With the campaign behind them, Obama for America Technology alumni are scattered across the country — some still in Chicago, some making a new start in a new city, others still taking time off for travel. In interviews, some of these coders, designers, and product managers said that the campaign was a political break in a career otherwise spent in the tech sector. Others told me their time working for Obama has convinced them to focus on civic life. All of them expressed a connection to their campaign colleagues and to OfA's test-everything, data-driven organizing ethos that, they say, is likely to inform everything they do next. Read More

The point's been made again and again that the Obama campaign basically has a technology startup working in-house, but that's not all: Team Obama looks to want that startup to be able to handle its own full-service digital advertising, too. Read More

Nobody disputes that the Obama campaign needs to use all the tools at its disposal to mobilize a grassroots base that is not as active and energized, or at least not yet, as it was in 2008. What's at issue is how effective the campaign has been so far in doing so — and we'll all find out by November, to be sure. Read More

The Obama campaign is "poised" to unleash Dashboard, the campaign tool we've been hearing about in pieces here and there since November 2011, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel write. Read More

The Obama campaign is emailing people on its list who have yet to donate to the campaign, asking them to fill out a survey with whether they plan to donate at all — looking for another quick data win in its never-ending quest to put the right message in front of the right potential supporter at the right time.

The general secretary of the left-wing German Social Democratic Party (SPD) is visiting the Obama Campaign Headquarters today, according to a text message interview she conducted with her party. Andrea Nahles has been on a U.S. trip to Washington D.C. and Chicago for the past few days to discuss political communication with politicians, journalists and bloggers ahead of the American election. In the interview, she says her impression is that the Democrats are nervous, even though conditions are beginning to improve in a way that would benefit President Barack Obama. Read More

The Obama campaign has released a new app that lets supporters sign their friends up for physical mail from the president's re-election effort. Politico's Byron Tau spotted it first.

This is the latest use of the web to revamp what is in reality a years-old campaign practice. Postcards from friends on a campaign's behalf have been a tool in the toolkit for years, and there are riffs on this idea that involve even more high tech.