Status of the RNC Technology Counter-Reformation

( – promoted by Rob “EaBo Clipper” Eno)

It has been a couple of months since the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Report and lots of other post-mortem-style commentary on the Republican technology problem. There have been a lot of interesting articles in the press about how things are going, and it is hard to understand what is going on. Many people have asked me for a take on how things are going, as everyone cares about the issue. OK.

Here is what I will be covering:

– The three-sentence version

– The long version

– Conclusion

– What should the rest of us do now?

– References

The three-sentence version

The RNC’s admirable  goal of an open, extensible voter information data “app store” required that they hire software firms outside their non-technical social network of cronies, but they did the opposite, of course. The goal of one enormous voter database for the whole party is unrealistic, and would totally unmanageable even if it could be built. I believe that Republican techies are better off building apps for Nation Builder’s Election Center, which already exists, can be used for campaigns now, and will surely become the model for the RNC sure-to-be-scaled down ambitions, and experience there will be the best preparation for anything to come from whatever succeeds GOP Data Center.

(read more…)

The long version

– Despite the May 1 deadline, the RNC hasn’t found a Chief Technology Officer yet. They want someone who is very political, very technical, and is known to lots of RNC insiders. They are finding it isn’t possible to get all three. (Getting the first two would be hard enough.) It looks like they will sacrifice technical street cred for someone who merely is a great advocate for tech. But we don’t need advocacy – we need someone who can hire top talent to build the damned stuff!

– The RNC wanted a new voter data repository and a new platform to make it accessible to everyone else. They had a competition to pick firms to do this, and unfortunately picked insiders who do not have the right skills. The winner for the platform thinks he is just going to hire the right people. Yeah… Mitt Romney thought the same thing. (The first article in the reference section of this article has a lot of great content about the choice to build this thing.)

– The people who are currently handling the terrible GOP Data Center (Data Trust) will continue to manage the RNC’s data – wtf? – but that data set will now be enhanced and made part of a much larger data warehouse for the whole party nationwide. (However, I don’t see the incentive for anyone to contribute their data to that larger system.)

– They commissioned a new firm, Liberty Works (they don’t exist yet!?), to build a platform to make that data accessible to anyone that wants to build on it. The vision here is that this will allow lots of enterprising developers to come build on this platform. If this sounds just like the new NationBuilder Election Center, it is. Everyone is talking a good game about “iPhones” and “App Stores” and other models for this, but I don’t see how the usual suspects build that. I have many professional clients who want a similar, internal data-and-service “App Store” and they have no idea how difficult that is. Even if you had the correct architecture, you have to figure out the rules to manage the data and services. That’s difficult stuff.

– The founder of Liberty Works is saying the right words…

“Our venture will change the game with a Republican, free enterprise approach to data and technology. We are building an open platform to increase access to data for the entire Republican team as well as to bring creativity and technological innovation to our party through new great applications that can be built off the platform.”

… but has done nothing to convince anyone that his will happen, such as starting the platform as a series of open source projects in GitHub – the largest online repository for public projects.

– The RNC believes this whole thing will cost between $10 and $20 million. That’s probably way too big a budget and will pay for lots of people who aren’t actually advancing the initiative.

– I have serious doubts about the “one voter database to rule them all” approach. Even if it could be built, it could not be managed. Sure, a basic data set (current GOP Data Center stuff) could be exposed in this way. But all of the other very valuable data that the RNC wants to integrate will be problematic. First, people who have that extra data now (like the Koch brothers) won’t want to give away something for free when they paid millions for it and already have their own (clunky, unusable) system (Themis). Second, as the RNC’s data set grows, the regulations on who gets to use it will grow also, cutting off more and more people who want to use it, strangling the system. (Joe Tea Party Guy is not going to be given the tools to beat John Establishment Guy, capisce?) See the last article in the reference section for some of this. Third, privacy advocates will instantly target it for regulation.

– There are a variety of other firms and groups outside the RNC who are working on various things. Some are firms that already had their own voter files and tools, including several firms who lost the competition for the big RNC contract. They will continue to do business providing their own voter data services, and I doubt they will participate in the RNC stuff – which is fine. Of course, what we want is for the ecosystem to improve, and all that stuff isn’t helping if it is all kept private. I think the RNC should create some data and service specification standards to facilitate cooperation.

– There are some small shops and groups of techies who are vocal about change, but they aren’t doing anything constructive. There is one amusing underground group of conservative techies called, “The Republican Stealth Mob.” I am serious – it’s really named that. It involves people like Aaron Ginn – formerly of Team Romney/Targeted Victory and Patrick Ruffini of Engage (they wrote the incredible “Inside the Cave” deck about Obama’s team). But they aren’t doing much on the tech side that I can find.

– I really think it is time for everyone to start creating things. While I would love to see the RNC roll out some improvements to the GOP Data Center for the time being, my guess is that they go for the “big bang” approach and release something when it is all-but-done. (Note that I never advise large conservative clients to do that. Instead, start small, and add incremental changes.)

Conclusion

I think the RNC needs humbler goals, vendors that aren’t cronies, and a more distributed approach to this problem (a working ecosystem of many tools and data sets). Their CTO must be someone with tech street cred, not lobbying ability.

I still think that NationBuilder’s data file and their new Election Center “App Store” – which includes sample code for working with their data services – is the right approach. It also won’t suffer from the control and management issues the RNC data warehouse will have. I am still betting on them, and not the RNC, for a publicly-available voter data platform that can be broadly used. Sure, the NB file doesn’t (yet) have all the very valuable extra information on voters that the RNC database promises. But the RNC has promised that extra stuff for quite some time, and if, you remember, the GOP Data Center was supposed to have all that – as you can see by all the extra fields that are there now.

Even if they deliver this big data file, I guarantee that your campaign will be determined to be unworthy of it. If this is going to be the data warehouse for the 2016 presidential nominee – well, then just admit that and tell everyone else they are getting only a little more than they are getting now from GOP Data Center.

What should the rest of us do now?

We are all on our own. State parties need to do their own thing, and keep using GOP Data Center and Nation Builder. For instance, the MassGOP has decided to move its stuff to Nation Builder and offer instances to campaigns to use subsets of that data set. That’s a great start, and good for the SC Tech Committee for initiating that. There should also be collaborations between state parties. There should be training sessions for NB and people should try to write some simple apps for that platform. NB has sample code for their APIs in GitHub already. Developers should start playing around with that.

Can we help the RNC? Not really. I am going to speak to them soon about all this, but I am probably going to spend time talking about aggregating a social network for techies inside GOP.com and also for them to fund improvements in Nation Builder’s Election Center so that it can function as the prototype for what they want to do.

References

Karl Rove, Koch brothers lead charge to control Republican data (this is a wonderful long story about the struggle to figure out how to build this)

RNC tech officer finalists from Facebook, Google, Twitter (Politico – about the CTO search)

Conservative geeks want a wired GOP (this is about the Republican Stealth Mob)

GOP Digital Reboots for 2016 | National Review Online (pretty good advice from the leader of the Republican Stealth Mob, Aaron Ginn

Exclusive: GOP Launches iPhone-Like, High-Tech Data Operation | Goppers (basic description of plan, silly talk about everyone happily sharing data – and bad headline – they haven’t released jack!

What it Really Means to ‘Close the GOP Tech Gap’  (this article begins to ask the questions that show that this platform will be unmanageable.)