The discussion on the right over the past few weeks, with regards to the state of the center-right movement online, has been fascinating to say the least. The way the Obama team took the most successful offline community organization campaign our country as ever seen and blended it in to a flawless online infrastructure, that in turn translated in to offline political success, has left many on the right scratching their heads.

Often times, especially over the last few years, the right has gotten far too caught up in the ?we’re behind online? chant. In doing so, we’ve completely been ran over by a true collaborative movement that we don’t understand, nor do many of us seem willing to explore.

Last month, while speaking on a panel at AFP Summit in Washington, D.C., I caused a stir with a few friends of mine in political circles by claiming that we aren’t at all behind online. In fact, one could argue that we’re running right alongside the left when it comes to technology and the tools it provides.

Let’s take a look at some of the sites and tools on both sides.

Daily KOS vs. RedState
Daily KOS is still THE MOST read political blog on the web. It’s a diary site where anyone can start a blog and throw their voice in to the mix. Well, RedState not only provides the same platform, RedState provides a BETTER platform.

Indeed, RedState is clean, crisp, well designed, 2.0, and on and on and on. I would argue that apart from traffic, RedState is a much better site than Daily KOS.

Act Blue vs. Slate Card
Act Blue raises millions of dollars for liberal campaigns. Slate Card, a new system, but one that is state-of-the-art with a plethora of features that should be embraced by the entire right online, hasn’t been able to come anywhere close to the level of fundraising currently enjoyed by Act Blue.

Digg.com vs. R-igg.com
Love or hate Digg, you have to admit that liberal eActivists have been able to pass around enormous web influence using Digg.com. If you’ve been on the front page of Digg, and I have, you know that a link there is worth at least 15,000 unique visits within a few hours.

The left has been able to master the art of finding a small liberal blog with 20 or so visitors a day, and almost instantly, using Digg, take that blogger to stardom. I mean, depending on the title, the time of day, and the amount of Diggs, a front page story can result in thousands of new feed subscribers, hundreds of new bookmarks, and tens of thousands of new readers.

And while Digg.com isn’t necessarily ?liberal owned?, the left has dominated the Digg community and the right has done very little as a collaborative effort to respond. When will we realize that we too can be VERY competitive in this realm?

We actually DO have a site on our own site that uses the Digg philosophy of crowd powered news over at R-igg.com. R-igg was developed by a brilliant young mind of the right in Aaron Marks. But there has been no collaborative movement to help it reach critical mass. Why not? How hard can it be for 500 center-right eActivists to collaborate and help this Beta site rise in predominance?

Answer = not hard at all. All it takes is mass collaboration.

There are many, MANY more sites and tools that I could talk about here, but hopefully you get the point. And that point is that we have the technology know how on our side. We understand the tools, we get social media (just look at #dontgo and how it started on Twitter, for example), and we know what our political goal is.

Why can’t we achieve political success as an online movement then?
In my opinion, it is because we fail in the collaboration realm. But before I can explain why I feel that is, let’s look at some efforts from our friends on the left.

Twitter Vote Report
I had the privilege of being on the Google Group as well as the wiki for the Twitter Vote Report Project. Mad props go out to the collaborative effort it took to develop this resource, and being in early on helped me realize just how badly we’ve missed the boat.

About a week before election night, if you were to visit the Twitter Vote Report website you would have seen… wait for it… nothing. It wasn’t there. There were a few people working on putting a blueprint together, but for the most part, it had yet to come in to existence.

Then, all of a sudden, and seemingly out of nowhere, the beta site goes live. The very first design, as it went live, was basic and almost looked like a blank canvass. But, the second this group saw the project and realized the vision behind it, they dropped EVERYTHING and attacked the project like a pack of wolves.

They instantly had a VOLUNTEER team developing code using JSON and the Twitter API, they had developers writing code for the iPhone application, they had coders cleaning up the site framework and streamlining the system, they had graphic designers working to design a visually appealing and professional template, they had organizers building teams of grassroots ?promoters?, and they had groups/organizations coming on as sponsors to help spread the word about the project.

They built this all for FREE. Then, they let us all use it… for FREE!

Mass collaboration designed, developed, and marketed a major web activism project in less than a week, with no cost attached.

