Technology

Not Tony Stark, Alex Murphy or even Locutus of Borg… but Barack Obama. All have bonded with technology to varying degrees, willingly or not. Obama’s reliance on electronics to be able to function was again highlighted in India.

An official in the sub-continent was amazed that the renowned orator was dependent on teleprompters. This exclamation of surprise highlighted how little is known about the ‘Great Savior’ outside of the US. More than a few British folks remarked, to me personally, on hearing the mid-term election results that they thought Obama was well-liked by Americans. I guess they have been too wrapped up in their own parochial affairs for the last two years to notice that all was not well (an understatement) with America.

If our overseas friends embraced technology as the president has, they may get a truer picture of the false idol that is still imprinted in their minds, striking a pose while flanked by mighty stone pillars.

When Obama first entered the White House there was much talk of his affection for his Blackberry, a fact that concerned his security advisers. Perhaps he found it a useful way to keep updated with emails, or it appealed to his narcissistic streak, enabling him to see the latest press adulation. Or his paranoia, keeping tabs on his number one enemy, Fox News.

There has never been such a programmed politician. Aside from his love affair with teleprompters, his impromptu statements show all the versatility of a stuck subroutine. His seventeen minute reply to a simple question from a member of the public is a classic example. The crux of the query had still not been addressed as the audience dozed off.

Evasiveness under questioning is nothing new for a politician. I’ve seen masters of this art that can totally flummox all but the very best interviewers. This is not the standard ‘I’ll ramble so he forgets the point’ approach, though. It’s more like the multiple choices given by a technical support website. You can never find the exact problem that has occurred, so you select the nearest to it. The answer you get will not cure your problem, but the program assumes it has done its job.

Obamacare is a typical case. When asked about the cost to businesses and the taxpayer, the deterioration of services or the effect on seniors, the explanation will always include the homeowner who is forced to sell up to cover treatment costs.

These pre-select answers have some hilarious results. A machine can not look ahead to the consequences of irrelevant or contradictory statements. In this week’s post-election press conference, Obama said that perhaps he could have done more to help the fallen Democrats. That statement is open to more replies than I care to count!

The funniest was possibly “I don’t think anyone walks around with a fixed ideology”. This, from a man whose determination to impose his ideals would destroy his government and, if not checked, the country.

If I didn’t know that he is a mere mortal, I would suggest that Obama may have a defective chip, that his frequent inclusion of the word ‘batteries’ in every industry stimulus visit could be a secret code to his boffins that his need replacing.

He can take comfort that a new job awaits him in advertising in 2012. All he needs is a drum, a pair of sunglasses and a pair of sandals… oh, and batteries!

(Editor Dee is in for Skip today)

Ross Douthat makes two crucial points.

#1 - Online success is less about the technology, and more about the ideas and motivation.

[T]here’s no necessary connection between online organizing and liberal politics. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate.

#2 - Unfortunately, Republican politicians still have very little in the way of real ideas...

If liberals are feeling disillusioned, though, their right-wing imitators may be ripe for an even greater letdown. The Obama administration has at least gone some distance toward enacting an agenda that the net-roots left supports. The “right roots” activists are rallying around politicians who are promising to shrink government without offering any plausible sketch of how to do it.

#1 is about winning the battles (elections) & #2 is about winning the war (better government).  Achieving #1 without addressing #2 is an establishment-protection racket.   Republicans need to insist on more than the usual tax and spending rhetoric.

The annual Personal Democracy Forum was Monday and Tuesday in New York, and it was very good.  As always. You can read more about it at TechPresident.

Naturally, there was a great deal of conversation about the imbalance between the Left and Right online.  The general consensus is that Republicans are behind on the internet, though there is a great deal of debate over how and why.  The least convincing answer was offered by a PDF audience member, and it basically boiled down to "Republicans suck. Democrats are cool.  So we're better at the internet."

Yeah, well, those who forget history...

