When a Republican ran unopposed for the state house in Ed Ridpath's district last year, the IBM employee says, "I had to look at myself and ask, 'well, who's to blame?'" Spurred on to volunteer, he soon found himself revamping the county party's web site. "I assumed that in Wake there would be a lot of web-heads doing the work," he says. "I was wrong." And on the strength of his "massive overhaul" of the site, he was tapped by the incoming county chair to head a newly formed technology committee.

Ridpath's committee has focused on three areas: communication, voter tracking, and training. With communication Ridpath is proud of his group's emphasis on what he calls "enabling technology," which allows even semi-computer-savvy people to manage newsgroups, web sites, and other communication tools. "We tried to distribute the power out a little bit," he says.

On the voter tracking side, Ridpath's committee has encouraged more decentralization. The Wake party has negotiated with the state party to begin expanding access to the state party's voter lists: Ridpath hopes that "as we get more experienced with it we'll push it down to the grass roots" as far as the precinct level. The technology committee has also worked hard to make it easier for the party-and campaigns-to produce reliable maps. Here as in other areas, the committee has set clear standards in order to make their systems reproducible both for other counties and for later generations of volunteers.

Finally, there's training. "We've got all this wonderful technology," Ridpath says, "but if nobody knows how to use it, it won't do us any good." For that reason, his committee of volunteers has written manuals on how to use these new systems-and offered one-on-one training to party leaders.

Ridpath acknowledges that technology is not a panacea for the party. "Politics is more about people," he admits, but he adds that "the big thing about technology is that we know the opposition is using it. We need to make sure we're keeping up."

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