• UK | Wikileaks' war records: the datajournalism perspective
  The Wikileaks disclosure of Afghanistan war records has been frontpage news in the last two days. It was not only about journalism, but also about datajournalism
  The three newspapers that broke the story had less than a month to choose how to publish the data: how to choose? How they did it?
  Here's what was the process at The Guardian:

• UK | Digital engagement, where art thou?
  

  I don’t like the phrase ‘Government 2.0′ much, so the something bigger hopefully isn’t that. I quite like ‘Open Government’, and digital engagement is part of that, as is open data and general increases in transparency from government.

  A few weeks after the UK election, Dave Briggs wonders what is the place of digital engagement in times of austerity.

• Italy | Wikicrazia: public policies and online collaboration... in action!
  PDF Europe speaker Alberto Cottica proposes an interesting experiment of web collaboration: next September he will publish a book called "Wikicrazia", exploring how public policies can be shaped and changed by the web and the new ways of online collaboration. At the beginning of June he has published the last draft of the book, asking for comments and creating a debate on the different topics he dealt with in the book.
  Every week Cottica is  publishing a post, analyzing the contributions of his readers and sharing how they helped him writing a better book: so far he received 98 (very detailed) comments.
  The experiment will continue until the end of the month, so - if you understand Italian - become a "wikicratico" and help him!

• UK | The British are invading (Twitter)!
  Last week British EU geeks got excited by the UK debate when the three candidates dealt with EU and foreign affairs. Quite surprisingly, the debate had a huge impact on Twitter (hashtag: #leadersdebate), also extensively used by the eurobloggers.
  Joe Litobarski watched the debate and has a detailed summary of the night - and a critical take: "There was a lot of build-up to the second TV live debate for other reasons. Jason O’Mahoney points out that the Liberal Democrats had done so well in the first debate that they now had a lot to lose.

• Italy | A discouraging Internet scenario and the (not so) hidden potential of the web
  The Italian Internet law scenario is quite discouraging and it may get worse, according to Vera Franz: in a long post on Open Society, Franz explains how Italy's media landscape is in fact already biased by the peculiar political situation (the Prime Minister owns the three main private TV channels and controls the three public TV channels - a total of 84% of viewers). Moreover recent bills, if turned into law, may lead to a severe limitations of freedom of speech in a country.
  The last weeks of the campaign for local elections saw a further step in limitating political conversation: "Although equal-airtime legislation was introduced in 2000 to avoid bias, Italy’s media watchdog, Agcom, decided last month that the best way of all to guarantee balance was to ban talk shows during the campaign" reports The Economist. But this time the web "helped" mainstream media: the journalists whose political talk shows have been banned from public television organised Raiperunanotte, a major event denouncing the miserable state of media freedom in the country.

• U.K. | What kind of campaign will Britain see?
  On the Guardian Kevin Anderson reflects on how (and if) British political operatives and activists will adapt Obama's strategies in this campaign: "If Facebook is good at organising groups, are there constituencies where issue-oriented organising might play a role in the outcome of an election? If the debates are the real innovation in this election, what role will the Twitter "spin room" play in public opinion?".
  Guido Fawkes, one of the top political conservative bloggers, leaves the first comment: "TV is king". What if?

Wondering what's going in European techpolitics? Starting today, PDF Europe will tell you more - three days a week!
Links and suggestions are welcome both by email and on twitter.
(thanks to Nancy Scola).

EU | Are you ready for (y)EU?
Julien Frisch introduces the Web Communications team of the European Parliament.

During the last European Parliament elections in June, almost all different candidates around Europe turned to the Internet to engage voters in their own countries. The European Parliament didn´t want to be left out and launched a 2-2.5 millons euros three month internet campaign with the theme of “If you don´t vote don´t complain.” It was centered around websites like Ucount4EU, which featured information about the election and the roll that EP is playing in the lives of European citizens day to day; Can you hear me? in collaboration with MTV Networks International which focused on young Europeans ; and TellBarroso.eu where the President of the European Comission Durao Barroso asked for opinions about European challenges through an online poll.