Update: Apologies to the commenters - I deleted the wrong extra copy of the post, and it took your comments with it. I'll see if I can recover them.

Van Riper is the author of one of my favorite phrases - "in command and out of control" - which defines the kind of management style that community-based enterprises require.

Obama's campaign tripped pretty hard this week when they forcibly evicted a volunteer who had - over two+ years and on his own dime - built the unofficial Obama MySpace page into one with 160,000 friends.

The story is pretty well told over at Micah Sifry's blog.

There's an astounding amount of vituperation aimed at the volunteer - a L.A. paralegal named Joe Anthony - in the comments and on the blogs.

There's also a strong thread of anger at Obama's campaign.

From my POV it would have been an easy problem to solve - assign a junior staffer to work with Anthony and assist with the workload (he's got a day job, and running a site that popular starts burning hours), give him invites to some high-roller events here and a chance to have coffee with the Senator...et la, problem solved.

Instead, the campaign has bout itself far more than $44,000 worth of negative publicity, which was amateurish and stupid.

And we learn that in spite of the communitarian face on modern campaigns, they are still probably too centrally run. The problem, of course, is how to combine the 'do your own thing' ethos of Campaign 2.0 with the media microscope. A two-pipe problem, but one that could have been easily avoided here.

I've complimented Obama in the past, but no points to his team for this one, I'm afraid...