Last Saturday morning, the Obama campaign launched 23 training sessions for organizers in 17 states. And you know how political campaigns are always begging for more volunteers? This program, the Organizing Fellowship Program, had the opposite problem: more applicants than they could take. Of the 10,000 applicants, only 2300 were accepted into a program where they’ll be given the privilege of working their buns off this summer, putting in long days and eating unhealthy diets–but worth it if they can change the country.

That’s what Buffy Wicks, Obama’s Field Director for Missouri (pictured below), told the group that was meeting in St. Louis. She explained how she herself had been originally galvanized politically. A friend of hers called needing a ride from the hospital. He had just been told he was HIV positive, and the hospital wouldn’t release him unless someone came to pick him up because of concerns they had in such cases about suicide. He told Buffy that he had no health insurance.

It would be interesting to hear the stories of what motivated the other people in that room, but whatever those stories are, the goal now is to get Obama elected. And the way these volunteers are going to go about it is to recruit more volunteers. The 100 plus workers in that room won’t be going door to door, doing voter ID. Their job is to build capacity: They’ll be recruiting more volunteers and supervising them as they in turn recruit still more.

First these Fellows will learn how to articulate quickly and clearly what motivates them. Then they’ll use the house meeting model of organizing to help identify new volunteers. That notion of finding new volunteers at house meetings, along with the phrase “exponential growth” (from volunteers who find more volunteers who find more volunteers) all sounded familiar. In fact, it sounded like the state party’s Neighborhood Leader program. So I began to wonder if these two programs were going to be fighting each other for volunteers who’ll be double canvassing the same neighborhoods. Are we reinventing two slightly different wheels that won’t fit on the same axle? And what about the new DNC software that’s going to roll out soon that will enable Democrats to just get on their computers, register, and be given a list of people in their neighborhood to ID? Is that another wheel–in another gauge?

Prepare yourself for a (pleasant) shock, because when it comes to campaign organizing, the new Democratic Party isn’t the herd of cats we’re used to. Kombiz Lavasany, in charge of blogger outreach at the DNC, assures me that all three programs are being coordinated.

The biggest difference I can see between the Obama Organizing Fellows and the other two organizing entities is, as Buffy pointed out, that many campaigns don’t allow volunteers to mentor or coach new volunteers. The Fellows trained in this three day workshop, though, will have that responsibility, and they’ll be working at it full time.

Generally speaking, the Fellows will be working in their own communities: the theory being that organizing built on personal relationships, especially with people you’ve known for awhile, produces the strongest results. In addition to finding new volunteers, the Fellows will oversee voter registration drives, all the while focusing on hard data.

We need the right numbers to win. So if a volunteer that a Fellow is mentoring mentions that she contacted 25 people last night and the computer readout indicates she only called five, then it’s going to be up to that mentor to call the volunteer on the disparity, in as tactful a way as possible, of course. “You know, 25 calls is not the number I’m seeing on the computer readout. You seem to be falling short of that. Is there anything I can do to help you reach that goal?”

It’ll be hard work done on a shoestring. Buffy, field director for the state, has no office yet. She’s working out of a local internet cafe except when she’s on conference calls. In that case, she has a very private office: her car.

Buffy’s office may not have the glitz of a Karl Rove operation, but she and the people in that meeting room intend to get the right numbers, the results that will put Obama in the White House.