<< close window >>

Anthony Thigpenn: “The role of technology is a couple of things, in its most fundamental ways. One, it’s a tool to make the work easier and more effective. So, allowing people not to spend time shuffling paper but to be out talking to people. That’s the most important test. Whether it’s the database, the information management that allows us to really focus in on who we ought to be talking to, allows us to produce precinct lists that are very tailored to the particular needs of a community, whether it’s a barcode reader that allows us to capture information in two hours instead of eight hours – all that’s about making it more effective and easier for people so that people are spending their time talking to other people and not doing other things. So that’s the first, most important use of technology that we measure against. The second is scale. Technology allows us to be able to reach many more people than we could otherwise do, just because there are limits to doing things by hand and not being able to produce lists. […] And I would mention one other which is analysis and evaluation. The ability to take the numbers, find out how many people that we’re talking to, are we having an effect? […] And also being able to do that graphically in term of GIS mapping is very, very important to be able to evaluate the work, and the whole point of the evaluation of the work is to learn how to be able to do it better and more effective.”