political technology

Today, the GOP released a request for proposal for a new web site.  This is the RFP (PDF).  I have read it all the way through.  It's quite a document.  It's an especially interesting read for someone like me, who responds to RFPs for web development for a living.I say "interesting" because it's a masterpiece of confusion and idiocy.

<sarcasm>

I assume it was written by someone who has heard of this new thing called "com-poo-tors", and who doesn't actually have one, but has been told that they'll be very big in the future.

Let's take a little closer look at this document, shall we?

Integrate outside products through common API’s, widgets, or iframes (examples: Kimbia fundraising, Voter Vault, Widgetbox, Ning).

As far as I know, there is no common API for those applications.  Each has it's own API, I'm sure.  They may be accessible through a common technology, i.e., any ODBC compliant data/programming model like PHP or .NET will probably be able to access them in some way.  But there's not going to be anything common about it.  I also love the use of the term "widgets".  Because every tech person knows what a "widget" is.  It's such a specific term.

But the best part is asking for the use of the IFRAME tag.  I guess that's OK.  As long as you won't be wanting to use the XHTML Strict doctype, or anything.  Or you've never heard of the OBJECT tag.

Flash interfaces can often make mundane tasks exciting, and having Flash developers who understand user behavior will make the site more user-friendly.

Well, that's a perfectly uncontroversial statement.  If there's one thing that everybdy in the web-based tech community agrees on, it's how wonderful Flash is.  Because it makes things, you know, move.  And it's so easy to optimize for search engines!

An ideal client will have a CMS that is already built out and ready to plug into the system, so the only programming time will be building the outward facing presence.

Because, as everyone knows, every CMS system uses the exact database schema that the RNC uses, so there will need to be no data import, or customized programming to access the RNC's content data.  All you have to do is istall the CMS, and, like magic, the only work you'll have to do is set up a really nice theme. And how convenient that Flash will require no custom ActionScript programming to integrate into the CMS.

The really helpful thing about the RFP is that there are no indications of what database backend the RNC uses, no information about the database size or schema, no indication of the server technology they'd like to use, or, actually, any technical details at all.  But, when you throw all that stuff in, the RFP gets so, you know, long, and boring.

But long and boring is one thing this document is not.  In fact, it's only two pages long.  Once you start throwing that geeky stuff in, you end up with a hideous and stuffy nightmare of an RFP like this.

But, one thing the RNC does want:  They want to know what it'll cost them.

All costs of the project will be delivered with proposal.

Well, it's a good thing the RFP is so chock full of the kinds of detailed information that will allow a contractor to make accurate time/cost estimates.

</sarcasm>

Surely this is all some sort of elaborate joke.  Perhaps on Monday the RNC will tell us that they were just having us on.  Then, once we've all had a good laugh, they'll release the real RFP.

Because whatever this document is, it's not an RFP.  At best, this is some sort of marketing-related  statement of intent.  It's nothing more than a series of barely-related bullet points that say:

• We want a cool web site.
• We want neat external applications to run on it.
• Flash is fun.
• We want it to be easy to use, 'cause we ain't got us much of that compooter learnin'.
• Make it pretty.
• We have data.  We'd like to use it.

This the new, high-tech-savvy GOP?  This is the kind of in-depth attention to leveraging technology that the refurbished, Michel Steele RNC has planned?

This is a travesty.  And it's sad.  Especially since the opening paragraph states:

This RFP and the ambitious goals behind it result from the help of the RNC Tech Summit and the 7,000 grassroots volunteers who participated both online and in-person.

Wow.  That must have been an über-effective tech summit.

Today, the Republican National Committee held a “Tech Summit” to discuss how our party can best modernize its operations – anybody with a passion for technology and politics was welcome to attend. Let there be no doubt, the RNC Tech Summit was something special.

The atmosphere was rich with that almost mystic combination of creativity, technical skill, and a passion for new ideas. Looking around, one could see political veterans and rookies alike – individuals with different specialties, experiences and perspectives collaborating on a shared challenge. How can we best move our party forward?

The greatest innovations are the result of unplanned collaborations and today was no exception – the long-term legacy of today’s event will be those associations fostered within the crowd. Side conversations. Chance meetings. In the months and years ahead, we will see countless projects that trace their origins to conversations in that room.

This is the generational opportunity for the Republican Party – the tools may change, but the challenge remains the same as it has always been. We must utilize technology to genuinely include the American People in the political process in new and profoundly meaningful ways.

