reporting

We've seen the Gold Standard, the Housing Standard, and the Dollar Standard.  What's next?  Will the Information Standard be the real measure of value that we often refer to as "wealth"?  How we create, accumulate, aggregate, package, protect, invest and proliferate information is what's most likely going to influence and grow monetary, sociocultural and political capital. 

With the exception of technologically innovative methods of knowledge accumulation and proliferation, the methods of creating and promoting Liberal Intelligence have remained fairly consistent since the rise labor unions and labor activism which evolved into the civil rights and social justice activism of the 20th Century.  These methods include printed materials, public demonstrations, speeches, rallies, civil disobedience, literature, theater, art, music, film, and media coverage which cumulatively result in mass participation which lead to public and academic support. 

Conservatives don't usually embrace mass demonstrations and don't enjoy the same media coverage or support from the arts, students and academics.  Watching the success of Liberal grassroots movements online, it's tempting for the Right to follow the successful lead of its opposition.  The thought that if only the Right had its own version of the The Nation, Daily Kos, AlterNet, Talking Points Memo, MyDD, Open Left, et al, we would have a more cutting edge capability is fine until one realizes that we already have National Review Online, RedState, InstaPundit, PowerLine, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic, The Next Right, and so on - all helpful, with many more great sites such as #dontgo, Team Sarah, Rebuild The Party, SmartGirlPolitics, not to mention Twitter aggregates, MySpace and Facebook groups on the way.

But what can Conservatives create that's separate but equal to Liberal collective action?  I believe that Conservatives have an ability to both centralize and decentralize authority, to delegate up to representatives and down to the grassroots in a networked hierarchy that rolls individual contributions into a consensus that can be mobilized. 

Opinion can be "Interesting and Thepautic", but it's not Quantifiable Data

Most of the sites mentioned above proliferate opinion.  Several of the Liberal Information sites seek to drive behavior, which can be especially powerful during a campaign.  But opinions expressed in the form of large blocks of text are not quantifiable data.  What I mean by quantifiable data is a small block of information which can be stored in a database, linked to relevant associated data, and either reported back to the public in the form of "the public needs to know this!" or reported to executive decision and policymakers in the form of "the voters want leadership to know this!".  Think binary (yes/no, good/bad, accept/reject) responses to survey questions, think brief statements, URLs, or Tweets as opposed to blog posts, diaries or comments. 

We know that the Democratic Party mobilized a mighty army of GOTV propaganda and boots on the ground during 2006 and 2008, but how responsive is that leadership to its grassroots, and vice versa?  While we heard a great deal of antiwar lipservice throughout the Democratic Primaries and General Election campaigns along with bailing out Main Street as well as Wall Street, the installation of an Obama Administration's centrist/moderate cabinet of Chicago School free market economists and foreign policy hawks would seem to indicate a counterintuitive disconnect.  The Republican Party can listen and implement its constituents' needs, and it can do so better, faster and smarter through the application of  Business Intelligence.

Use the corporate Business Intelligence model to create Conservative Information Intelligence

We're having great debates on whether we should have a Washington-based Ideas Czar, a British model Shadow Cabinet, whether Libertarian values should override Social Conservative values, whether Realpolitik should supersede Reaganism, and so on. But what do the majority of our constituents really need and want from our leadership?  I suggest we take these debates out of the hothouse echo chambers of opinion and march them into the field as follows:

1. Obtain funding for a GOP Central Information Office (CIO) with an executive and technical staff including Oracle Database Administrators along with web developers, data analysts, report writers and infrastructure (server/network/data security) specialists.
2. Create a secure central data repository (data warehouse) to accumulate, aggregate and report on information collected from the far reaches of the Conservative Information Network (CIN).
3. Task the GOP-CIO with outreach to the following types of decentralized Conservative Intelligence gatherers and providers: conservative websites, weblogs and social media sites, local RNC offices, local and syndicated columnists and talk radio pundits (including blog talk radio) and the offices of conservative elected officials at all municipal, county, State and Federal levels. 
4. Task the GOP-CIO with developing a mission, a strategic information management plan, a formal set of requirements for designing the initial warehouse schema, and a set of easily reproduceable templates/widgets for collecting information onsite or forwarding users to formal survey sites (like "MyGOP.com" for example)
5. Employ a mandatory business rule throughout the CIN of affiliated sites that every user who takes a survey or participates in a poll must provide a verifiable email with voter registration affiliation and demographic information. 
6. Task the GOP-CIO with "data stewardship" to eliminate prank users, spammers and other forms of distraction and disinformation.
7. Ensure that each site in the GOP-CIO network has the ability to collect donations as well as data, and pay any fees necessary to display a banner such as "McAfee Secure Site".
8. Enable (train, fund, provide widgets) for each CIN affiliated site to display data feeds from the GOP with the data that "the public needs to know".
9. Seed the data warehouse with the list of registered Republicans and their email addresses, and task the GOP-CIO with providing a weekly email newsletter indicating "what's hot" and "what the public needs to know" throughout the GOP network of affiliated websites.  A good prototype for this is the Sacramento Bee's "Capitol Alert" email.
10. Identify every elected Republican official's email in the database and aggregate information under the category of "this is what the local, State and Federal leadership needs to know" by district, State and Region to help provide informed decision support.

