During the campaign, Obama's aides relentlessly recruited voters into  several networks at a time. More than a million people asked for  campaign text messages on their cellphones. Two million joined MyBO, a  website fusing social networking with volunteer work, while more than  5 million supported Obama's profile on social sites like Facebook.  Most famously, 13 million voters signed up for regular e-mails,  fundraising pitches and other communications. On election day, a  staggering 25 percent of Obama voters were already directly linked to  him--and one another--through these networks. Campaigns largely  dissolve after elections, but this infrastructure remains intact.

Presidents have always needed intermediaries to rally their base, from  the press to party machinery. But Obama has a direct line--or several-- to his most active supporters. "We've never seen anything like this,"  says Micah Sifry, who runs the Internet politics site  TechPresident.com. Obama has "the ability to directly reach millions  of people in a very targeted way [and to] activate support district by  district." Since the election his aides have been experimenting with  how to use the networks, for governance and for postcampaign  politicking.

On the governance side, the transition team is recruiting people to  monitor transition meetings, pose public questions to the staff and  share input on selected policies, starting with healthcare. Twenty  thousand people participated in the first user-generated press  conference, which allowed the public to write and rank questions. The  bailout, civil liberties and marijuana legalization were popular  topics. The transition team's Internet director, Macon Phillips, said  the queries "weren't only ones you'd expect from supporters, which is  a good thing." Phillips did Internet outreach for the campaign, but he  stressed that the objectives have shifted. "In the campaign we were  organizing people. Now it's more conversational, trying to listen and  engage people that weren't engaged in the campaign."

The political track is more complicated. A few people still gather at  the old Chicago campaign headquarters to draft e-mails and plan  volunteer events. The e-mail list could have used a break--7,000  messages went out during the campaign--but the focus is on maintaining  momentum. E-mails with announcements, videos, events and donation  requests keep pouring out of BarackObama.com. But what is  BarackObama.com now? So far, it feels like a campaign without an  election. In December supporters met at 4,000 house parties and  reported back on the top issues discussed. At one gathering in  Brooklyn, the twenty middle-aged attendees were upbeat but unclear on  the meeting's purpose. Volunteers posted hundreds of photos from the  events on Obama's Flickr account, featuring diverse and enthusiastic  gatherings that ranged from a handful of people to several hundred.  Beyond volunteer labor, the postcampaign organization will have a  budget and paid staff, according to a senior field operative who spoke  at Rootscamp, an organizing conference in Washington. Some aides refer  to this operation as "Obama for America 2.0," though the name has not  yet stuck, and no one knows exactly what it will do.

Many Obama supporters want the network to turn from electoral politics  to lobbying. After the election, half a million activists responded to  an e-mail survey about the road ahead. The most popular goal was to  help the administration "pass legislation," according to campaign  manager David Plouffe. If Obama's initiatives stall in Congress, these  activists will presumably back him instead of their local  representatives. Combining the White House bully pulpit with  constituent lobbying could have a dramatic effect on Obama's  presidency. Previous presidents have gone over the heads of Congress  by appealing to the public, of course, but never with a parallel whip  operation targeting representatives in their backyards. If the  pressure works, the experiment could even alter the conventional  balance of power. After all, citizens typically lobby the legislature  for their own policy goals--not on behalf of another branch of  government. While George W. Bush boosted executive power by routing  around Congress, Obama may fortify executive power by mobilizing  citizens to roll right over Congress.

Top-down legislative advocacy, however, is not the only aspiration for  members of Obama's network. The campaign thrived on bottom-up  participation, with volunteers taking charge of projects, organizing  themselves and sometimes challenging Obama's positions. "There's been  a lot of hand-wringing about what Obama is going to do with his e-mail  list, but that has it a bit backward," says David Dayen, who writes  the progressive blog D-Day. "It's really, What is the list going to do  with Obama?" Marshall Ganz, the famed United Farm Workers organizer  who advised the Obama and Dean campaigns, also argues that the network  should not be treated as a list to be managed. Obama won "through the  creation of a movement," Ganz observed in a recent YouTube interview,  but that does not mean its members can be directed from Washington.  "Can he lead it from the presidency?" Ganz asked. "Probably not."

