Obama's Brain Trust

A profile of Sen Barack Obama's top aides including high-tech entrepreneur Julius Genachowski, the man behind the campaign's unprecedented use of high technology to empower grass-roots activists and helped to churn out campaign contributions. Although Obama is far from a techie, in Genachowski he found a personal Internet evangelist, someone who convinced him that the Web had powerful implications for his core ideas about empowerment and connecting people. Genachowski persuaded the campaign to hire a chief technology officer from the private sector, as well as a new-media director from the political realm. This cross-pollination of the political and new-media worlds continued with the hire of one of the wunderkind founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, whose unofficial campaign title is "Online Organizing Guru." With reassurance from Genachowski, the campaign has learned to embrace the chaos that goes along with empowerment. Genachowski is quick to point out that credit for Obama's online machine goes to the campaign team that spent 15-hour days building it. But the vision was undeniably his. From the beginning he was insistent that the campaign invest in tools that were professionally built and that could scale along with the campaign -- no matter how big it got. His philosophy was simple: "If we don't build it, they won't come." He credits Plouffe for taking the leap of faith required to invest, on the front end, in pricey technology with no guarantee of return, and in ramping up the investment as the tools began to prove their worth.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/21470304/obamas_brain_trust/