Archive for February, 2009

February 12th, 2009

RNC Tech Summit – Presentation

Due to a few traveling mis-haps it looks as though I will be attempting to present at tommorows RNC Tech Summit.   I have put my Powerpoint Presentation below as well as the text of my speech.  


The timing/format/and AV setup was not made very clear and I wasn’t too sure if this was more about general ideas or a “hard sell” so I spoke generally about my philosphy of approaching political data and management, namely keeping data stupid simple, fully integrated, actionable, and increasingly intelligent.  

Anyways, check it out and let me know if you got any questions/comments.

Click here to download/read the text of my remarks (reads along with the slides below).

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February 4th, 2009

Vlytics Open API in 2009

Fact: Vlytics will provide some sort of open API for voter files in the 2009 Calendar Year.

As witnessed in political tech articles over the past year both democrat and republican techtivists (what I like to call technology inclined political activists) have been calling for some sort of freely available open API so they can build data driven applications.

If you don’t know what an open API is or what it can do for you than it probably won’t matter to you right away. But down the road an Open API will lead to free mobile apps, google map mashups, and maybe even an easy way to get some basic stats on a district.

For those of you who do know what an open API is, rest assured I want to allow you to be able to pull all sorts of data based on Vlytics Voter Files.

Why is Vlytics doing this? Honestly, not sure yet other than I see a need for freely available data feeds for budding techtivists looking to take campaigns into the next generation. As I hash this idea out I will post here my thoughts and thoughts from others.

I have to be somewhat careful to protect my business model as well as my hosting costs but I see an opportunity here for Vlytics to do something for the techtivist community at large – hey maybe someone will build an App I might want to buy/integrate into the Vlytics platform?

If you want to know when I will release it, what data will be available, and if there will be call limiting than I can tell you those questions aren’t answered yet. I do want to hear from you, just leave a comment below.

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