• Italy | "Internet is freedom": Lawrence Lessig at the Chamber of Deputies
  There were high expectations for Lawrence Lessig's lecture at the Chamber of Deputies yesterday afternoon during the event "Internet is freedom". Some days before, the organizers asked people to tweet about the theme of the conference: the chosen hashtag was #difenderelarete, a reference to some recent bills attempting to limitate freedom of expression on the web. There were thousands of tweets and even more during the speech, making the topic the most popular of the day in Italy.
  But, apparently, mainstream media still don't get it: the lecture was preceded by a speech of the President of the Chamber, praising the Internet as a force of peace and innovation, and that is the only part of the conference that has made it to the news so far.

Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

• U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra reports back in with some basic highlights from his swing to the West Coast last week. On a stop in Silicon Valley, Kundra sat down to brainstorm with "venture capitalists and technology innovators" from companies like Mint.com, Mozilla, and Facebook. What'd they come up with? If you have the vision of a bald eagle, you might be able to make out some details in the storyboard above.
• Here's a map showing the real-time location of the 13 vehicles that the Census Bureau has out and about in the U.S., letting people know about the upcoming head count. Each van is doing its own tweeting from the road.
• Also from the census folks: you can read the census form online, but you can't fill it out there. Yet.
• "For someone who claims to hate the 'Democrat[sic]-media complex,' Breitbart sure knows how to work it."
• TurboTax -- as in, the people who make that tax preparation software -- takes to Twitter to respond to those who had criticized them for supporting a certain political TV show. They tweet, "Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show."
• And Mr. Beck is also the target of a new campaign from the likes of MoveOn, Brave New Films, and the SEIU that makes use of that your-name-here technology to make fun of the Beck-board.

Credit: NCinDC

• For just under half an hour yesterday afternoon, there was no power in the Longworth House Office Building. In the United States of America.
• New to Twitter is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson (@lisapjackson), who is looking to "expand the way we thinking about environmentalism." She might want to talk to Cory Booker about how you go about using Twitter to do some reputational enhancement.
• After some further noodling, Kevin Drum decides that "anonymous" blogger briefings inside the corridors of power can, indeed, be worthwhile.
• Parsing what John Yoo has to say about what became of his Justice Department emails.
• The AP analyzes White House tweet spin.
• And, completing our House of Representatives news sandwich, the House has launched a new caucus on global Internet freedom. There are only two members on board as of now, with Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey and Democrat David Wu of Oregon. But it's still early.

• Germany | Creating a more transparent Frankfurt
  Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt) is a new space for citizen participation: the aim is tracking local political decisions, making them more transparent and motivate citizens to connect locally and to discuss on how to change their neighborhood.
  The website offers information in form of geo-referenced data and documents properly tagged. It also offer an email service and space for comments and proposals.

Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

• Over at the White House, they're trying out a new web campaign to push out into the digital ether, every day, one new number highlighting some key fact of their health care push; "1,115" is their number for the dollars spent, on average, for employer-based health coverage per family each month. The number will live in giant font, it seems, at the top of WhiteHouse.gov each day, and will go out via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.
• If a social network worked for the Obama campaign, why can't it work for a Polish social justice movement?
• And holding staff tweets against their bosses.

(With Micah Sifry and Nick Judd)

• Spain | We can fix this only together...with or without you?
  In the past days the Spanish Chamber of Commerce launched an initiative to raise the confidence of citizens affected by the economic crisis. The campaign is called "Esto solo lo arreglamos entre todos" ("We can fix this only together") and it is willing to be "the biggest social therapy of the history", in the words of Susana Diaz, one of the consultant working on the project. The campaign consists of a website and several ads by both anonymous citizens and celebrities (the ad campaign costed 4 millions, according to Expansión).
  But so far it has not been well received by lots of citizens who felt betrayed by this sort of sharing responsibilities: on Facebook it is easy to find groups protesting against the campaign, with several hundreds of fans each. The protesters complain that the campaign is opportunist and demagogic, even creating a website called "We can fix this only *without them"*" to send "a message loud and clear to the organizers of the ad campaign and the state: we are not the problem.".
  (thanks to Anna Bellorbì)

This Friday we have a special "Scandinavian edition" of the Europe roundup, brought to you by PDF friend Bente Kalsnes.
If you want you can send us stories or interesting links to look into. And don't forget to check our twitter account!

• Norway | The Prime Minister is in the playground
  The Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is inviting bloggers to his office this week to discuss about the government's new website, Samarbeid for Arbeid (which means, more or less, "working for collaboration"). The website is made of a blog and a Twitter aggregator, sorted by four topics. If bloggers or Twitter users want the Prime Minister to read their posts, they can register the blog or tag tweets with predefined keywords.

• Protests against school funding cuts in California are being documented on YouTube.
• Where everyone (English-speaking, at least) now gets autocaptioning.
• Using tech to support dissent beyond California.
• Sebelius webchatted about health care reform.
• How information flows during election observation: some notes from Kenya.
• Introducing Distraction.gov.
• Sunlight posts its House expenditure database.
• And thinking of open analytics as part of open government.

(With Micah Sifry)

• Spain | Net Neutrality: a controversy that needs a political intervention?
  In Spain there's lot of talking about Internet business models and the neutrality of the operators that provide the connectivity infrastructure. And things might change quickly, according to what César Alierta, president of the telco Telefónica, declared last month: "Clearly, Internet search engines use our networks without paying anything, which is lucky for them and a curse for us. But that can not continue, we are the networks (...), we do it all. That will change, I believe it”.
  But some public servants don't seem to agree: Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, former president of the Spanish region of Extremadura, wrote an op-ed on El País, asking the government and politicians to work on the controversial topic.

Credit: Saucef

• Google rolls out a People Finder to connect folks left disconnected by this weekend's earthquake in Chile.
• Call him #PhilippeReines: one of Secretary Clinton's tweet-averse top communications advisors at the State Department, reports Politico, is wading into the Twitter waters by guest posting on @dipnote during the Secretary's trip through South America this week. A sample: "#PhilippeReines: In San Juan, refueling. Never dull moment w SHRC-adding stop tmrw pm-Buenos Aires, to meet w Pres. of Argentina de Kirchner."
• More progress on the Scott Brown Senate website front!
• Are we losing the cyber war?
• A review of John McCain's video wall.
• A look at the brewing Coffee Party "movement."
• The New York Times' coders upgrade their Congress API.
• Hill Republicans do a concerted Twitter push.
• More tweets were sent that linked to SunlightFoundation.com/Live than WhiteHouse.gov/Live during last week's health care powwow, and other insights into exactly how Sunlight's live meta-summit worked.
• The modern twist on the timeless student protest: what they're protesting is AT&T's poor cell phone coverage. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• And a campaign veteran sizes up the new MiniVAN: "For old timers who chased around with sheaves of paper and clipboards, this is as big as news gets."

(With Micah Sifry)