I already reported on Obama having his web site ready to publish the day after his win, but it seems as if it took the media a week to catch up. Yesterday on National Public Radio I heard about how well Obama used the Internet to mobilize campaigners and how he can use the same tactics to get the word out to the people and the people’s words to him.

I notice on his new Change.gov page that he has a place where visitors can offer feedback and ideas in text, documents of video format. (Quick aside: I think a bunch of us should get together at the Blandin Broadband Conference to create rural broadband videos to post on the site!)

It will be great to see how the technology-tools that helped to mobilize Obama’s team help him mobilize the citizenry to ask not what their country can text for them but what they can text for their country. I think it worked for Obama in a way that it wouldn’t work for someone else because he (and his team) understand grassroots first and technology second. It’s a perfect marriage.

While we’re waiting to see to what happens, I think we can take a look at what has already been successful and use those tools in our own lives – today I’m thinking about using technology in nonprofits – but tomorrow I could be thinking about it from a corporate perspective. (Another aside – I don’t think we’ll have to wait long – people are predicting technology changes in the first 100 days.)

A week or so ago I met with Trisha Hasbargen from the Minnesota Jaycee’s. They are an organization with many local chapters. Being from St Paul I associate them with Haunted Houses – but each community has its own memories. They are volunteer organization of mainly young people (18-40) who do good works. They self-manage projects in the community. This year’s project manager selects and mentors next year’s manager. So it’s a great way to build local leadership capacity.

Trisha works with the Statewide organization. Each chapter is pretty autonomous, which is great except that there are resources within the community that are underused. There is excess capacity in some communities, while others need help. Also with the autonomy the mission and the message of the whole organization is getting a little lost. What they need are some communication tools – and that’s what we talked about. How could they use social networking tools to unify the chapter and members or at least lead to communication of the mission and message and collaboration when desirable.

So for the Jaycee’s we talked using the tools. I suggested that they could start small and build – to be prepared to make some mistakes but to learn from them. Also I noted that if the statewide organization didn’t take the lead one of the chapters or members probably would – and that would be hard to un-do.

For communities, especially rural communities, I think these stories are (possibly) interesting for two reasons. First because I think many communities are in a place similar to the Jaycee’s in that they would benefit from having a way to communicate quickly with their constituents. Second, because they can both learn from Obama’s campaign – whether you love him or are learning to love him you can learn from his successful use of technology. He reached out and found young people online and mobilized them by reaching them online.