Why, yes!
Without a doubt politics exists outside of party politics. In Edgeryders 1 there was some discussion around the story of Spaghetti Open Data in Italy – that’s a civil society non-organization (it’s just a Google group) that came to have a significant impact over the politics of transparency in that country. The original post is here:
Since then there have been many developments, like the launch of TweetyourMEP and, subsequently (for the elections held in February), of Twitantonio. Despite being farily technical, now Spaghetti Open Data has over 500 members, many of whom are public administrators themselves, crunches on average 500+ messages a month and was able, in January 2013, to cook up an open data grassroot (and uncompromisingly high-quality) event with more than 250 registered participants on no budget – it must be some kind of world record.