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

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.

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.

“All innovation involves the application of new ideas – or the reapplication of old ideas in new ways – to devise better solutions to our needs. Innovation is invariably a cumulative, collaborative activity in which ideas are shared, tested, refined, developed and applied. Social innovation applies this thinking to social issues: education and health, issues of inequality and inclusion.”
Charlie Leadbeater, Social enterprise and social innovation: Strategies for the next ten years
In a recent post over on Techpresident, Micah unpacked the three branches of We.Gov. The first is the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency.
While I agree with Micah strongly on all 3 points, for me what none of these quite get to is perhaps one of the most powerful uses of the web within the realm of We.Gov – the ability for people to use the Internet to come together and reimagine public value, not (just) public services per se.

This post brings together two chapters of the recently published report Social by Social: a practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact. Commissioned by NESTA, it provides a collection of tools to engage communities, offer services, scale up activities and sustain public service projects both from inside and outside government.