During the 2008 presidential race, it seemed like "community organizing" came to stand as a proxy for the competing world views of the Democratic and Republican tickets. Barack Obama, of course, drew on his experience as a grassroots organizer in Chicago to explain his vision for an America where my fortunes and freedoms were inextricably linked to yours. And Sarah Palin, you'll remember, mocked Obama's community organizing resume to a rousing response at the Republican National Convention.

Obama went so far as to bake that world view into his MyBarackObama.com tools, empowering the humblest among us to create events designed to draw our communities together in support of candidacy.

One thing he didn't do, however: make much use of MeetUp, which played such a talked-about role in Howard Dean's 04 candidacy. But MeetUp has a plan to get back into the mix. MeetUp and the Huffington Post have teamed up to hand out about a half of million of "Hello, My Fellow American, My Name Is..." name tags to the crowds amassed in DC for tomorrow's presidential inauguration.

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.

In the midst of all the noise of RNC week, the Obama campaign quietly slipped out a Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool that might become a killer app come election day; Palin's dig at community organizing is fueling faith-based fundraising; McCain ramps up online ad spending but the gap between the campaigns remains; with earmarks in the air, we point you to a useful tool for tracking where federal dollars are being spent; and much, much more.

In the midst of all the noise of RNC week, the Obama campaign quietly slipped out a Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool that might become a killer app come election day; Palin's dig at community organizing is fueling faith-based fundraising; McCain ramps up online ad spending but the gap between the campaigns remains; with earmarks in the air, we point you to a useful tool for tracking where federal dollars are being spent; and much, much more.

The pushback against Sarah Palin's dig at community organizers seems to have legs; we look at how one email went from Wasilla, Alaska, out to the world at breathtaking speed; some conservatives find themselves having a tough time making the most of Digg; post-convention online buzz favors Obama over McCain, Palin over Biden; and a great deal more.