As we explore that great opportunity, the verdict on today’s event is clear; without question, the Republican Party is stronger for it.

Matt Lira currently serves as the Director of New Media for House Republican Whip Eric Cantor.

I think this question from the RNCdebate site is very important:

Partial Quote:

"A resurgent Republican party needs to turn this around and brand itself as the "ipod" party - the party that gives citizens the most freedom, options, and choice. We need to offer a clear distinction between Democrats top-down, one-size-fits all policies by giving the American people policy choices, the ability to opt out, and policies that recognize state and regional differences. The best way to do this is to resurrect the idea of federalism. Will you commit to making federalism/local choice the key plank of a revitalized Republican Party?" 

Since getting their behinds handed to them in the last two election cycles, people on the Right have been taking a long hard look at why they've turned into such losers. One of the areas of concern that have popped up as a result of this introspection has been the role of technology in politics. Technology, many are now convinced, is super-terrifically important. "After all," they argue, "just look what Obama did with his web site. We need to do that!"

So now, the politicos are all jumping onto the technology bandwagon. Being good politicos, they are going about it wrong.

There has been a rush of political consultants to learn technology, so they can bill themselves as "technologists" (They aren't). There's been a stampede to get Twitter accounts and Facebook and MySpace profiles. Everyone is throwing around cool-sounding terms like "Web 2.0" and "Social networking software".

All of this generates a lot of heat, but, unfortunately, very little light.

Primarily, that is because the people engaging in this discussion, for the most part, don't have any clue about technology. Oh, they know the buzzwords, and they have a grasp of what some current technologies do, and maybe even have some good ideas about how to use tech here and there.

But they don't know technology. What they know, to some greater or lesser degree, is how to use some products of technology. But how to architect it, design applications, or how to implement them…they don't have a clue.

On the other hand, I don't look at technology from a political point of view. I've worked with computers for twenty-seven years, starting programming when I was a high-schooler. I've been a full-time, professional developer, database architect, web designer, and systems analyst for the last 12 years.

So, from that point of view, I offer up the following bits of advice to the politicos.

MANAGEMENT BY MAXIM

Outside the pure tech world, technology is never a driver. Technology is a support function. It can tell you how to do something. But it can't tell you whether you should do something.

The first step in implementing any technology should be the requirements of your business or organization. What problems do you face, and how do you overcome them? What processes should you implement? What information would you like to store or query? What strategies would you like to implement? What objectives support those strategies? What business tactics will allow you to achieve those objective?

Note, please, that none of these questions have anything to do with technology at all. These are all questions about the goals and means of the organization. If you don't know the answers to these questions technology is useless. To the extent that it helps you, it's a result of luck, and nothing else.

Jon related an interesting and amusing tidbit to me over the phone this morning. He noted that everyone in the politics business was getting Twitter accounts.

Why?

What does getting a Twitter account do for you? How does Twitter achieve your organizational goals? How will you use it to further those goals? What is the desired outcome of using Twitter? It's not enough that all the cool kids have a Twitter account. Its use has to be in service of some organizational objective, or it's just a waste of time, no matter how much fun it might be subjectively.

Business requirements are always the driver for technology, not the reverse.

You must construct the business maxims you desire to implement first. These are derived from the strategic goals and objectives of your organization. From those business maxims, you and your technologist then derive IT maxims that describe the information you need to access, the software and hardware you need, and the human and physical infrastructure to support it. This is known as Management by Maxim.

The nice thing about this is that you don't need a technologist, or even have any deep understanding of technology to oversee this process. You do, however, need to know 1) what the organization's strategy, goals, objectives are; 2) the problems your organization faces; 3) the business processes you'd like to implement; and 4) how to document them clearly.

The job of the technologist is to take that documentation, and design the hardware and software technologies that support your business requirements.

If you aren't implementing technology this way, then you're doing it wrong.

A good primer on management by maxim can be found in Broadbent and Weill's article from the Sloan Management Review, which is available for free online here, in PDF format.

WHERE THE BOYS ARE

The technology boys (and girls), I mean. 

Let me be frank. 

If someone has spent 20 years as a political consultant, and the last four years as a web designer/programmer on the side, then that person is not a technologist. If you're looking for a technologist somewhere inside the Beltway, then you're looking in the wrong place.

Real technologists work in the field full time. Real technologists have a history of creating IT/ IS solutions in fields other than politics or government--and that includes the beltway bandits. Real technologists have probably done very little, if any, work in politics at all. Real technologists work at Yahoo! or Telligent, or at private consultancies in Omaha (and San Diego!). They do nothing but technology, and they do it for all kinds of organizations.

