Credit: Jumo.com

Chris Hughes, whom you may remember from such hits as orchestrating the Obama campaign's groundbreaking internal social network MyBarackObama, took the lid off of his new startup this morning. The full-fledged effort won't launch until the fall. But we're getting a peek at what's next for a person who stands pretty squarely at that nexus of technology's start-up culture (including as a co-founder of Facebook) and the brutality of politics.

It's called Jumo. The tagline for the project is "Together in Concert," and the aim seems to be to build a platform that more easily connects people who want to do good with other people who want to do good, and all them with resources to make good possible:

We’re announcing today that we’re building an online platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world. We believe we can leverage the participatory web to foster long-term engagement with the issues and organizations that are relevant to each individual. Jumo has the potential to unlock a great deal of time, skills, and financial resources previously unavailable to organizations around the world.

It's a little fascinating how, after the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, we saw the web vets from that race run off and start web strategy start-ups. Now we're seeing Obama vets starting movements. By the way, Jumo's hiring. And you can follow along with the action on Twitter.

Today we are publishing a techPresident special report on the first year of Organizing for America (OFA), drawing on new interviews with congressional staff in both parties, former Obama campaign staff, and 70 activists from the OFA grassroots. This report -- the most comprehensive review of OFA’s work to date -- is authored by The Nation’s Ari Melber, (www.arimelber.com) a longtime techPresident contributor who traveled with the Obama campaign in 2008. Barack Obama entered into office of President of the United States in January 2009 with an unprecedented base of digitally-networked supporters and volunteers. As we reach the one-year anniversary of OFA this weekend, this is an important time to have a detailed and open discussion of its work, and its future.

“Year One of Organizing for America; The Permanent Field Campaign in a Digital Age” can be viewed on Scribd, downloaded as a full PDF and read online at techPresident.com/ofayear1. To advance the discussion, we will post reaction and commentary on the report page, and we invite readers to engage on Twitter with the hashtag #OFAyr1.

We recommend you dig right into reading the primary source, but here are a few highlights...

January 14, 2010 -- Today we are publishing a techPresident special report on the first year of Organizing for America (OFA), drawing on new interviews with congressional staff in both parties, former Obama campaign staff, and 70 activists from the OFA grassroots. This report -- the most comprehensive review of OFA’s work to date -- is authored by The Nation’s Ari Melber, (www.arimelber.com) a longtime techPresident contributor who traveled with the Obama campaign in 2008. Barack Obama entered into office of President of the United States in January 2009 with an unprecedented base of digitally-networked supporters and volunteers. As we reach the one-year anniversary of OFA this weekend, this is an important time to have a detailed and open discussion of its work, and its future.

Read the report on Scribd or download the full PDF. (If you would like a bound copy of the report, you can order that here.)

Read "Year One of Organizing for America: The Permanent Field Campaign in a Digital Age"

• Foreword: Organizing Baselines
• Introduction: A New Permanent Campaign
• Section I: Community and Reform
• Section II: Reaction to OFA
• Section III: Discussion and Analysis
• Conclusion: 13 Million Emails Later
• Appendix: Methodology
• About The Author & Personal Democracy Forum

Read the report on Scribd or download the full PDF. (If you would like a bound copy of the report, you can order that here.)

More tidbits of new media goodness from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's book, Going Rogue. Oh wait, that's not right. This one is called Audacity to Win, and in it Plouffe's offers tasty bites from the innerworkings of the innovative campaign. There's a theme: new media decisions often came from the top down and were intimately tied to the Obama campaign's strategic roadmap, and the campaign's leadership was willing to stand up and vigorously defend unconventionality even in the face of naysayers. Here's Plouffe on how the decision to announce Joe Biden's selection as VP via text message went down:

Joe Rospars came into my office one afternoon with the idea of telling our supporters first, before the media or politicos. "While our e-mail list is growing exponentially, our mobile list could use a big kick start," he explained. "Why don't we ask people to sign up for a text alert? We can tell them that they'll be the first to know who Barack picks as a VP.

The idea appealed to me on two levels. First, it was consistent with other key junctures in our campaign -- reporting fund-raising numbers, the decision to limit our primary debates, opting out of the public funding system -- where we had communicated first directly to our supporters...

Second, this was a great way to grow our text-messaging list. Rospars was right about the increasing gap in our contact figures; our email list was now over 6 million, but our list of mobile numbers was in the low six figures. Making a big announcement by text would ignite a spark and juice the latter number.

Reflections upon the Obama campaign's design work? A crowdsourced fundraising effort? Total techPres bait, but Obama campaign design director Scott Thomas is involved in an intriguing quest. Wanting to chronicle the art and design that both was created by the Obama for America campaign and developed organically by supporters, but to put out a book with considerable production values, Thomas decided to avoid traditional publisher, go DIY, and fundraise himself for the production of Designing Obama -- using Kickstarter, what Thomas calls an "Obama-like fundraising model."

The finished product is set to come in an 360-pages of hard-bound art and commentary.

