Politics News & Articles

On January 1, 2006, Rick Falkvinge set up a web page for the Swedish Pirate Party. He mentioned the address in a single chat room, and within 24 hours he had over the 2,000 signatures he needed for the party to participate in the upcoming election.

What do these pirates want? With such a name it can be hard to take the party seriously, but politicians are taking notice now and so should you. The Swedish Pirate Party now has a seat in the EU Parliament, two if the Treaty of Lisbon goes into affect, changing various aspects of how the EU's government works. And the party has spread far beyond the EU. It might even be in your own back yard.

With the Democratic National Convention well underway, bloggers have been busy covering every aspect of the political event.

Hundreds of bloggers descended upon Denver on Monday and will do so into St. Paul next week for the Republican National Convention. As with the changing face of politics, both parties understand the need to allow bloggers, who are often self-supported, into the fray, as they embrace the new social medium that is fast replacing television and other traditional media that has long been the primary resource of reaching out to voters.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, most everyone can agree that how politics is covered online has changed dramatically from four years ago. With political convention season within days of peaking, the impact that online media has on coverage is hard to overlook.

As it turns out, political conventions have very little to do with television anymore.

Non-profit organizations that work to change policy on the local or state levels will revel in the latest news from the Sunlight Foundation.

Organizations using the open source constituent relationship management tool, CiviCRM, can now better connect their constituents and members to their elected officials, thanks to recent integration work that ties US federal data directly into CiviCRM records via the Sunlight Labs API.