• 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?

My new report on the first year of Organizing for America is yielding some interesting responses, including notes from politicos who want to remain anonymous. Here is an email from a seasoned Democrat that suggests a broader context for Internet politics, and argues Obama's political operation has undercut its own ability to innovate:

Since OFA is a coherent organization, one can point to it and say 'this is unprecedented, and they are doing a great/good/bad job', but a post-Presidential period has happened before, forty something times.

It would be interesting to informally benchmark what's happening now against previous Presidential campaigns and what came out of them. There were a lot of important spinoffs of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns on the right, not just generations of talent but new organization models like corporate PACs, direct mail, and New Right structures. In 2004, a lot of progressive activists on the various Dean, Clark, and Kerry bandwagons came into politics with a very specific set of initial searing experiences. And the people who ran the Obama campaign at the top came out of various campaigns from the 1980s and onward. Some campaigns held onto talent long-term, some didn't. Some had highly charged electoral energy, some didn't. Some were centralized, some weren't.

Tom Watson MP will be speaking at next month’s Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona. In this short interview we give you a quick run down on Britain’s first blogging minister, the man credited with bringing digital engagement to government in the UK.

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.

This year’s European elections marked an all time high for disengagement and an all time low for turnout, reaching a meagre 43% pan Europe (that’s 20% - or a third - down on 30 years ago), worse even in the UK at an mightily undemocratic 34.7% (up from 24% 10 years ago mind).

Back at the end of June this year, I was invited over to PDF 2009 as one of the Google Fellows to experience the buzz and brains of the Personal Democracy Forum for the first time in person. And it didn’t disappoint.

Due to the multiplication of breaking news related to online criminality in Italy (Facebook groups exalting famous mafia bosses, Google executives accused of defamation and violating privacy for “allowing” a video to be posted online showing an autistic youth being abused, growing concern about online piracy, etc..), the issue of Internet regulation has acquired a very important role on the Italian political scene.

Here's the video of Michael Wesch's keynote talk from the second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009. Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, first gained acclaim as the author of "The Machine is Us(ing) Us," a video about how the internet is changing society (that has been viewed more than 9 million times), and I was thrilled that we were able to get him to speak at PdF this year.

Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein does a 'greatest flubs' rundown of the modern Republican party when it comes to just about anything having to do with zeros and ones, pixels and/or power cords. There most likely aren't any revelations therein for most of us about just how, where, and when the GOP has bungled when it comes to integrating the networked worldview into the modern Republican party. There's "John McCain is aware of the Internet" (a classic from a PdF conference gone by -- register now for PdF '09!) to referencing Facebook with a the preposition in front to the RNC coming down hard on former e-director Mike Turk for getting made fun of by "The Note," of all things. Of course, it didn't necessarily have to turn out this way. Bush-Cheney 2000 did some pretty innovative things both online and on the data back end -- identifying prospective voters and using supporters to make the sale on the GOP ticket to people they knew in real life. McCain himself wasn't all that shabby on the early Internet back then himself. So it wasn't as if where things stand in 2008 is the natural order of things. If wasn't obvious even a few years ago that you would today pretty reliably get a snicker out of even the most casual political observer by using the words "Republican" and "Internet" in close proximity.

But the pertinent question today is whether the GOP can overcome what is, by general admission, a pretty sizable deficit when it comes to the modern Internet...

I'm in DC this weekend for the Gov2.0 Unconference, a semi-formal get-together to discuss all sorts of topics in the government/politics/technology/transparency milieu: mobile platforms for emergency management; how to engage citizens through social media; technology options for health care reform; digital privacy; tech tools for state legislatures; and on and on.

I'm finding, however, that this conference fit the pattern of most others: the sessions are okay, but they seldom yield any breakthroughs. Instead, the value of the conference comes from the break-time conversations that evolve by having all of these people in the same place. And this time, it is especially interesting given the people that are here...