Democrats race to catch up to GOP online

The Democratic National Committee relaunched its Web site Friday and appointed its first technology adviser in an effort to match the Republican party's success in using the Internet to build its constituency. [...] "We realized that the Republicans were ironically peddling their Stone Age ideas with modern-day technology tools, and we were just not at their level in our dedication to technology," Buck said.Insiders say it's widely acknowledged that the Republican committee has done a better job than the Democrats' committee in creating an online strategy.  The Republican committee "is far and away ahead in securing a large constituent of online activists and does a better job of using the medium to move their message," said Pam Fielding of E-advocates, an Internet advocacy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.

That was 2002.

What changed?  Again, that's the subject of a great deal of debate, but I would argue that it was two things:

1. Republicans got comfortable.
2. Democrats got entrepreneurial.

In 2016, there's no doubt that the online landscape will be very different.  The Right will be much more effective.  The only question is how they will do it.  The balance of power on the Right will depend, in large part, on who the new entrepreneurs are and how they build the infrastructure.

Patrick Ruffini wrote that “The Rightroots Needs Less Meta and More Purpose.” I’ve recently been involved in two Twitter campaigns which have convinced me that the proper combination of meta and purpose can lead to political success. 

Free the Hops

Free the Hops is an organization behind a recently successful bill to allow beers with more than six percent alcohol (98 of the world's 100 top gourmet beers contain over six percent alcohol) to be sold in Alabama. After a hard fought four year Internet-based campaign, the wildly popular bill finally passed in Alabama’s lower legislative chamber.

When the bill hit the state Senate, one senator decided to filibuster the legislation. Every time the bill came up on the floor, he’d irritate his colleagues by preaching about the evils of alcohol. After years of hard work by thousands of activists, it looked like the bill was going to die. That’s when we decided to take it to the Tweets. 

Once, Silicon Valley -- the center of American technology -- leaned Republican. In recent years, the industry and the region as a whole has moved left. The Reagan tax cuts removed government as an obstacle to progress, helping make possible the era of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. And Bill Clinton was wise enough not to tinker -- by and large -- with the Reagan consensus on free enterprise and capital formation.

With the threat of government intervention removed in the economic arena, the Valley has been free to indulge its libertarian instincts on social issues. This has been a boon, electorally and financially, to Democrats. Larry Lessig's "free culture" has replaced free markets as the dominant ethos in the Valley. The irony here is that many of the entreprenuers who succeeded in the most unregulated environment possible -- the Internet -- are at once hyper-capitalist and socially-liberal Obama voters. (Good luck creating Twitter or Facebook in any industry as tightly regulated as the auto or banking sectors in the Age of Obama.)

The inherent contradiction of America's most capitalist region supporting America's most socialist politicians may be coming to an end. Especially if this Administration really is dumb enough to treat venture capital like hedge funds. Government would no longer be invisible when it came to raising capital for your startup. Government as the Problem, not the solution to our problems, would return to the economy and to Silicon Valley with a vengeance. And Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- and the highly educated managers and developers whose interests are aligned with the entrepreneurs -- would be free to vote their pocketbooks once again.

Via TechCrunch comes this piece from James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal. In Tim Geithner's zeal to regulate every financial instrument known to man, it now seems that venture capital -- which had nothing to do with the housing bubble and credit-default swaps -- has been caught in the dragnet.

The Obama administration wants to regulate venture capital firms to prevent systemic risks. Silicon Valley residents are scratching their heads and asking: What risks? The rest of us should ask why Washington is targeting a jewel of the American economy that had nothing to do with the housing bubble.

The confusion began when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently told Congress that large venture capital (VC) firms should be forced to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and submit regular reports on their investors and portfolios. Data collected by the SEC would then be shared with a new risk regulator to ensure that VCs aren't "a threat to financial stability."

