Business, Featured - Written Wednesday, June 4, 2008 by Don Tapscott - 7 Comments

Obama’s victory and the power of wikinomics

I’m sitting in the airport lounge in Madrid, having just finished a fascinating conversation with Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prize winning economist) who happened to be sitting next to me. We (of course) were discussing the Obama campaign and what’s next.

We have both followed Barack Obama’s rise from political unknown to democratic party nominee with great interest – and have both written about it (you can see my previous blog posts here and here). Obama’s accomplishment is nothing short of extraordinary, and we agreed that his embrace of the power of mass collaboration and the Net Generation that was the difference.

I think Peter Leyden put it best (as quoted in Andrew Sullivan’s article Barack Obama is the master of the new Facebook politics):

“What’s amazing is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model – she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.”

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