My Next Job?

One of the reasons that I largely abandoned the blogosphere this past week was because I was helping to build a database for a local congressional race. I've spent a portion of the past week working to develop a user-friendly application to allow campaign staff to capture and track information about their volunteers (and their prospective volunteers).

Apparently, I'm not alone. Tuesday's Washington Post has an article about the lengths to which the national parties are going to capture information about voters:

But in this year's election, there is a hidden high-tech twist. Rutkus and Harris are out to "map" the political demography of this neighborhood, trolling in the service of a quasi-science called "database targeting."

Houston's answers will bounce from Rutkus's clipboard to a computer in the state Democratic Party's offices here, and then 400 miles away to computers housed in the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington.

Like rivulets flowing to rivers and rivers to the sea, this information will join an enormous data torrent streaming toward Washington from all around the country. Houston's "profile" is just one of 166 million -- or one for every registered voter -- that the DNC is constantly updating in a huge digital cache known as DataMart. The Republican National Committee tends a similar information trove, dubbed Voter Vault.

Going door to door is not really my thing. But give me a mountain of data that needs to be condensed and managed and you're singing my tune. My contract at my current client will be coming to an end soon. I wonder if the DNC needs a technology guru in the Colorado area to supervise the collection and analysis of voter data.