Virtually every successful technology startup in the last 20 years has been funded through VCs, creating tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs, and fueling the engine of technology innovation in a way that's probably created millions more indirectly.

Bill Clinton was wise enough not to muck with this, and Al Gore actually works for Kleiner Perkins. Though tech companies are the most visible success stories, the next wave of big VC success stories will likely be in green energy and biotech, industries which have been hailed as the future by left and right alike.

If Obama's Geithner comes down on the side of more regulation, the right has a renewed opportunity to start capturing hearts and minds in Silicon Valley. And as a result, cast ourselves as the most forward looking and the enlightened party economically -- as the party of technology and free market solutions to the environment. Not only is there a constituency to be won, and new high-tech support to be had, but the macro issue frame helps us with the electorate at large.

Ironically, private equity and venture capital boomed in the Bush years precisely because of tighter government regulations on the public markets in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbox dried up the IPO market on Wall Street and moved billions in financial services to London. In the midst of the housing crisis and in the wake of the dotcom bust, private capital was something of a safe haven. No more. And when capital is given fewer and fewer productive outlets, expect a backlash that will move votes as well as money.

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.

"How do we use RTP website" is the name of a blog post over at RebuildTheParty's ning network.  The author of the piece offers this advice:

A couple of folks, responding to my blogs, have asked how we use this website beyond just chatting. Good point. Here is how I intend to use it. 1. To identify activists in my home state (MD) and get them to start to organize events as our network builds. 2. To identify people with particular talents (IT or otherwise) or particular expertise in subject areas that allow us to organize and to respond to the lies put out by the Democratic Administration and the media. 3. To work for and fund specific candidates that support our views and positions. I believe this website was designed to be a tool, not an end in itself. It can be useful for seeking information and resources, but the rest is up to us.

I completely agree.  These technologies will not change the face of Congress tomorrow, nor will they give us a Republican President today.  But they give us the opportunity to be ready for 2010 and to be ready to take the fight to the liberals.  Never again will we be caught flat footed.

This is my advice: Network, network, network. Find fellow travelers, exchange ideas and interests, extend your network online (twitter, facebook, youtube, blogs) and offline (events, phone, fundraising, campaigning, etc). We have a lot of networking to do to surpass the libs.

Over the last few days, our diaries here at TNR have been consumed by discussions of how to valuate technology versus message in rebuilding the GOP. Stephen Gordon has a good post on this here. And over at RedState, Leon Wolf chimes in with the following:

In the wake of Barack Obama’s astounding fundraising success in 2007-2008, which was largely fueled by an unprecedented web operation that collected millions of active donors and volunteers, many Republican strategists have begun to realize that the current state of web operations on the right is simply not acceptable if the GOP is going to be competitive in elections going forward. New websites are springing up left and right in an attempt to solve this problem, and established web sites and online activists have dedicated countless hours, posts, and emails in the last several weeks to navelgazing over this issue. I tend to think that much of this misses the point entirely.

Don’t get me wrong; our web operation is clearly and unacceptably behind the left’s, and these discussions need to be had or we risk perpetual minority status. However, I am sorry to say that our enfeebled efforts are not going to reach the needed levels just because our candidates master the use of Twitter. You see, an effective web operation only links people as they are; it does not change people into something they are not. And the bottom line is that, more than having been beaten by a superior operation, we were beaten by people who were more motivated and willing to get involved and donate than we were. Obama’s web operation was just a tool by which he took advantage of a pre-existing resource.

All of this is spot on and Leon's entire post is well worth appreciating in full. However, there is one nagging annoyance I've had since the election that I'm going to have to call out, and that is when people focused on ideas or message start devaluing and even belittling the importance of technology or infrastructure. As in, Sure that tech stuff is important. But it doesn't matter until we get our message straight / return to our principles / kick out the religious right / kick out the fiscal right.

