Spark It Up!!!: Ken Blackwell Understands the Internet

I guess you readers can tell that I am impressed with Ken Blackwell. I fully support him for RNC chair. Blackwell has laid out his vision for the party in his Conservative Resurgence Plan. Take time to read the plan. One of the impressive things about Blackwell is his embrace of the Internet, New Media, and technology. Finally a republican that gets it! Blackwell lists five points that are key to a conservative resurgence. He writes

Creating, developing, and harnessing a conservative resurgence is a complicated effort that can essentially be broken down into 5 segments:
1 Inspired Base
2 The Party of Ideas
3 Rebuild
4 Technological Infrastructure
5 Commitment to the Future

Lets look at a little of #4 Technological Infrastructure. How important is that? To the republicans of the past the issue was not important at all. Blackwell makes it clear-

"We cannot allow the Democrats to hold a technological edge on party applications and software. Voter Vault must be redeveloped into a party and grassroots management tool that meets the needs of our grassroots leaders in terms of organization, tasking, tracking, and rewarding of our County Chairs, District Chairs, Precinct Captains, and Volunteers."

Here is some bio on Ken and what his plan calls for to address the above.
Technological Infrastructure
The party that dominates technology is positioned to win.
Ken Blackwell has received meritorious recognition from the Center for Digital Government, and was recognized by Government Technology magazine as one of the top 25 public sector leaders in information technology. The RNC needs similar technological advancement.
Morton Blackwell teaches at the Leadership Institute that if one candidate or party dominates an important technology, that candidate likely has an insurmountable advantage in a given election. Republicans dominated talk radio and direct mail in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Those advantages allowed our party to flourish despite Democrat advantages on broadcast news. The Internet is the most important new technology since the home television. Just as John Kennedy won largely due to his superiority in televised debates, Obama won at least partly due to his ability to harness the Internet to organize a superior ground game and raise large sums of money online for relatively little cost.
Once we have inspired the Republican electorate, we will need to have the technological infrastructure to manage their activities and requests. This section focuses on managing precincts and improvements to the Victory program. Please see the Technology section later in this plan for online strategies.

Precinct Organizational Tools
We will provide every Precinct Organizer (PO) with a login to a website that will supply them with a list of voters in their precinct with contact information, data that we would like gathered about each voter in their precinct, and a map. They will be able to assign streets to their friends who agree to serve as Street Captains (SC’s).

Blackwell addresses new media and technology issues many times throughout his plan. He does so in commonsense fashion. This is something republican bloggers have been screaming about for years. Maybe our screams were finally heard. I always thought that the GOP would slowly embrace the Internet from a local unit on up to the top. I never thought there would be chance that the (possible) party leadership would start requiring use of the internet, moving from the top down. You can support Ken Blackwell by clicking here.