As the dust settles on the Democratic primary fight, I think more people are going to be turning their attention to understanding the significance of the new kind of political machine the Obama campaign has been building. Matt Stoller, one of my favorite netroots writers, has a great stab in this direction over on OpenLeft with a post he titled "Obama's Consolidation of the Party." I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions about Obama's dominating and remaking the Democratic Party, but there's surely huge potential in their blending of top-down message discipline, net-centric outreach, Alinsky-UFW-Ganz-inspired field work, Camp Obama trainings, Obama Organizing Fellows, and a new 50-state voter registration effort.

Whether Obama wins or loses in the fall, this network is going to be a game-changer. So I'm planning to spend more time digging in and writing about its internal dynamics, culture and leaders.

Here are my notes for the talk I'm about to give at Politics Web 2.0 on "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America.” (Caveat emptor, your experience may vary.)

Here are my notes on a very interesting talk by Rachel Gibson of the University of Manchester, titled "Trickle-up Politics? The Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on citizen participation." I think you'll find her overview and characterizations of politics before and during the web to be very helpful.

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for London, England, where I'll be speaking along with techPresident blogger Michael Turk at "Politics Web 2.0," a two-day international conference hosted by the University of London, Royal Halloway. The conference features 120 papers organised into 41 panels, with more than 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries, and is probably a bit more academic than most of the events I tend to go to these days. My talk is titled, "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America." What do you think I should cover?

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."

The open-sourcing of debate planning; the debate on the online Right; the demographics of the online Left; the ongoing decline of newspapers; another exploitative video; and whose website is winning the most attention...