Dan Langer, the Obama campaign's national data director, and Luke Peterson, data architect for Obama for America, presented a facinating discussion of how the Obama campaign used data-mining techniques to cultivate record numbers of donors and voters by cross-referencing hundreds of disparate data sources. This data was made available to the grass roots organizers throughout the campaign.

Some incredible facts and figures:

One technique that the Obama campaign used was to allow people to be the first notified by text message when Obama selected his running mate. All they had to do was register their phone number and zip code. Then, when Obama was in, say Cleveland, each registered user within 50 miles would get a text message saying that Obama was going to be in Cleveland tomorrow. There would be a special entrance reserved for mobile users and they only had to show the text message as their ticket. This is an excellent example of using online data to get people involved in an offline fashion.

Another example is that when someone registered on the Obama website, the user's information was emailed directly to the local campaign organizer so that te newly registered user could be phoned within minutes of registering.

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