Yochai Benkler, who wrote the Internet bible The Wealth of Networks,  is advocating an empowered civic activism for the Obama era. At a  December summit for Internet politics at Harvard, where he and Ganz  teach, Benkler warned the Obama staff in attendance to avoid focusing  solely on "mobilization for the next battle." Now there is a special  opportunity, he stressed, to serve the "core of democracy" by  fostering relevant "participatory forums for people to set their own  agenda."

This vision is more ambitious than responding to surveys or submitting  questions to the administration. To shift presidential priorities,  network activists must by definition reach beyond the boundaries of  the incumbent agenda. Obama's supporters will have to decide whether  fulfilling the movement sometimes means pushing the president, or if  such efforts will always be degraded as "counterproductive" by the  narrow metrics of tactical politics. In other words, are any issues  bigger than Obama?

"Obama's technologically networked supporters are unlikely to desert  him or pressure him very hard, wanting so much to believe that the  'change' mantra will mean something other than swapping Hillary for  Condi," predicts John Stauber, a netroots activist and critic. "While  Obama became the candidate of choice for most on the left, the fact  that he is well to the right of his supporters remains a challenge to  his base."

One precedent for more participatory agenda-setting occurred this past  summer, when Obama backed Bush's domestic-spying bill. Supporters used  Obama's social networking portal to protest the move. Thousands of  activists discussed the issue through direct e-mails, thanks to the  campaign's tools, and they developed goals together. The protest  swiftly became the largest self-organized group on the site at the  time. That growth, in turn, drew widespread attention and a direct  response from Obama, sans media filter, to his critical supporters.  While he did not change his vote, the effort clearly forced a civil  liberties argument onto the agenda--a result that formal, funded  organizations often fail to achieve. "Traditionally, unless a citizen  group convinced the media to cover their events, a candidate or  representative wouldn't necessarily know about them," notes Sam Graham- Felsen, the Obama campaign's official blogger. Based on visibility  alone, Obama's network can play a significant role in pushing him to  address issues beyond the choices presented by the media and formal  interest groups.

The protest group's evolution, however, also shows how hard it is to  maintain a decentralized pressure network. The campaign's top-down  networks never stopped growing, but the protest group's e-mail list  has fallen to one-third its original size. About thirty members are  organizing a new push for the inauguration, but they have not regained  traction with many supporters, blogs or the press. Jon Pincus, a  social-network activist and early group leader, believes similar  efforts can influence the administration if there are conflicts on  core issues like Iraq or torture. "During the campaign these efforts  could be centered primarily on MyBarackObama," he said. "But now you'd  probably have to work across several other social networks, using MyBO  as only one of the nodes in the network-of-networks."

Meanwhile, the self-organized groups that were built to elect Obama  are still talking to one another. "A lot of the homemade groups on  MyBarackObama are still updating and sending out e-mails about what's  going on," says Kevin Flynn, who worked on the campaign's blogging  team in Chicago. "I still get eight e-mails a day from grassroots  groups," he told me in late December. While they were not created for  protest, some of these networks could morph into hubs to pressure  Obama. Take the student network, one of the largest groups on the  site. During the campaign it held 19,633 grassroots events, raised  more than $1.7 million and hosted a constant stream of many-to-many  communication through more than 170,000 blog entries. As this article  went to press, members were posting criticism of Obama for inviting  Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration.

These networks should not be defined, however, only by whether they  take orders or try to give them. Beyond their orientation toward  Obama, millions of citizens are now more primed to activate and lead  one another. A whopping 10 percent of the survey respondents even said  they want to run for office. Now they have a good model for how to do  it.

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