GOP's technical knockout

After a high-profile technology failure during last year's presidential campaign, Republicans are looking to Boston for help climbing out of the digital abyss and onto the same level as Democrats, top party officials and experts said.

During its summer meeting in Boston last week, the Republican National Committee played up a push to boost the technology arm of the GOP. Republicans lagged behind Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign in reaching voters through technology and social media, top party officials admitted.

"Republicans need to significantly beef up their technology in order to catch up with Democrats," said Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

Andy Barkett, the first chief technology officer in the Republican National Committee's history, managed a team of engineers at Facebook and once worked at Google. He was recently hired "to build things, technology things" and fill in "the hard-core technology gap" the party's suffered from, Barkett said.

"They need to improve their talent level," West said.

To help address that lack of talent, party officials will look carefully at the Boston startup community, Barkett said.

"There's a thriving startup community here," he said. "I'm very excited to go out and look for a few of those people who might say, 'I want to do a startup. Wait, here's something that's even better. I want to do a startup that's going to fix the whole country.' "

According to West, one of the key areas Republicans need to improve is database use, something Barkett thinks is especially suited to Boston and Cambridge.

"There are certainly people with really, really good data-analysis skills, big data skills at MIT and Harvard," he said.

The RNC will focus its talent search in Boston, as well as Silicon Valley, New York City and Austin, Texas, Barkett said.

Local technology groups were not exactly shocked at the news.

"With the largest number of different technology clusters of any state, it's not surprising that the national political parties are looking to Massachusetts as they continue their embrace of technology," said Felix Browne, vice president for policy and communications for the Massachusetts High Technology Council.

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