From a new job posting by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee comes the latest sign that data analysis is becoming a more and more basic skill with each passing day:

"The DCCC Targeting Team is seeking an intern to will assist with creating, revising, and implementing targeted voter contact plans. Duties will include data entry, data analysis, research, daily task tracking, using voter file data, and assisting with other projects."

Slate's Sasha Issenberg has a great story outlining one narrative about Newt Gingrich's loss in Florida: He inspired a group of tech-savvy volunteers, but gave them no way to plug in to the campaign. Read More

Minnesotans United for All Families, a state-level group fighting for same-sex marriage rights, just put out a job posting for a "data manager." The responsibilities are a little more robust than what you'd find at a campaign just trying to cut turf for volunteers. They indicate a desire to use data to identify like-minded supporters, then connect them to one another and to voters — a kind of social-network-aware organizing approach that's been on the rise this year. Read More

On Monday, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington hinted at the creation of a new database — either a "voter file" or "a database connecting millions of Americans" — to support the political causes and campaigns backed ... Read More

More than in any other race to date, Americans may experience the 2012 presidential election through precisely targeted phone calls, visits, tweets and Facebook posts — messages not from the candidates themselves, ... Read More

Writing Monday for GigaOm, Derrick Harris speculates about the importance of data for Obama 2012: Those large follower counts are why social media data could be such a game-changer for Obama 2012; their sheer scale is ... Read More

You know how Rapportive can serve up social data keyed off your Gmail inbox? Meet Inbox Influence. It does the same thing, basically, but with details on the political money tied to the people and organizations in your ... Read More

Governing Magazine's Heather Kerrigan reports that cities across the U.S. are finding a useful policing edge in overlaying crime data and traffic safety data. (In broad strokes, crime and traffic incidents tend to happen ... Read More

Steven Adler had to wait five years before he could get back into the political software industry. He did things like this in the meantime. Say you're the co-founder of a company that quickly becomes part of the core ... Read More