FROM IRC TO POLITICAL PARTY

On a roof top of Brussels Hackerspace we meet Ásta Helgadóttir from the icelandic pirate party. Here we get the insight how people that only communicated on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) started to form a political party.

The Pirate Party (Icelandic: Píratar) is a political party in Iceland. The party was cofounded on November 24, 2012 by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and several prominent Internet activists, including Smári McCarthy.
They successfully applied for the ballot list letter Þ in order to run in the 2013 Icelandic parliamentary election. This marks their first electoral participation as well as the first party to request the letter Þ. The party managed to win three seats in the 2013 election and became the first pirate party in the world to enter a national parliament.’

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an application layer protocol that facilitates communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client/server networking model. IRC clients are computer programs that a user can install on their system. These clients communicate with chat servers to transfer messages to other clients. IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.’

Quotations from Wikipedia.

Read more here:
Pirate Party (Iceland)
Ásta Helgadóttir

Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL)
IRC