Sunday afternoon. I am at a friend’s house in Washington DC. Yesterday, I did a training at the New Organizing Institute. This is “a unique grassroots training and research program created by experienced online organizers and technology professionals in politics in conjunction with MoveOn.org”.

Over 700 people applied to be part of their first training. They accepted 40 whom they split up into six teams. Each team will build a campaign for a fictitious candidate. I trained one team in setting up a campaign website using CivicSpace. For those who don’t know, one of my various ventures is to set up low end campaign websites through SmartCampaigns.

Generally speaking, the forty students were young and energetic. They had various levels of campaign experience and various levels of technology experience. We worked well into the night setting up campaign websites and I hope I will be able to link to some of the sites soon.

One of the discussions that some of the trainers had was about how some traditional campaign trainings don’t touch the Internet at all. They think it isn’t important. They think that Internet Outreach should simply be part of the IT operations. At the other end of the spectrum are those that get involved with Internet Outreach as some sort of end in and of itself and forget that the whole idea is to convince voters to support your candidate and then get those voters to the polls.

The N.O.I. training seems to particularly understand the importance of using the Internet to get the message out and use that to get boots on the ground. It will be interesting to see how the week progresses for this first group of trainees, but my sense is that people coming out of this training program will be incredibly valuable resources to any good progressive grassroots/netroots campaigns. Zack Exley has a blogpost about a job fair for the trainees on Friday. If you’re in DC and want to meet some great new online organizers, please check it out.

As a final note, it seems like this is part of the answer to the decreasing civic involvement noted in Bowling Alone and that trainings like this are essential to defending democracy here at home.