Think few people would prepay $10 for a digital version, or $50 or more for a print version of a book they haven't seen yet? With 13 days to go, 883 backers have contributed $57,000 of the $65,000 target Thomas set for the first run of the book.

Joe Rospars might seem like a household name in the households occupied by those of us who hang around these parts. But Google the name of the Obama campaign's new media director -- as Rospars himself claims never to do, in this solid new National Journal profile by Amy Harder -- and you turn up just 30,000 hits. Compare that to David Plouffe, who, despite never ascending to Karl Rove or Joe Trippi-like levels of campaign manager fame, still returns ten time the Google results as Rospars.

Rospars, by intention, remained a force largely behind the scenes during the presidential run, despite architecting the very way millions of Americans engaged with the Obama campaign. Writes Harder:

Every campaign needs a "cast of characters" supporters can connect to, Rospars says. Obama, Michelle Obama and Joe Biden starred. [Sam] Graham-Felsen spoke to supporters every day through his blog. Some supporters' e-mail inboxes were filled with more messages from Plouffe than from their own families. But Rospars was most instrumental by being least overtly involved. His voice was loudest when the voices of others were heard. He's the invisible host responsible for making conversation easy.

Despite the novelty of being a new media guru, Rospars did many of the very traditional things a good manager does: build a exceptional team, set a clear and strong vision, and then fight for the resources necessary to get the job done.

The profile also provides some insights into why Rospars didn't follow many of his campaign colleagues to the White House:

Rospars admits to being only "vaguely interested in how to make government more transparent. It's not where my heart and passion is." But he's still rooting for the conversation between Obama and his supporters -- a conversation Rospars himself helped enable -- to continue. "I have a somewhat personal emotional investment in the relationship," Rospars said. His firm advises Organizing for America and Rospars wants to help cultivate the network, albeit not to the extent that he did during the campaign. "The relationships didn't end on Election Day," Rospars said. "We built those relationships in a way that it was never really about Election Day or a candidate. It was about a common sense of purpose and what the people wanted the country to be."

The full profile is well worth a read, and you can find it here. Also check out Ari Melber's own reflections on the piece and its subject.

Jose Antonio Vargas has been covering the intersection of politics and technology for the Washington Post since February of last year, and he's got a pre-New Year's wrap up of what he's learned along the way...Some of the digs against Digg, the community-ranking site, is that it's biased against women and weighted in favor of liberals. On the latter, enter #diggcons...MoveOn's Eli Pariser is out with a nice Washington Post op-ed laying out the case for why a President Barack Obama will need to tap into the wisdom and passions of the electorate if he's truly going to make transformational change on health care, the Iraq war, and energy policy -- the issues at the top of both his and the American people's agendas...and more.

(Laura is the deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Social Justice at New York University Law School. We're thrilled to have her analysis of how we should best think about a critical component of this election cycle's fundraising landscape: small donors and small donations. -- the editors)

Ever
since the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) first published an analysis
of the Obama
small donor numbers

several weeks ago, the ink has been flowing. CFI's central claims
-- that small donor influence on Obama's fundraising is a "myth"
and that the percentage of small donations in Obama's cash haul (26%)
does not differ from Bush's 2004 numbers (25%) -- made a big splash.
Besides the New
York Times, MyDD and The
Politico, Bob Bauer, Obama's election law attorney, Rick Hasen, a law professor, and Brad Smith, a campaign finance opponent, all
weighed in. On the heels of the flap, Michael Malbin, the study's
author, defended
his conclusions

as based on established categories in campaign finance analysis.

Much
of the discussion in the campaign finance community centered on whether
it is fair, in
a long election season, to characterize the mid-range donors who gave
multiple gifts that put them over the $200 mark (whom CFI calls "repeaters")
as something other than a "small" donor. Malbin's defense of
CFI's line-drawing centers around the indisputable fact that $200
is the reporting threshold for donors under federal law.

But
whatever the nomenclature, this complaint with CFI's act of unmasking
misses the forest for the trees. We may just be counting the wrong
things altogether.

On election day, 2008, the Obama campaign experimented with a new system designed to fix one of the strategic problems that can plague election efforts: not knowing which of the potential voters field organizers work so hard to identify as supporters have actually made it to their polling place when it finally counts. Called "Project Houdini," the campaign planned to used technology to vanish voters from its highly-cultivated contact lists in real time. If it could pull of the trick, the campaign could gain a strategic advantage by not wasting critical resources (people, vans, etc.) to pulling in votes that had already been banked. Newsweek's Special Election Project described what Project Houdini aimed to do:

The Obama campaign's New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a "flusher"—the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station.

But, while there's still digging to be done, it's clear that in some critical swing states Houdini didn't quite work as planned. More importantly, when it collapsed, it took down some critical reporting channels with it.

The Democratic side of the House Energy and Commerce Committee under John Dingell (for now) has issued a 110-page condemnation of the reign of Bush-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin...We know -- you've been dying for a mobile tool that tells you up-to-the-minute federal stats on the UV index in your city. You're in luck!...If you pay attention to these things, you get the sense that no one in the Obama campaign ever really did a head count in its much-celebrated Internet shop...and more.