Sometimes it's good to take a step to see things more clearly. I started writing this in Stockholm after being invited to the official election campaign launch for Sweden's Pirate Party. It was their success in '09 that kickstarted so much interest in the Pirate Party movement.

So it was good to take a moment to remember that.

But also it was worth taking a step away from the already poisonous atmosphere in the run up to the European elections in Britain. Other British party leaders chose to kick their campaigns off bickering with their enemies. We chose to kick it off talking with our friends out in Europe about what we have achieved.

And the Pirate Party has delivered way more for the British people than UKIP has for instance. And that's even without any British MEPs. Think what we could achieve with a candidate like Maria Aretoulaki in Brussels.

We may have a new website, but that is just the start of our plans to open up politics.  In association with Lancaster University, we want to take the lessons we learnt in our "Policy Alpha" project which ran on reddit, twitter and elsewhere, and formed our manifesto in 2012, and take it to the next step: Policy Beta.

About Policy Beta

Policy Beta is our next big IT project.  We want to create a digital platform for citizens to network, generate ideas, debate issues, and vote on the policies that we will adopt.  It's going to be our way of deciding the Party's direction and with that, the pressure we put on government.  Policy Beta will do what we did manually in Policy Alpha back in 2011/12 and much more. It will be a custom fit, open source platform for crowdsourcing public policy.

But its not just for us: As a way of crowdsourcing ideas, Policy Beta will deal with the lack of participation in the way political parties and, indeed, modern democracies work when it comes to gathering ideas.  It will be an open source platform, which means anyone will be able to make use of it, extend it or help us to improve it.

We'd like you to join us and our partners at Lancaster University to get this project across the line.  Right now we are looking for developers, but as with our other large IT projects, there will be lots of stuff you can get involved with!

Payday lender Wonga has backed down on its attempt to remove a parody advert criticising them from Twitter after thousands of users (and the Pirate Party UK) defied the company by reposting the picture.

Wonga said:

"We accept that we were a little heavy-handed last week when we issued a Twitter Takedown notice for @BrandySnap's image, and having seen the full ‘Streisand Effect’ ourselves, we won’t be pursuing the notice"

The Streisand effect occurs when an attempt to remove or cover up information leads to it gaining significantly more attention than it would have done otherwise.

Wonga was on shaky legal ground by using a copyright claim under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to ask Twitter to remove the image, although Twitter complied at first. Parody and criticism are protected as "fair use" under US copyright law.