David Plouffe is out with an email to Organizing for America's massive list, calling on Obama supporters to "regroup, refocus, and re-engage on the vital work ahead." The focal point of his missive: to attend State of the Union "watch parties" organized by OFA members around the country.

One question that a number of people have raised in response to my post on The Obama Disconnect is essentially, "What's your alternative? What should the Obama team have done to keep the new political movement it had spawned going as a force for change? And how could they have better reconciled Obama's role as president of the whole country with his role as leader of a political organization beholden to him?" That's absolutely a fair question. Here's what I think could have been done...

Where Organizing for America is concerned, pushing a porky (though perhaps necessary) stimulus bill can never be a movement - or rival a Presidential campaign.

But here's something that can: universal health care for every American.

• There's a fuss being made about President Barack Obama's refusal to allow a video from House Minority Leader John Boehner to stand as a response to the President's first video address while in office...
• After the new WhiteHouse.gov launched, a section marked "Pool Reports" generated words of approval about a more open and transparent White House press experience. It could have been a true game changer. But...
• In a press briefing yesterday, press secretary Robert Gibbs said simply "our email system is not working so well"...
• And even more.

If you're on the Obama campaign email list, by now you've probably received a message alerting you to a special message from President-elect Barack Obama announcing the formation of "Organizing for America," the continuation of the organization that was built during his 2008 campaign.

No president has ever entered office with an organized social movement at his side, with the ability to reach millions of his supporters instantaneously and in as targeted a way as he wants. Nor have we ever been as networked to each other, with the ability to connect laterally by our own interests, as we are today.

It's interesting, then, how Obama's announcement papers over this tension. On the one hand, he says he needs his supporters' "help," that they will "drive" the organization and "must lead the way." Sounds great. On the other hand, he gives no details other than "you'll be receiving more information in the next few days about this organization" and that it will be "partnering" with the DNC. The rest is TBD. More below...

News continues to dribble out of Chicago on the future of Obama for America. First, Obama blogger Christopher Hass says there are now some 4,000 house parties occurring this weekend across the country to foster discussion of the movement's future--a healthy jump from a week ago. Second, attendees at last weekend's summit meeting in Chicago have received the following memo by email, which they've been urged to share widely. A copy made its way to my in-box and I reprint it below:

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...

While most of the country's attention is focused on the transition underway in Washington, another vitally important transition is taking place right now in Chicago. I'm referring, of course, to the future of the Obama movement and network, or what some organizers refer to as "OFA2" (as in, Obama for America II). Thanks to reporting by Peter Wallsten in the Los Angeles Times, we know that "This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit at a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan."

What exactly is going on? The Obama people are saying very little. For a team that has been refreshingly open about the transition in Washington, the transition to OFA2, which seems to be de facto centered in Chicago, has been a totally top-down, one-way affair.

Yes, the Obama political team has been asking for input from its supporters about the future of OFA2. But what kind of guidance can isolated individuals and disconnected house parties give, other than vague affirmations of the need for "change" and their desire to pitch in? (The suggested agenda for the hosts of these meetings, as posted on the Obama website, is also mostly focused on each group determining its own priorities, rather than being part of a national conversation about the future of the Obama grassroots movement.) And how motivating can it be to participate in a one-way process, especially when the internet makes multiway communication and collective deliberation so energizing and empowering? That's the question; let's dig into the details after the jump.

The folks who gave us ObamaCTO.org, which has attracted thousands of participants in a conversation about the priorities for Obama's Chief Technology Officer, have branched out and added a new forum for debating options for the future of Obama's movement. It's early in the process, and as I reported yesterday, organizers are meeting in Chicago now to try to hammer out the answer to this question. On http://ideas.obamacto.org/pages/obama_movement you can add your own suggestions and vote on the ones already there. This could get interesting...

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.