During PdF 2010, one of the afternoon session featured "The best of European tech politics".
Here's a summary and some reflections written by the moderator, PDF friend and speaker Jon Worth.

If you’re a United States internet politics person visiting Europe all you have to do is speak about the 2008 Presidential campaign run by Barack Obama and you’ll have the audience falling over themselves. We want some of that! The logos, the brand, the halo-like image behind Barack’s head at barackobama.com, the candidate who did it online. Let some of the gold dust rub off on us, the Europeans!

Yet just as a little of the gloss of Obama has been clouded by the struggles of healthcare reform and his reaction to the Gulf oil spill, so a doughty group of Europeans set off for Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) in New York determined to show a US audience that the land of the free does have something to learn from the old continent, even in terms of internet politics.

The panel committed to this theme at PdF New York featured Bente Kalsnes (Origo, Norway), Benoît Thieulin (La Netscouade, France) and James Crabtree (Prospect Magazine, UK).

The starting point for European tech politics, at least in Scandinavia, is high levels of public trust in the political system, good levels of broadband penetration and a solid legal framework. This has fostered social networking experiments in Nordic politics, and promoted two blogging Foreign Ministers – Jonas Gahr Støre and Carl Bildt who set a policy agenda through their blogs.

The innovation in France is strongly in the extent of internet use within political parties and how this can act as a means to build party activism. This process started with the 2005 ‘non’ to the European Constitution, where activism was fostered online against the political and media mainstream. Building on that sentiment PS presidential candidate Segolène Royal used desirsdavenir.fr as a means to strengthen her presidential campaign, an initiative that has been build upon to create lacoopol.fr, a social network for activists on the left prior to the PS’s open primaries for the 2012 Presidential elections in France.

The UK election on 6th May was not won or lost online; if anything TV debates were the major innovation. Yet some significant use of the net was seen – from the Conservatives’ effective use of Google advertising and voter targeting databases to Labour’s word of mouth, social media activities. Additionally The Straight Choice shone a light on inaccurate election leaflets, while MyDavidCameron.com effectively spoofed the Conservatives’ poster campaigns. Dedicated social networks and online donation efforts largely fell flat.

The debate in New York only touched the surface of this wide and deep issue, and the complex relationships between eGovernment and ePolitics. The small website – bestof.techpolitics.eu – will remain as a repository of the many interesting projects and ideas we discovered during the research for the panel and will act as the starting point for further debate at PdF Europe in Barcelona.

You can follow our speakers on Twitter: @jonworth, @benteka, @thieulin, @jamescrabtree