I'm really pleased with how everything went at PdF Europe's first conference in Barcelona. We had a great mix of political hacks and hackers from all over the Continent, and the conversations buzzing in the hallways before, during and after each session are the best proof that people were connecting to each other in all kinds of fruitful ways. (Indeed, the continuing buzz on Twitter around the hashtag #pdfeu is the best proof to me that we planted many productive seeds at the Torre Agbar.)

Tuesday October 6, Javier Pelaez (a blogger who is interested on science and has a blog that talks about it just as a hobby) asked in his Twitter profile how many persons would write in their blogs about the trim in the Spanish investment and development (I+D) budget. Some blogs began to mobilize themselves; hundreds of users began to support the cause using the social networks, and what began to as a simple tweet finished as a social group of real political pressure.

Are you a virtual office worker? That's the topic of this week's PdF Network conference call, Thursday from 1-2pm EST. If you're like many people, the odds are that you--or someone you work with--are working from home or from a remote location, away from your employer's central office. According to the Telework Research Network, the number of Americans who worked from home or remotely at least one day per month for their employer rose from approximately 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008. Five million employees work from home most of the time, another seven million do so at least once a month.

And while we can't prove it with hard data, it's clear that for people who work at the intersection of technology and politics, the percentage who use their laptop or their blackberry as their de facto office is probably much higher than the average population.

More political organizations are opening themselves up to running hybrid shops, with some or even all their staff working from their homes, or from the road. But how do they do it? What tools do they use? How do they deal with information overload, or chain emails from hell? How do they keep morale up and make sure their staff is being productive?