Now I know the argument many on the right will provide because I’ve heard it time and time again. ?But I don’t work for free… I have to put food on the table?. No offense to my friends on the right who do this for a living, but that sort of thinking is archaic and outdated. A dying frame of mind, if you will.

Just because you work for free does not mean you don’t get paid. As a Capitalist, I’m all about making money, but I believe the financial reward is there when I least expect it.

Let’s look at a recent post by Seth Godin, a guy whom I’ve studied for years and have great respect for in the marketing world.

Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.

The essence is this: connect.

But is it really that simple? YES! In fact, I actually HIRED a guy who was working on some coding for the collaborative project mentioned above to help me code a script last week. I never would have known he existed, nor would I have seen his work had I not watched him work to build a powerful FREE tool for the online community.

Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value.

* Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.
* Connect job hunters with jobs.
* Connect information seekers with information.
* Connect teams to each other.
* Connect those seeking similar.
* Connect to partners and those that can leverage your work.
* Connect people who are proximate geographically.
* Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.
* Connect like-minded people into a movement.
* Connect people buying with people who are selling.

Connect people and you create value. Did you catch that?

It used to be that if a piece of software costs $500.00, it MUST have value, right? But now FREE software is becoming some of the best software available. Wordpress anyone?

But… but, how can the folks behind Wordpress make money by giving away their product for FREE??? They create value.

And because of that value, because of their ability to organize a collaborative effort to create a powerful tool for free, they’ve been given MILLIONS of dollars to work on other projects.

Back to the right’s inability to collaborate
Now, back to our current state of the right when it comes to building online infrastructure. I can tell you from personal experience that almost every highly skilled tech guy on the right will respond one way when I ask for help with something related to tech… “what’s your budget?”

I’ll tell you what my budget it… ZERO. I’m not an organization. I don’t have donors, and thanks to extremely high taxes, I have very little money. How on earth can I afford $10,000 to have a massive social media community developed?

I can’t.

In fact, the #dontgo Movement is an all volunteer movement. We have no money. Heck… I’m now about $700 out of pocket to get the site you’re reading and the other various projects of #dontgo up and running.

Fortunately for us, there are guys like Allen Fuller of Flat Creek Strategies and Aaron Marks of Three Group, LLC who get this and are helping us in every way they can, but most on the right instantly send me a financial “proposal” when I ask for help.

So the first problem we have is that the people on our side who get and understand the technology and tools, aren’t willing to blend minds in a collaborative effort to help build community style networks and social media tools.

Like I said, it isn’t that we don’t understand the technology of the internet; Rather, it’s that we don’t understand what needs to happen in order to make it truly succeed.

Our second problem, which also involves collaboration, is the pride in taking credit for online success. The elites of the right online are so caught up in getting credit for online political success that they would rather not see success than to see someone else get credit for it.

There is an intense level of “I didn’t think of this so I won’t be working with it” going on in the right. I’m not going to mention names because I’m not writing this to start a fight, but trust me… it’s out there. And it’s a BIG problem.

At some point, we on the right, myself included, have GOT to stop bickering and “competing” with each other. It’s past time we move our pride out of the way and come together with wide open minds and start with a clean slate… a fresh drawing board if you will.

And last, but certainly not least, we need to knock it off with the “messaging is king” junk. No, it isn’t. Messaging is KEY, but in no way is it KING.

The REAL king of online political success that translates in to offline political victory is COMMUNITY.

How many times have we on the right watched a $40,000 website go live, only to fall flat on its face a few months later? The problem is the assumption of community.

In the past we’ve built our web properties on a foundation made of tools and technology. We need to start building our web properties on foundations made of PEOPLE. You know… bloggers, activists, donors, and voters.

People need to be given a say at the very beginning of web projects. We need to be given OWNERSHIP… our own little “I did this part” to take pride in. When people have a personal investment in something, they want to see it succeed.

We need to stop thinking “I need to make my project succeed”, and we need to start thinking “we need to make our project succeed”.

It’s all about community… and it’s all about collaboration. We can talk about the party, the message, the narrative, the tools, the players and the movers all day long, but until we get in to a collaborative/community based frame of mind, we’re not going to win.

That’s my rant for the day…

-Eric Odom