So I got in touch with Ali Jonzon, who (if I remember correctly) was Michael's national youth campaign chair last leadership.  I first met Ali working on Paul Martin's leadership bid back in 2004.  She passed my name along to the person organizing Michael's Northern Alberta campaign.  So now, I'm running Michael's campaign in Edmonton-Sherwood Park.  That's how (not) complicated it is.The Northern Alberta team going to be having a meeting by the end of the month.  Hopefully I'll be able to attend and get to know people better.In the meantime, I've set up the Michael Ignatieff Edmonton-Sherwood Park facebook group, and sent invitations out to all my facebook friends who live in the riding.  Our riding President was in Michael's camp last time, and will be again this time which is great. Our past candidate, Rick Szostak, is going to remain neutral for the time being, as he'd like to focus on building up the grassroots support in the riding.  He has a lot of good ideas for how to make that happen, and how to make the party more viable in Western Canada.  He'll give Michael a fair hearing before making up his mind, and that's all I can ask for.I've also started reminding myself how this whole thing works, and what I have to do.  There are a number of different tasks in a leadership campaign, and a number of different timeframes.The timeframes are these:

• Phase 1: Now until Membership Deadline (February 6)
• Phase 2: Membership Deadline until Delegate Nomination Deadline (TBD)
• Phase 3: Delegate Nomination Deadline to Delegate Selection Meeting
• Phase 4: DSM Day  (March 6-10)
• Phase 5: DSM Day to Convention
• Phase 6: Convention (April 30)

The tasks, from the point of view of a local campaign, are these:

• Fundraise (Phases 1-5)
• Get volunteers (Phases 1-3)
• Recruit members to the party (Phase 1)
• Recruit delegate nominees for Michael (Phases 1-2)
• Raise support among existing members for Michael and his delegates (Phases 1-3)
• Run a DSM Day Strategy (Phase 4)

Other than that, you just have to keep in touch with your regional camapign team to take advantage of any contacts made through Michael's website, and things like that.So that's what I'm signed up for.  Basically, it's a lot of data management, volunteer management, phone calls, and a couple of big events.  I don't know how much I can tell you about how it's all going, because I don't want to give up any information that other campaigns could use in order to better allocate their resources.  But I'll try to give you some idea of what it's like.  That's what I'm here for.