Below, I've pasted my copy of the remarks I gave at last week's Personal Democracy Forum. Our goal was to strike a discussion on the future of online campaigns at the local level, how using data effectively is key to winning, and how organizing tools are changing to reflect the new realities.

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I work for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, I'm guessing a lot of people here have an idea what that means. For the most part, you're right -- our mission is just like that of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We work to elect state legislators, just like they work to elect folks to Congress or the Senate.

But our job is fundamentally different.

In a good year, the DSCC might target a dozen senators. The DCCC might work on 100 congressional seats. Staff at each of the committees knows and works closely with every candidate on each of the target lists.

There are 7,382 partisan legislative seats in this country. There are 400 seats in the New Hampshire House, alone. We obviously put more resources into some states than others. But even when accounting for our priorities, our job is more complicated by an order of magnitude.

The sheer scale of the challenge requires us to approach our jobs from a different angle.

We’ll probably always offer targeted support, of course. And most of that will be the kind of stuff you expect from a campaign committee.

But more and more, we're trying to change the way we think.

Cory Doctorow is a writer I admire a lot. I recently read a column where he argued that artists online ought to think like dandelions. He argued that, as mammals, we get stuck on the notion that every iteration of our brand ought to be nurtured and perfect. Dandelions don't work that way. Dandelions spread a thousand little seeds into the wind, and many of them never take root. But we see dandelions all the time -- they're everywhere, even rooted concrete sidewalks.

At the DLCC, we're trying to think more like dandelions.

A year ago, we partnered with Wired for Change to develop an Internet tool set for all of our candidates. We wanted to make online politics simple and affordable. The result of this effort is DLCCWeb.

This service provides candidates with a web site, online fundraising capabilities, unlimited blast e-mailing, and a range of additional advocacy tools. To make DLCCWeb affordable, we negotiated an economy of scale price and our candidates pay just $40 a month for access to everything.

In its first year, DLCCWeb was an unquestionable success.

We had more than 350 campaigns in more than 30 states sign up to the use the service. Of the active campaigns this cycle, most were challengers and more than half won their races.

Websites run by DLCCWeb candidates generated 13,903,917 total hits in 2008;

Candidates using the service sent 2,798,496 emails to their supporters;

DLCCWeb candidates raised $444,098.89 through online fundraising using the service.

As we head into the final set of elections before the next round of redistricting, this is our strategy moving forward. We will empower campaigns from the ground up and give individual candidates the cutting edge tools so that they can develop innovative strategies to win.

And with DLCCWeb, we’ll make gains that surprise even us. There will be more Democrats winning races by tapping into local energy in places like Kansas, Alaska, and Utah.

But given that we're at a conference like Personal Democracy Forum, I think it's important to talk about what the significance of this movement is. Aside from just winning races, we are seeing more and more candidates who aren't staffing these responsibilities out. They're writing the blog posts, they're publishing the videos, they're sending out the emails. That means we have actual elected officials and office seekers using technology to engage their constituents on a one to one basis. That's something new in our democracy. It's a degree of participation that's unlike what we're used to.

As we move into the question and answer portion of this discussion, that's something in particular I'd really like to discuss.