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!

An online fire is burning in Europe. It was set by what appears to be a designed campaign to transform the European intellectual property regime, towards a more restrictive set of rules directly affecting the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and information. We're seeing its implementation in Sweden, France, Italy, UK or at the EU level in Brussels.

This week is ending. I've been (still I am) in Moscow for a week of teaching at the MGIMO, as I do every six months. On the academic side, no big changes or problems - well, besides a drunk student who told me in front of the rest of the students that "this year everything is changing", for I will have to start teaching in Russian (!), because he couldn't understand English and my subject interested him very much (ignoring the fact that there was very good simultaneous translation!).

Ears couldn't help but perk up when, at PdF Europe, a presenter showed this map of the European blogosphere and noted the almost total lack of overlap between national online conversations, but pointed to the middle of it all and said something to effect of 'that's Jon Worth.' As the European Union takes ever greater hold, with the legal enforcement of the Treaty of Lisbon just yesterday, is there a pan-European online political conversation? If not, why not, and should there be? The Brussels-based Worth, the blogger behind Euroblog, was nice enough to join me on IM for a chat.

Help us understand what the presenter at PdF Europe meant when identified you at the lonely center of that mapping of the European blog world?

First of all it's worth saying that Anthony [Hamelle of Linkfluence] was talking about political blogospheres, not blogospheres about cooking or Formula 1 racing. Essentially political blogospheres operate rather nationally in Europe. It's to do with languages, prevailing political culture, and the fact that the European Union as a whole does not necessarily lend itself to blogging. I am somewhere in that gap between the national blogospheres. I'm British, I live in Brussels, I am an EU politics person by background, and I can do tech. And I have been blogging about the EU for more than 4 years. So what transnational/EU wide political blogopshere that exists one way or another passes through my blog quite often.

I was not remotely surprised by what Anthony presented. It's essentially what I've intuitively understood.

Can you expand on that idea that "prevailing political culture" helps to explain why there doesn't seem to be a pan-European online conversation?...

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.)

If you want to follow along with the Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference live by audio, we're pleased to be partnering with Civico, an internet radio station based in Birmingham, England, which will be streaming all the sessions over the next two days at http://www.civicolive.com/pdfeu.

Hi everyone! Welcome to Spain 2.0, it’s only 1 day to go and the Personal Democracy Forum Europe will begin. With this entry I will talk about the situation of Personal Democracy in Spain, covering the relevant laws, the Spanish Government ministries that touch on the subject, then through the Parliament and finally I will talk about the different Regions.

I owe the readers of PdF Europe an update on the Open Declaration on European Public Services. This is a case of "public innovation without permission", where a groups of Gov2.0 enthusiasts tries to disrupt the EU policy-making process from the outside, by creating a bottom-up declaration which will be presented alongside the official Ministerial Declaration on e-government in Malmo this week (www.egov2009.se).

While we all know where to find the number one Euro (w)e-gov event next week (*cough* Barcelona), there is also another *fairly* important conference going on some way north around the same time.

Next Thursday sees the start of the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Meeting and Conference, which will be taking place at the Malmö Exhibition and Convention Centre, Sweden. As the event page says:

“It will be one of the major events of the Swedish EU Presidency and will include a Ministerial Meeting of ministers responsible for eGovernment, a Ministerial eGovernment Conference, and an exhibition of more than 50 finalists of eGovernment Awards.”

The conference is intended to agree a Ministerial Declaration that will set out the roadmap for eGovernment across Europe up until 2015. The Ministerial Declaration will be presented jointly by the Swedish Presidency and the European Commission on the first day of the Conference.

Straight forward enough, right? Well not exactly. The event has provoked plenty of agitating, with some prominent We.Gov figures intending to shake things up a little and disrupt proceedings from inside and out.

We're pleased to announce the following twenty people have been selected to win a Google Fellowship to attend this month's Personal Democracy Forum Europe inaugural conference in Barcelona. The fellows were selected based on their work and initiative in the arenas of technology, politics and social entrepreneurship.