• EU | What happens when the Euroblogger becomes a reporter...
  

  When the Euroblogger enters unknown territory, she or he doesn't know whether he or she is walking into a gold mine or a mine field - and my participation at the EPP Summit ahead of the June European Council meeting was such a move into unknown territory.

  Euroblogger Julien Frisch was invited to follow the European People's party summit and liveblogged the event. Frisch had previously been active part in the debate on whether bloggers should get accreditation to EU institutions (a topic we explored on our blog, too) and has a lot of interesting reflections, an exploration on the differences between blogging and journalism and how both of them can look at the EU work and tell people about that:

• UK | Twitter: a new prediction system for elections?
  During the UK electoral campaign Tweetminster conducted a Twitter-based word of mouth experiment : they tracked the most mentioned constituencies and candidates and tried to map the correlation between buzz, word-of-mouth and the eventual election results through a predictive mode (here you can read more about initial findngs and methodology).
  The results?

• UK | Tory and Labour Manifestos for 2010 election
  Both the Conservative party and the Labour party have presented their Manifesto for 2010 election. The Tories also provided an audio version while the Labour Manifesto has the motto "A future fair for all" and an animated video to viralize content:

• Italy | Is transparency compatible with “robots.txt”?
  PDF friends David Osimo and Alberto Cottica point us out a story from Italy about a “transparency project” launched by the Italian government.
  The initiative, launched some time ago, aimed at publishing relevant information about civil servants, such as paycheck and days of absence. But, as this article points out, most part of this data (including those about the ministry itself) has been published in a directory which is not possible to reach by search engines – using the robots.txt file with “disallow:/operazionetrasparenza/”.
  Here’s David’s take on the story: “The implication is that searching with google the name of a person, you will not find these data. You will have to know that the person is employed by a public administration, and visit the website and check the name. This is obviously limiting the real transparency of the public data.
  I assume the excuse is related to privacy: there are different privacy implications if a personal information is searchable or not. This is an important matter, which I would like to understand better. Yet in this case it appears as an excuse. Real transparency needs machine-readable data, and using robots.txt is a clear contradiction of the principle of transparency."
  Plus, David has another point to make: why is transparency applied first of all to (against) public sector workers and their behaviour instead on how the P.A. spend public money?

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.

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The initiative, led by Jay Nath in the Department of Technology, was inspired by President Obama's transparency directive on his first day in office. They then looked at what had been done with Apps for Democracy in Washington, D.C.

Mark Pesce, digital ethnographer from University of Sydney Australia, asks, "What do we do to make the idea of participation so alluring so seductive that people want to participate?" Hear the author of Open Source Democracy and Life Inc Douglas Rushkoff respond. Both Pesce and Rushkoff were speakers at PdF2009 conference in New York.

PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.


Interested in hearing more from Mark Pesce or Douglas Rushkoff? Watch Pesce on The Dangerous Power of Sharing at PdF2009, or watch Douglas Rushkoff on the New Renaissance at PdF 2008.

Hear what Beth Noveck White House Office Science and Technology wants to know about how the government can create useful feedback loops with crowdsourcing. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a graduate student at Columbia University who studies the use of new technology in politics, offers his response. At PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.
Interested in hearing more from Beth Noveck? Hear what she said to PdF 2009 in her keynote titled Innovation in Government, Obama-Style: Participation and Collaboration.

Taking a close look at the White House, it's not difficult to see that they're fairly quickly shifting focus from the "Why?" aspect of open government -- that is, making the case for why a more participatory, collaborative, and transparent democracy is a positive, progressive development -- to a "So, how exactly do we go about doing this open government thing?" phase. They're setting their mission big. If they ultimately succeeded with even part of what they have in mind, it's probably on the safe side of hyperbolic to say that they would be putting the United States at the leading edge of participatory democracy. Below are a trio of insights from the last few days into what the Obama Administration is thinking, doing, and inviting us to do on the way to a future of more engaged and engageable government...

What is written here is a rough account of the session taken from our note taker during South by Southwest, and from this information we will be submitting a report to the White House on recommendations for the future growth of Whitehouse.gov as well as for open government and transparency in general. We appreciate feedback and additions if there's anything we missed in this article that occurred during the conversation.