The idea that what a party stands for is more important than the tools it uses is so blindlingly obvious that I wonder exactly why people feel compelled to throw it in our faces once we mention there we also face key infrastructure challenges, like Barack Obama's 13 million email addreses or half a billion raised online. I've been banging the technology drum for a while, and not even I disagree with the primacy of ideas. Not even guys like Eric Odom or Michael Patrick Leahy who have been leading the charge on conservative adoption of Web 2.0 would disagree. 

The notion that there are tons of people out there saying you can rebuild the party only with technology, infrastructure, and tactics is a straw man. No one is arguing this. Leon's metaphor about fertile ground is something I live everyday as a political consultant -- the same strategies applied to issues where there is already a kernel of motivation and enthusiasm always yield explosively more effective results. My advice to people who come to me where that enthusiast base may be elusive is always the same: try to find it first, before implementing a technology strategy.

There is no basic disagreement here, but conservatives are balkanizing into "ideas" or "tech" camps needlessly. Because of the magnitude of the GOP loss, there is an unfortunate sense that we don't know where to begin. Fixing any one thing would not have stemmed the tide. That's why we need to at least try to fix everything starting now. That means revamping our ideas and rebuilding our infrastructure. These are not mutually exclusive. Those arguing that we need to do one before we do the other, or at the expense of the other, are part of the problem.

The other day, I argued strongly for a purpose-driven use of technology in which everything is subordinate to political goals like gaining seats in Congress, or Tim Goddard's goal of flipping state legislatures, or finding good candidates. A lot of the noise lately has been around driving conservative adoption of tools like Twitter, and this may be what people like Leon are responding to, but that is not the message I have been delivering, nor is it the message of Rebuild the Party.

At the end of the day, however, I think the smartest, most efficient way to accomplish these goals is through technology. I have to lodge a disagreement with Stephen Gordon. Technology is just "one of many" tools. It is the primary tool in the 21st century. Sure, it may not be any one technology, like Twitter. It may not be out-of-the-box tools like Joomla implementations or Ning networks. It's going to require programmers who can build tools that don't already exist -- and not wasting time building stuff like the "conservative version" of Facebook or YouTube because Silicon Valley is largely liberal. The technology toolbox itself is as vast as the traditional campaign toolbox.

Attacking technology as a way to rebuild the party misses the point in another way. It assumes that technology is just a tool -- that it doesn't change the dynamics of the political process itself. And that it can't be an instrument in nudging along the kind of change we all want on the issues and ideas front.

Were MoveOn.org and the netroots primarily about technology or ideology? The answer is both. They were instruments for the ideological "reformation" of the party that just happened to use technology. They were both successful because they tied technology to sense of political purpose, direction, and action. I understand we won't "be like" the left, but this is a very useful lesson for the right.

Without technology, the Democrats' path to power would have looked very, very different. Their purpose-driven use of technology sped up the process of giving the grassroots an ownership stake within the party and feeling like they could safely get involved in official Democratic politics again. Right now, there is a poisonous divide between the official Republican Party and the grassroots. This is the inevitable consequence of the bailouts, spending, and Medicare Part D and probably couldn't be any other way after eight years in the White House. But over the next few years, it has to be a goal to get the grassroots looped back into the party and in fact get them in the drivers' seat shaping the ideas and priorities of the party. For an opposition to be effective, it must be united. This means breaking down or rendering irrelevant the elitist mindset of the political class that divides it from the grassroots, and working as one united Republican Party in the think tanks, on the ground, and online to be an effective foil to the Obama Administration.

Technology will play the critical role in this process. And this is where stuff like Twitter actually matters in a political sense. It was a Republican, John Culberson, who was the first member of Congress to use Twitter as it was meant to be used -- as a personal communications medium. More and more members of the RNC are joining Twitter. They aren't just using a cool tech toy -- they're getting plugged into an instantaneous feedback loop where the grassroots can share their concerns and priorities in real time. Imagine what would happen if a Congressman actually had to answer constituent phone calls on the bailout, and you get a sense of the environment politicians enter once they start using technology the right way. Except those "constituent phone calls" a/k/a e-mails or Twitter DMs are less likely to be argumentative because you know the target it actually listening.

