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Before I begin, I wanted to thank Mike for inviting me to post here and share my my experiences at the NOI program. I'm a 17-year old from Santa Cruz, California, who will be cross posting these entries on my small progressive blog Got Democracy.

The New Organizing Institute was founded in the summer of 2005 by a group of campaign staffers that had experience doing grassroots mobilization in the '04 cycle, and realized that progressives need to seriously invest in training future young staffers in the technology aspect of campaigning. Their first "boot camp" was organized by Zach Exley and Judith Freeman in the winter of 2006. Earlier this year, my friend Barak Wouk and I were both accepted into the NOI's 8-day Summer Campaign Boot Camp from July 1st-8th in Washington DC.

Barak and I arrived in DC a few days early to explore the city and melt in the crippling heat and humidity we were forced into. But, yesterday things cooled down considerably as we made our way to George Washington University for the first day of the NOI Boot Camp. At 3:00 we arrived, and checked in to our dorm rooms along with the 60 other young trainees (mostly recent college grads). In the evening Zach Exley introduced the NOI program to us, gave his story of how he got involved in politics, and told us what he hopes we will bring into the political arena when we leave at the end of the week. It was an inspiring speech that got everyone fired up about the program and our ability to create change.

The main point of Zach's talk was that the internet has brought about a fundamental shift in the people, on a scale similar to the changes that occurred when writing, telephones, and televisions were each invented. He told us that he began his work in the organizing field shortly after college as a union organizer. After years of frustrating experiences and many defeats he quit that job and became a programmer. When George W. Bush first ran for president, Zach gained instant fame for a small parody site (GWBush.com) that went viral after the Bush campaign got nervous and blamed his site for Bush's cocaine rumors. The storm of attention that swirled around his site was only possible because of the internet. Zach then went on to tell the story of how the Dean campaign discovered the potential of this new medium, and compliantly revolutionized the way modern political campaigns use the internet. Apparently the decision to set high fund raising goals (as Joe Trippi advocated) was a dangerous risk that faced a lot of resistance. Zach stressed that tension within campaigns always happens and is a very important process. He asked us all to fight those battles to take greater risks, because progressives can only win when we are willing to take chances and raise expectations.

Then Zach explained how the mock campaign, a major part of the training, will function. The 60 trainees were split into groups based on colors. Then each group was randomly given a Simpsons character (or the one Family Guy character that was tossed in) which they now have to run a presidential campaign for. Each group will create unique websites that will be completely open to the public. The goal of the completion is to get as many sign-ups on our email lists as possible, and get as many people as we can to attend a Live Earth MoveOn party here in DC. I'm on the pink group, and our character for president is Stewie from Family Guy. It should get interesting.

More from the NOI training later this week...

I've been skeptical of the value of Second Life - as both a type of social network and more particularly as a campaign resource - for quite a while. It's never struck me as a place that is highly populated by a desirable audience that isn't reachable as part of another, larger (or niche) audience. And I've never seen the real value in it as anything other than a novelty.

Social Web guru Clay Shirky is putting stats to that claim. Any campaign interested in pursuing a Second Life strategy should read his recent article dissecting the hype that surrounds Second Life.

If we think of a user as someone who has returned to a site after trying it once, I doubt that the number of simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 regularly. If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the site breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events.

Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn't as currently advertised (and it isn't), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.

If campaigns really want to get into this game, I'd suggest they figure out a way to into the other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. The number of real users is astronomically higher, the bonds between users are knit into tighter communities, and there's probably a lot more fertile ground to be tilled.