• EU | Should we give eVoting another chance?
  Voting in an election is not as easy as it may seem: during the British election night many people reported they could not cast their ballots. As reported by The Guardian, "at least 1,200 people lost their chance to vote on election night because of bad planning by councils, according to an official report by the electoral watchdog the Electoral Commission which says the entire system of running elections needs to be modernised ". The postal system didn't cause less problems, as some local authorities report postal voting enquiries up by 60%.
  The next question is unavoidable: could eVoting be a solution?

In the early primary campaign season of 2010, things seemed oddly quiet in Texas. In a heated primary battle, Texas Republicans did not get a single phone call, saw not one yard sign, and had no canvassers knocking on their doors -- at least not from incumbent Governor Rick Perry.

But Perry wasn't off the radar. He was online.

Are paper political campaigns a thing of the past?

Join the PdF Network on Thursday, May 13 as Ryan Gravatt, of Quicksilver Internet Solutions, shows us what campaigns can learn from Perry's experiment in online-only campaigning.

Thursday, May 13th at the PdF Network
Paper-free Politics: How the Internet Replaced Traditional Outreach in the TX Governor's Race
1-2 p.m. EST

Join the call!

Check out our upcoming PdF Network calls...

• UK | The Digital Economy Bill: further steps, further protests
  The controversial Digital Economy Bill passed through the House of Commons and it's one step closer to become law (you can find the debates on Theyworkforyou), not without a strong opposition from some MPs and lots of protests. As our own Nancy Scola reports: "What seems to have folks in UK most riled up about the bill is how on substance, the legislation frees the government to take action against digital downloaders and other undesirables, including shutting down their ISP connections, and on process, that the MPs didn't seem to have any clue about the matters they were legislating upon -- when they bothered to turn up at all" (Cory Doctorow agrees on the last point).

• 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.

UPDATE: MyConservatives.com now live

The Conservative Party will launch their very own take on My.BarackObama.com (or MyBo for short) later today - MyConservatives.com. Timed to be released ahead of next week’s Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, ‘MyCon’ (or even #MyCon, as it's bound to become known on Twitter) provides a very British take on Barack Obama’s revolutionary approach to online campaigning and organising.

Developed in conjunction with global digital media agency LBI, the Conservative Party will no doubt be hoping the site can achieve the same profile and uptake as its American counterpart, fêted as one of the driving forces behind Barack Obama’s historic win. Equally LBI will no doubt be looking to reach the legendary status of Blue State Digital, the people behind MyBO, in the new media world.

Rishi Saha (Head of New Media at the Conservative Party and speaker at next month’s PDF Europe event in Barcelona) stresses that while drawing on many of the core features of Blue State Digital’s MyBO platform, it has very much been developed with a UK audience in mind.