What Technologies are most needed and useful?

[N. Mercier]

Clearly there are thousands of ways we can bring the GOP kicking and screaming into the online age. However I think it would be extremely beneficial to prioritize so that our focus does not become overly diverse. With the existence of Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, Twitter, cell phone texting, email lists, stand alone web-sites, viral videos, YouTube comments, PodCasts, Iphone applications and who knows what else it would be easy to overwhelm many of the technophobic members of the grass roots GOP.

What do you think would make the biggest difference in the shortest amount of time? Personally I feel that we need to establish even a basic presence on the web. My own Republican Town Committee is just now playing with the idea of developing a website. I hope to encourage them to use a blog based medium such as WordPress so that they can make a website that can stay current and relevant rather than a static page that will soon fall out of date. Imagine how much more internet buzz we could generate if we just were able to convince some of our leadership to take steps similar to this on the local level.

What other technologies do you think are easy enough to use so that all our members could be comfortable with them, but at the same time are relevant and effective enough to spend the time developing? I leave this as an open question to the community because I am sure some of you are far more educated on this matter than I am.

[Bridget Geegan Blanton]

This is a question...not a comment...
During the recent GOP Tech summit there was a company called Voter Track ( I believe...) They did a brief presentation on their software which they claim will cut the time it takes to organize/conduct Precinct Walks in half. I'm wondering if anyone has any info on this. During the past election I spent hours and hours organizing these walks from volunteer recruitment to individual maps per neighborhood and then data collection on contact success. There has got to be an easier way! In Riverside Cty. CA - our Registrar of Voters (D) does a lousy job of updating the voter files among many jobs she does poorly and as a result our voter vault call sheets were plagued with wrong #'s and outdated info... This may not change and for that reason we want to focus on Precinct operations. If anyone has any familiarity with this voter track please let me know.

[Matt Yeatman]

Hi Bridget,

I am from VoterTrack. I wasn't from presenting at the GOP Tech forum but our software does produce precinct walks with bar codes which dramatically reduce the time associated with re-entry of data.

Feel free to visit our site www.votertrack.com or email at [e-mail]

Thanks.

[Randy Covington]

Bridget, get with your local party and ask for access to voter vault. I have not seen it myself, but maybe it can help you. AS to local records I also beleive that the local registrar may be holding our on you. You may have to seek the records in the most firendliest form by asking for a digit version through the open records law. Trust me Riverside CA should have a very complete voter database.

You also m,ay ant to searc for Civcrm. This is the opensource softawre that made Howard Dean a household name - undeservedly so. The software is great, free and can now be set up independently from Drupal and Joomla. I am sure yu can find some geeksto help with this in your local party . If you want toknow more, reply to this or send me amessage through the systems here.