That means that, to find effective tech guys, you are going to have look outside northern Virginia and southern Maryland. You will not know these people personally. They may not, in fact, particularly care about or support your politics. And you should not care.

They don't need to know politics. What they need to learn, they will, because that's what they do. They go into a retail sales or construction business, and they learn as much of the business as they need to learn to provide technology solutions. They are professionals at it.

You don't need activists to create your IT solutions. You need professionals who will implement your business rules, and support your strategic goals with the appropriate technology. You don't need to care what they believe, only that their solutions work to effectively promote your organization's strategy.

Be warned: You will have to pay them real money. They are worth every penny.

CONCLUSION

Technology is massively useful. But only if you harness it to support your goals. Without a strategic vision, you're implementing technology in the dark, without any guarantee that it will ultimately be helpful. Technology is merely a tool to help your organization succeed. If you want to use technology to get you to where you want to go, you need to have a very clear idea of where you want to go in the first place, and to map out the process for getting there. Only then does technology have any real use for you.

Anyone who tries to sell you technology without forcing you to go into details about your strategy, processes, and objectives, isn't someone you want to buy technology from.

In a discussion among local party people about "how to bring the Republican party back", one idea crystallized that I would like help to flesh out. We discussed the fact that campaigns - in this particular context local campaigns -  need better support in terms of technology, communications, infrastructure and a lot more besides. The challenge is how to implement such great ideas in the context of campaigns that cannot afford huge budgets. Technology is making things cheaper, but there is a yawning gap between what is possible and what people know how to do.

So we came up with the concept of "Campaign-in-a-box" -  a manifest of all of the elements needed to support a basic political campaign (e.g., local-type campaign, state representative, county commissioner, etc.), that would enable a candidate not to get lost in the 'nuts and bolts' concerns of how to set up all the technology and communications infrastructure to support the campaign. It would be a manifest and implementation that provides all the basics to him or her so they dont have to build from scratch.

Consider it from this perspective. We are telling campaigns "get on facebook; get a YouTube account, post video there; get a way to issue press releases; ID your voters; build a website; etc." Well, giving such advice is useless to a candidate who is neither expert, nor does he even know where to start on these things.

So, let's collate that advice in the umbrella of ALL the advice and specific supporting implementations that a candidate would need. Can a local campaign leverage standard infrastructure for an effective campaign, and would such a concept lower the barrier for them to utilize more effective technology?
In other words, what should be the manifest for the "campaign in a box"?

Some specifics:

• Campaign website infrastructure and templates, e.g., can a Drupal implementation be templated to create a baseline campaign website to leverage? Many congressional campaigns use Drupal (e.g., Chet Edwards) so it or a CMS like it is a good starting point. What would be the must-have features, and what is a good implementation (low-cost/no-cost), so that a campaign wouldn't have to start from scratch? What Web 2.0/user generated content to have?
• YouTube, Facebook, twitter; what is the set of must-have online communications channels? Optional/maybe-do communication channels? Encourage use of videos and posting them
• How to interact with bloggers? Websites, forums and online groups to leverage?
• Communications / press office: The 'campaign in a box' includes a Press Release Kit - What's in it? How to establish good press relations?
• Voter database: Voter data should be a part of the package, so the question would be, what sort of database should be used, how should it be managed and integrated? What voter data is important? Mostly getting the "R" and "D" affiliation is just a first step, can more precise data be gathered? Should the candidate bother trying that? Is an integrated database important? How sophisticated should it be? (Again, think local-type race, where you might have 10,000 - 50,000 voters total).
• Campaign  basic strategy: Should the campaign-in-a-box have a basic strategy and what would it entail? What methods of outreach have the best ROI, and how should the local candidate be directed: Phone calls, blockwalking, neighborhood forums, finding key influencers, etc. Which to prioritize or should that be left to the candidate to figure out?

The reason this idea is important is that many campaigns with even good candidates flounder for the lack of a 'good campaign', and they rarely fail for lack of hard effort. They fail because the candidate, while they may know the issues, doesn't know how to run a campaign, and doesnt have the money to pay big-buck consultants to figure it out. A "campaign-in-a-box" would be a simple pared-down version of whatever its that Obama spent tens of millions of dollars putting together and which costs a hundred thousand or more for a Congressional candidate to put together.

A simple "How To" and manifest for a local candidate could go a long way towards making many of these campaigns more effective.

