Credit: iTunes Store

One step closer to the dream of canvassers everywhere to have a two-way, digital, portable voter file in their pocket is MiniVAN Touch, the just-released iPhone app version of the Voter Activation Network data program used to power a great deal of Democratic campaigns and the field organizing efforts of a wide range of progressive groups. The target audience: existing VAN clients, as it requires users to already have a way to log into the VAN.

"We definitely feel this has a broader audience than the Palm app it replaced," VAN new media director Mike Sager tells me, "because it is so easy to use and troubleshoot. We think lots of candidates themselves will carry the app when they go door to door."

Are we nearing the promise land of the paperless campaign? Perhaps not quite yet, but Sager says that the iPhone version of VAN can at least cut down on the vast amounts of time and effort that can get wasted during the course of a campaign's pounding of the pavement or working of a crowd. "The app is dramatically more efficient than walking with paper lists," says Sager, "as it eliminates all the follow up data entry -- press one button, and your contacts are recorded in VAN."

The Hill's Kim Hart has the story on Facebook's run for attorney general in California. Okay, so technically, it's Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly who is in the race, but Kelly concedes that he's well known as "the Facebook guy." His website is, as Hart notes, awfully Facebooky. And as the company's point person on privacy (and a public face for an industry that didn't even really exist a decade ago), he's been working with attorneys general in all fifty states -- putting him in a good position to know both sides of the policy debate on some of the more cutting edge issues a California attorney general is likely to face.

That said, Kelly says that he hasn't really embraced the idea of integrating the social tools he knows well and the digital megaphones he has before him into his statewide race. "You have to appreciate," Kelly told Hart, "that the cadence of a campaign is just important online as it is off."

Word is the Voter Activation Network -- better known as the VAN or, by those who know it well, simply VAN, and used by many a Democratic candidate to both hold and slice-and-dice voter data -- is buying a new labor-focused firm in the hopes of both bringing some powerful new tools into its toolshed and prepping for what it expects to be an Obama-era resurgence in union membership. From the announcement...

This morning, the Harvard Internet & Politics conference continues with two "deep dives" into the McCain and Obama campaigns. We continue to operate under Chatham House Rules, so the following liveblog will remain unattributed, but the speakers in these sessions played a role in the campaigns. This second morning session is about the Obama campaign.

Some information is starting to filter out of this past weekend's "summit" in Chicago of about 300 key organizers from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign (evenly divided between regional field directors, field organizers, and team leaders). Details after the jump...

They'd Check the "It's Complicated" Box; The Oppositional Approach to Getting from Here to Five Million; Transition's Tech Team Taps Beltway and Beyond; Government Guide to Marijuana (Vendors); Nanobama, the Microscopic President; DC's Apps Contest Names Winners; Progressives' Annual Participatory Debrief; and more.

The morning of November 4, 2008 found me — like thousands of others all across the nation — rushing from door to door the final phase of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort. In those pre-dawn hours in rural New Hampshire, the fate of the election came down to the mundane work of footsoldiers armed with low-tech (yet high-gloss) door hangers and paper walksheets. But only this literal last mile was low-tech. Everything leading up to this moment was built on a solid, database-driven foundation. And so it’s easy to imagine how the mechanics of campaigning might evolve over the next four years.

It's late and it's Yom Kippur, so I'm going to be brief: Go read all of Zack Exley's detailed field report on "The New Organizers, Part 1: Obama's neighborhood teams and the power of inclusion and respect." Exley, one of the country's consummate NEW political organizers, who started out as a labor organizer and then got in early on internet-powered organizing first with his satirical GWBush.com, followed by stints with MoveOn.org, the Dean campaign and the Kerry campaigns, has written a powerful and convincing depiction of the people-powered, hyper-networked engine purring away under Obama's hood.

I just got off the phone with "notq," a Twitterer who served as an information hub during this week’s St. Paul protests around the Republican National Convention, as I detailed yesterday.

As a point person for on-the-ground information, notq served as a node through which a great deal of tear gas notices, police instructions, and tactical information flowed. But here’s the rather remarkable thing: he was doing it all from Tempe, Arizona, some 1,800 miles away from the Twin Cities. notq, a.k.a. Nathan Oyler, is a politically active Linux administrator opposed to the Iraq War and the Bush Administration. He was a central point through which critical information passed via Twitter -- and he wasn't even there.

"I was dispatch," he says.

Some voters may still be working out their reaction to Sarah Palin's hard charging speech last night, but her address and its sustained needling of Barack Obama certainly won insta-plaudits on the online right; Former Reagan aide Peggy Noonan's had a hit mic incident yesterday when an MSNBC microphone seemed to catch her off-air calling the McCain campaign "over" after its Palin pick, and the clip went what can only be called really, really viral; Palin's dig at community organizers in last night's speech ("I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities") has set the left-leaning blogosphere aflame; and much, much more.