In the corporate world, managing cultural change in the form of "User Motivation and Training" is always the biggest challenge associated with Business Intelligence.  Local RNC chairs may need to draw users in through "Life of the Party" get-togethers and/or send their staff out into the field to knock on the doors of their constituents and literally show them how to log in, bookmark their favorite sites, and use them so that we can have more conservatives participate.

If it turns out that 8 states prefer a Social Conservative national platform but 42 states prefer a fiscal/security conservative platform, then a report could be distributed indicating why the GOP has taken a particular policy position based on participatory democracy - at the same time providing needed information to local candidates within those 8 states indicating how they can best strategize to win their down ballot elections.

There are so many opportunities here to interact face to face as well as online, to collect ideas and consolidate them into workable proposals and projects, to proliferate information virally and help the GOP represent its voters by making better popular policy decisions, collecting donations, promoting worthy candidates and re-forming the Republican Party that it almost seems a no-brainer.  Nonetheless it would take a professional, well-funded, well-organized and highly motivated team to make it a reality.

What do Conservatives think? 

• If you're a Conservative leader, are you interested in acquiring, analyzing and disseminating information in this 2-way fashion and would you actually use public input to drive your policies and decisions based on your voters' values and needs? 
• If you're a Conservative webmaster, are you interested in belonging to a Conservative Information Network to extend the participatory democracy platform to your users? 
• If you're a political information consumer, are you interested in using participatory democracy tools to contribute your ideas and opinions to leaders, and to hear directly from them in return?

Cross-posted at Lagomorphic Tendencies

[Promoted - In BlogNetNews Elections, David Mastio has built a very interesting, useful tool for tracking online conversations about specific races around the country.  I can see this being valuable not just to the campaign watchers, but also to the people actively involved in campaigns.   Please check it out - and make sure you submit additional races you want them to follow.  The "counsel" that Mastio kindly attributes to me was merely a couple thoughts about the user experience; the credit goes entirely to him and his team.

David Mastio has been a leader on the Right in developing good online products and services.  We need more people doing this. - Jon Henke]

Following local and state elections through the eyes of local bloggers is about to get a lot easier. For the last two years, my partner and I have been been building BlogNetNews.com to be the first bipartisan aggregator of public affairs and news blogs that covers all 50 states.  A typical page  gives readers links to the latest posts, the most popular posts , a local blog search engine and a bunch of other features.

But now that we have all 50 states built and the matchups for the Fall elections are starting to firm up, we've launched something I think is even more powerful. BlogNetNews.com/Elections

Click on the map and go to the state you want, then click on the race you want to read about. Two clicks simple.

Instead of relying on the MSM to be the filter of election news, BNN/Elections lets readers and bloggers use the blogosphere as a filter, gathering links and excerpts of all the latest posts in one place and constantly updating them.

All we need now is for the experts on the ground to help us find the most important elections to cover. We've already loaded in the governors races, the U.S. Senate races and many of the most competitive U.S. House races. At the bottom of each state page is a link to a form where you can suggest races for us to cover. We'll try to be updating every day this week within hours of your suggestions.

Thanks to Jon Henke's counsel, we've already started to add features that should make BNN/Elections more useful. Every state now has a permalink so you can skip the map once you know where you want to go and there is an RSS feed from the left and right for each race so you can subscribe to the posts you want to follow.

We're looking for your ideas on how to improve the site too, so send any ideas to me at editor@blognetnews.com or if you want to submit your blog to become part of BNN, all you have to do is shoot me your URL with the state you are in and if your blog is focused on state and local issues we'll add it to BlogNetNews.com and if you focus on national issues, we'll add you to RightyBlogs.com .