So ... Time to think INSIDE the box.  What should be in the Campaign-in-a-Box? What technology components are particularly effective/needed in this?

I thought techies of the left were a bit self-absorbed three months ago when they proclaimed John McCain unqualified for the presidency because he doesn't use a computer regularly. Now Barack Obama is looking downright foolish for having taken his cues from them.

The right side of the blogosphere is abuzz with criticism of Obama for creating an attack ad that ridicules McCain for figuratively being stuck in 1982, the year he was first elected to Congress. "He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer," the ad says. "He can't send an e-mail."

The ad echoed the criticism that surfaced at the Personal Democracy Forum in June. Conference organizer Micah Sifry elevated the debate over McCain's tech credentials to the status of "breaking news" with a headline that mocked a McCain staffer for saying "McCain Is Aware Of The Internet."

PDF's sister site, techPresident, followed up with a poll asking the question that only geeks would think is on the edge of every voter's tongue: "Does a connected world need a connected [president of the United States]?" The "yes" response was a predictably high 61 percent, but the high-tech outrage against McCain never made it into the mainstream.

Until Obama decided to cast his own vote against McCain's technological shortcomings, that is. Now plenty of people are talking about whether it matters that McCain uses a computer regularly -- and the tide is decidely against the netroots/Obama view.

Even the liberal blog The Plank asked, "Which voters exactly are going to be outraged by the fact that McCain doesn't know how to use a computer?"

While the iPhone 2.0 has already gotten significant coverage by the press and bloggers alike, I'd like to take a different look at the new iPhone SDK and API.  As a new media guru and a believer that technology, when used properly, can literally make the difference between winning and losing elections, I see a huge opportunity with the new iPhone 2.0 firmware.

While I was not fortunate enough to have the opportunity to see Steve Jobs' presentation in person, I was reading live updates every minute thanks to MacRumors Live Feed.  One of the items that immediately caught my eye was Apple's Location API. The Location API is used in two of the applications that Apple demoed today -- Loopt, a location-aware network that actually generates a map and shows on the map where your friends currently are, and the Mobile News Network, powered by the Associated Press, that makes use of the API by automatically pulling news from local sources.

Technology advances in campaigns have allowed them to engage volunteers from the comfort of their own home.  John McCain and Barack Obama already have massive Volunteer HQ applications that allow volunteers to contact the media, make calls from home, and more.  When I worked on Senator Santorum's campaign in 2006, we wanted to take this one step further and allow our volunteers to go door-to-door for us by simply logging in to a website, removing the need for them to come into the campaign office.  A lot of barriers stood in the way of this -- the technology wasn't available to us, and the amount of management, development, and overhead to run something like this was tremendous.

Using the iPhone's new location API and GPS, functionality like this could be easily built.  Based on the user's location, an application could use the API to create a door-to-door list and display it on the map.  When they were on their way to a given house, all they would have to do is tap the pin on the map, and they'd be able to get driving directions from their current location and instructions and information for the household.  If the campaign wanted to get further information or to try to use the walk to microtarget the voters at the household, it could easily add a script with questions to this -- and the responses would automatically be synced to the campaign's system after completion.

At an even lower level, if the person at the household wanted to receive e-mail updates from the campaign, there could be a field that allows volunteers to type in their e-mail address and become instantly subscribed to the campaign's e-mails.  Similarly, if that person was torn between the candidates and wanted additional information, the volunteer could input their e-mail address and the system could automatically send a document with information about the candidate.

This is only one way that I see the new SDK for the iPhone potentially reshaping the entire playing field for politics.  As I discussed earlier, the phone from home functionality is becoming more and more mainstream -- indeed, it is one of the pieces of the Mission Control software package that I have built.  Taking this a step further, there could be a home calling application on the iPhone which provides volunteers with the phone numbers, question, and script, and after each call would automatically sync with the campaign's database.  It would be as easy to use as plugging in your headphones and loading an application.  There are many other possibilities as well, and I encourage you to discuss them in the comments.

The iPhone 2.0 represents another massive step forward in mobile technology for consumers and businesses.  It also presents a wide array of functions that could give Republicans a serious leg up in elections.

Aaron Marks is a founding partner of Three Group, LLC, a Pittsburgh-based new media firm that focuses on providing technology-based solutions for Republican candidates and organizations, and in particular has built Web 2.0 campaign management software called Mission Control.  Aaron also worked in new media and voter outreach on Senator Rick Santorum's 2006 re-election campaign.