WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government...

Part One of a six-part series, cross-posted on e.politics

Without the internet, Barack Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois. Instead, his two-year campaign for the White House relied on electronic communications to an unprecedented extent for its core functions: organizing volunteers and staff, finding new supporters and putting them to work, turning out voters on election day and (of course) raising staggering amounts of money -- all contributing to a crucial edge in the primary and general elections.

The fact that the campaign web team wasn't relegated to some back office but was instead placed at the center of the action on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign -- the campaign that spawned Blue State Digital and a handful of other web firms -- was consider a considerable mark of respect, a sign of how far things had come. With the Obama '08 campaign under the company's belt, the 110 men and women who make up Blue State Digital (BSD) are, today, being offered more than a decent office seats. BSD's reach extends beyond American politics to advocacy, policy, and cultural campaigns here and abroad.

Here's a look at some of the ways the firm that helped power Barack Obama to the White House is selling what it has learned since those Dean days. Through it all run the same simple but powerful threads. Tell stories. Make design a priority. Focus on people. Use video whenever possible. Build community. Treat your email list with great respect. And, in doing so, help to turn visions of how the world should be into how it is. Blue State Digital is busily working to figure out how well what has done to American politics translates in other realms and around the world...

Monday I was up at Harvard to give a talk to Nicco Mele's class at the Institute of Politics on "The Making of the President 2.0: How the Internet is Changing the Political Game." (The powerpoint is here.) While I was there, I was fortunate to get an hour with Marshall Ganz, who teaches public policy at the Kennedy School and is attached to the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations. Ganz is a giant in the field of community organizing, with seminal experience going back to the civil rights movement and working with Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. More important for the present moment, Ganz was the architect of Barack Obama's grassroots organizing juggernaut. He played a central role in the "Camp Obama" training sessions--three-day intensive workshops attended by something like 23,000 local organizers--and his teachings on the theory and practice of community organizing were widely influential on the campaign's local efforts.

The full interview is about 45 minutes long, and it's going to take me a little while to get it all up on the web. We covered a lot of ground, ranging from the role of the internet in supporting the campaign's organizing program to the debate over whether online community networks are a form of community organizing. I've excerpted a chunk from the middle here, because it's on the topic that everyone is thinking about: What next for the Obama movement?

Ganz makes three really important points: The first is that we've never had a president enter office with an organizing social movement attached to him, and there's no precedent for thinking about how the participants in that movement have a voice in his presidency. The second is that this movement isn't going away, and the critical question isn't "who's going to get the list" but how will this movement govern itself. The third, which is somewhat of an open secret, is that there is a group of organizers meeting in Chicago right now trying to figure this out, and Ganz believes that their deliberations should be more open. "I think it's important to create the public space for this kind of discussion," he told me. So, with that purpose in mind, here's the interview and a rough transcript below.