Steele better have a plan for transition, and it better be good. You wipe out all that institutional memory – granted, often, and in this case, that’s mostly a good thing – there better be positives that get into place PDQ.

I can’t even get my Congressman, who lives 5 mins away, to respond to my email re: technology, let alone the RNC or a campaign. No one cares about grassroots “technology ideas”.

The most the RNC is doing is updating the ancient Voter Vault and focusing on Facebook and Myspace accounts. Give me a break – that’s kid stuff.

Why should anyone waste their time with this? There’s no such thing as grassroots – it’s all corporate – and I’ve spent enough time with clueless corporate-types who don’t know a damn thing about techology.

There is no place for brilliant people with brilliant ideas in the RNC – and if I’m wrong, invite me to the next technology thinktank – I won’t hold my breath.

Alas, the GOP web site at www.gop.com has a few good ideas, but they are currently poorly, poorly implemented. The GOP has a pretty fair idea in allowing one to set up your own web site/blog at whatever-your-id.gop.com – however their whole platform is so buggy, it’s going to result in more harm than good. I’ll just hit the high points here:

So many bugs! You cannot recover a password, nor log in, nor properly edit your profile. Pix, videos and comments do not appear, and hundreds, if not thousands, of sites have been created by folks who did not realize they were creating a web site and thus have no content. This really hurts the idea of a myGOP web site.

Too many javascript prompts and error messages were written by ESL programmers. Improper English and bad grammar are so rife at gop.com that it begins to appear that the GOP would be pro-illegals. If there is anywhere that should be careful about proper English, it’s gop.com. My company hires offshore programmers too, mostly from India, but we always check their English before we allow the code to go into production. What political conclusions would visitors draw? What about setting an example?

MOST IMPORTANTLY: the GOP is pursuing an online strategy that promises to diffuse effort rather than concentrate effort, and will turn away experienced bloggers (presumably the very audience they want to attract) after just a couple of hours of effort.

Check out my website there, elronaldo.gop.com – I wasted a whole half day on this. The headlines section allows you to post only headlines from the RNC list – not headlines (or Gadgets or Widgets) from your own sources. The blog section will only allow you to type in an article – and not allow a reference or embed or object for a feed or Ustream TV embed. Sorry, I already have my own blog and I’m not going to copy/paste every article into elronaldo.gop.com – the one time I tried this, it did not preserve the formatting.

Now I am in the web services business (800Cart.com ) and I understand just as well as the next publisher the principle of ‘publish-it-now-so folks-can-see-what-is-so-attractive-and-fix-the-bugs-later’ as well as the next guy. But the GOP carried this principle way, way too far.

If GOP.com wants to have thousands of identical, lame ‘web sites’ to lower its search engine authority, that’s one thing. But if they want to harness the web/blog talent that’s already out there, they will allow Gadget, widgets, Ustream embeds, rss feeds and all of the labor-savings devices that bloggers have evolved to distribute their political thinking.

I can make love to a libertarian. Making love to a liberal is a chore.

Which is the last thing he should do.

Maybe it’s some poorly tested changes posted on Fri that will get fixed on Mon

* cannot log in…

* cannot recover password…

* attempt to recover password produced a search result as if user wished to search gop.com

They DO have some really good resources there! Like contacting others in your own neighborhood – that is a great start!

Presumably these will get fixed on Monday….

I think of really good systems as providing multiple knobs and levers that give the user the ability to do what they want to do. As opposed to a system that forces the user to do a lot of unnecessary stuff.

Noted software thinker Martin Fowler has stated

There’s a refrain I’ve heard on every problem project I’ve run into. The developers come to me and say “the problem with this project is that the requirements are always changing”. The thing I find surprising about this situation is that anyone is surprised by it. In building business software requirements changes are the norm, the question is what we do about it.

A humorous small illustration of Erick’s point

It is vastly easier for a technologist to vet a shiny new tool with pretty bells and whistles than it is a political consultant. Too many political consultants get distracted by the shiny.

can be found here, see the emboldened text for brevity. I have no familiarity with the RNC’s technology efforts, but one point Erick raises it the question of whether the RNC has technology folks that can evalutate these types of criteria, and not just from a static “present functionality” viewpoint that will be left behind as the RNC’s needs inevitably change.

Far more more Republicans want the GOP to be like Palin than like McCain. Dems don’t see it that way.

Pailin polls surprisingly strong among unaffliiated (35% HIGHLY favorable).

Look for the left and liberal GOP Frum-types to keep up the attack.

See www.bejohngalt.com.

Far more more Republicans want the GOP to be like Palin than like McCain. Dems don’t see it that way.

Pailin polls surprisingly strong among unaffliiated (35% HIGHLY favorable).

Look for the left and liberal GOP Frum-types to keep up the attack.

See www.bejohngalt.com.

So it’ll be up to the Redstate’s of this world to go on the offensive. Against, who? Well Erick, you said it here. Very timidly, “McCain staffers”. Almost in a whisper. COME ON ERICK! Name names. Point fingers. Start identifying these enemies of the Conservative Movement. (like you did N. Wallace- remember Operation Leper?) Our immediate enemy is within the Party. Its an unpleasant task going after this negative element but it must be done. Many of them were, just a short time back, our comrades, true. Its not an easy task but are we willing to watch the Conservative Movement drift off into history? Become a memory? Glory days?

Another thing Patton said, “God have mercy on my enemies, because I won’t”. Darvin Dowdy

What conservatives are.
Who we are as a party
what the republicans have in mind.
What’s the plan?

I am looking for my niche, how I can help. I am looking for Ideas. Anyone have any, for a slightly disabled 52 year old computer guy with a lot of time on his hands?
Maryland is losing republican representation, maybe it’s time for some changes. I have high hopes for Michael Steele.

We can have the prettiest sites on the net, but they’re useless if there is no substance behind it. An ugly site with substance have more power than a pretty “empty suit”.

All too many “tech” consultants on the right are selling snake oil, or are genuinely lacking in knowledge and understanding of that which they want to be hired to provide. Cyrus needs to stay at the RNC, and the entire organization needs to run from the snake-oilers and incompetents as fast as it can.