers. For example, Gara Lamarche, the president of the Atlantic Philanthropies is . But so far there's little hard information. Yesterday, Chris Hughes, one of the Obama new media team's key staffers, posted a short note on his blog at myBO, writing:

Over the past 21 months, millions of individuals have used My.BarackObama to organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama. The scale and size of this community and its work is unprecedented. Individuals in all 50 states have created more than 35,000 local organizing groups, hosted over 200,000 events, and made millions upon millions of calls to neighbors about this campaign. There can be no question that these local, grassroots organizations played a critical role in Tuesday's victory.

What has made My.BarackObama unique hasn't been the technology itself, but the people who used the online tools to coordinate offline action. My.BarackObama has always been focused on using online tools to make real-world connections between people who are hungry to change our politics in this country.

And the site isn't going anywhere. The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact. Our victory on Tuesday night has opened the door to change, but it's up to all of us to seize this opportunity to bring it about.

In the coming days and weeks, there will be a great deal more information about where this community will head. For the moment, let's celebrate this victory and know that the community we've built together is just the beginning.

[Emphases added.]

Hughes is smart to do this, to at least reassure Obama's base that the site isn't about to be suddenly shut down. The enthusiastic responses in the comment thread on his post are telling. One wrote, "I was waiting for this thread! I knew they would keep this site open. It is just too dynamic and has been truly home to so many people over the past 22 months that it just couldn't die. Kind of reminds me of the famous line from Frankentein, "It's Alive!" But Hughes's post seems to be mostly a placeholder, a kind of status report that doesn't really resolve the fundamental question of myBO's future.

So far, we have a few crumbs of information on what may be happening. Earlier this week, Al Giordano reported that Obama staffers were being granted "four additional weeks of severance pay, health coverage through the end of the year, every reasonable accommodation to get ... employed on the transition team, inauguration team, and in the administration afterward." On the other hand, there are rumors afoot (links go to DailyKos and Firedoglake, respectively) that the DNC is shutting down its "fifty-state program" of field organization, which would mean losing all the institutional memory of the hundreds of paid organizers the party has had on the ground building local networks in the last few years. Since President-elect Obama is now the de-facto head of the DNC, this rumor makes little sense unless you are ready to believe his political team is going to throw away valuable organizing resources.

Personally, I expect myBO to get folded into the DNC, most likely by merging it into Partybuilder, the DNC's social network. The same company, Blue State Digital, built both platforms and, in fact, myBO is basically a souped-up Partybuilder. Obama legally can't take myBO with him into the White House, since the Hatch Act precludes using government resources for political operations.

For some insight into this thicket, I emailed Brian Young, the internet director for John Kerry for Senate (Campaign for our Country). After Kerry lost in 2004, his campaign still had a huge email list, and instead of shutting that structure down, Kerry has continued to work with that list to support his legislative and political priorities. (For an interesting academic paper on how Kerry has worked his list, check out this essay by Bob Boynton.) Young explained how Obama could potentially do the same thing:

The John Kerry list has always been the property of John Kerry for Senate or Friends of John Kerry (the organization before the official campaign cycle that started last year). In the Senate at least, the principle campaign committee can act as an adjunct of Senate staff when needed, with essentially no distinction (as opposed to Senate resources which can't be used for campaign). But everything must be paid for by the campaign fund.

Assuming the rules are the same at the Presidential level as at the Senate level (which is a *huge* assumption; it may be totally different), what would happen would be that the Barack Obama for President organization would morph into a Friends of Barack Obama type organization with possession of barackobama.com and Barack Obama list. They could still fundraise and would have to pay for their own staff, servers, technology development, etc, but they could also act to push activism around issues in coordination with the White House. It would be an enormously powerful tool, if it could be used in this way. Although the MyBO.com tool could be unpredictable, as we saw in the FISA fight in June. It wouldn't necessarily always be supportive ...

Whether myBO is merged with the DNC or kept as a separate entity, its real value is in all the networking that has already happened on and through the site. This is social capital as much as it is political capital, and arguably is as much the property of the people with accounts on the site as it is the property of the campaign. One hopes that going forward, the Obama political team realizes that the conversation with a network of supporters is different than the conversation with a list, and that the two-way, multilateral linking enabled by the platform is its real strength. While this does mean that the network could also be a "Frankenstein," a walking, talking monster that doesn't always obey its master's commands, if Team Obama attempts to take away the network's self-organizing potential, they will be left with a shell of the power now on tap.

Barack Obama | Brian Young | Chris Hughes | John Kerry | my.barackobama.com | mybo
Micah L. Sifry's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati