Given FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey's tumultuous exit from the organization he helped found, a Republican Party now casting about for solutions to its electoral troubles could be forgiven for passing over Tea Party advice on organizational structure. But if grassroots conservatives have technology tips to share, GOP insiders looking for an upgrade might want to lend an ear. Read More

The team at NationBuilder announced Thursday that they were releasing API and limited bulk data access to a nationwide voter file with records on 170 million voters, for free.

"I'm a developer, I've wanted to build off of this data for like a decade and it's just completely impractical because it would just cost a ton of money to bring this together, a ton of time, you wouldn't get access through all the parties, the tools are all partisan," Gilliam said Thursday. "There's no ecosystem around it. And that's really stunted the innovation in the political tech world."

A spot analysis of some 868,648 records of active voters in the city of Philadelphia suggests that Pennsylvania's new voter identification law may have a disproportionate affect on minorities and students. But the analysis, performed by Philadelphia-based software company Azavea and limited in scope only to the company's home city, raises eyebrows as much because of what it says about the lack of access researchers have to quality data on voters as it does about who might be affected by new law. Read More

As Democratic campaigners search for the best tools to track voters and voter contacts, some of them are looking at working with their voter data in a platform from the upstart nonpartisan firm NationBuilder instead of with software from NGP VAN, which many Democrats have used for years. And two of those candidates have received a strong message from their state Democratic Party organizations: Stick with the tools we’re already using. Read More

NGP VAN has released a new tool built to allow a candidate's supporters contact the likely voters that they find among their Facebook friends. The new tool is based on an earlier one that the company tested out in fall 2011 during the battle in Ohio over public sector unions, said Stuart Trevelyan, NGP VAN's CEO. The updated platform with a new interface allows users to not just engage their friends with virtual phone banks, but also with e-mails, social sharing and e-postcards, he said, and integrates it with gamification options like points and badges. Read More

As city and state legislatures become battlegrounds where the political right and left do combat over education reform, labor organizing and social issues, outside groups from both sides are looking online for recruits to fill their ranks of local elected officials.

Cyrus Krohn is the co-founder of Crowdverb, a sort of Justice League of Republican digital operatives assembled into a new Seattle-based startup in time for the 2012 presidential campaign. The team already lists the super PAC American Crossroads and conservative publishing groupEagle Publishing as clients. Read More