While this blog isn’t about politics, it’s interesting to learn how a political candidate in the USA is using both Basecamp and wikis to organise the campaign and the volunteers. And it was primarily the volunteers who asked for the wikis.

Below are a few heavily edited snippets, but read the whole article at: How the Barack Obama Campaign Uses Wikis to Organize Volunteers.

… organizing a campaign across a state the size of Texas, both in terms of number of people and geographical size is a daunting task.

…The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage “precinct captains” — volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state.

… Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals’ Basecamp.

… the idea to use collaboration software to manage precinct captains was actually something that bubbled up in the campaign from the grassroots volunteers who were out in the field.

…The specific appeal of Central Desktop’s wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster.

[Via Read/WriteWeb: How the Barack Obama Campaign Uses Wikis to Organize Volunteers.]

Does your organisation need to organise people? Basecamp has a free option — you could try it out. And there are plenty of free wikis around that you could experiment with.

Have you already had experience with Basecamp or wikis? Tell us your experiences in the comments.

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