As we point out at the end of the Rebuild the Party plan, technology can be a way to reinforce the party's core principles of trusting the people. If we build a system in which political power can projected up, and not just down, within the party, the party itself will become more responsive to the millions of Republicans clamoring for a return to conservative principles just as the Democratic Party became more responsive to its liberal base in the last few years because of technology.

Ideological reformation cannot happen in a vacuum. We can't just cloister ourselves in a room and come up with new principles and expect people to adopt them. To the extent we already know what the principles are, the most effective mechanism for change is to elect as our leaders people who value those principles. In that fight, new infrastructure matters and serves as a handmaiden to electing principled leaders. And not just infrastructure, but technology specifically. If our primary communications mediums are still about the few broadcasting to the many, that won't promote real bottom-up participation in the process, and entrenched interests will continue to win at the expense of the grassroots.

Aaron Marks asks if we are on the verge of a rightroots movement. The answer to that question depends on what we're organizing around: new tools or specific political objectives?

The last couple of months has seen a flourish of conservative organizing on Twitter. Now, we have DiggCons, complete with hashtag.

As someone who just crossed 3,000 followers on Twitter while writing this post, I'm just as thrilled as anyone about these developments. But I feel compelled to add a caution.

If these new movements don't evolve beyond efforts to colonize insert-Web 2.0-property-here, reacting to perceived liberal dominance of these spaces, we will not move the ball forward. That's because strategy must always precede tactics. A unifying goal to organize around is inevitably more compelling than cheerleading for specific tools. The end goal should not be to dominate, or keep ourselves from getting buried on Twitter or Digg. The goal should be to (eventually) dominate the American political system through the strategic use of all the tools at our disposal, including e-mail lists, fundraising, blogs, social networks, Twitter, or tools that don't even exist yet. In terms of how we communicate to the outside world, blog / Twitter / Digg triumphalism should be kept at a minimum, and a statement of our ultimate political objectives -- delivered in clear, non-technical language that even late adopters can understand -- must be in the foreground.

If you want a great example of goal-based online political organizing, look no further than Chris Bowers' call to his readers to pressure Democratic members of Congress to support no-name liberal legislation that would normally die in committee. This is actually a useful and serious political objective the realization of which just happens to be made easier by technology. But there is no tech-triumphalism in this -- just a hard-nosed political goal.

In many ways, the Open Left example mirrors the initial development of the conservative and liberal blogospheres. Conservative blogs in their early days featured a lot of blog-triumphalism, with "Carnival of X" serving as the precursor of a hashtag. This self-referential activity was good at building lots of interlinking between blogs -- but meanwhile, the left was beating us by organizing around concrete political objectives outside the political blogosphere. Raise Money for Candidate X. Defeat Bill Y. There is a lesson there. Anyone, whether an existing user of the tools or not, will be drawn to the goal, and will eventually latch on to the tools as a way to achieve the goal. The netroots was not self-consciously about dominating blogs. It was about routing around existing failed power structures to achieve concrete external goals, and blogs just happened to be the readiest tool in the arsenal.

People like Justin Hart are working to convert the right's energy on Twitter into dollars for candidates and organizations. And #TCOT has a whole slew of action projects, including a campaign to realize the 435 District Strategy and pressuring RNC members to get on Twitter. Given that Twitter is best used as a person-to-person medium, this is actually not a bad way to personally influence the 168 who elect the next Chairman to make sure our concerns are heard.

As someone who conspired in the creation of a hashtag around the wedding of one of The Next Right's founders last night (Congrats, Soren!), I know what great fun they can be. But if our goal is to exert real-world political power and convince the late adopters to follow, we might want to think about organizing our movement around things that are more serious, and less meta, than another hashtag.

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.