• Germany | An open government program
  The German government has published a program on open governement, in order to modernize government processes and increase transparency, "with structural reforms, new forms of collaboration and cooperation, as well as more horizontal and vertical collaboration throughout government departments as the way to do it" as reported by EPSI platform, that has more comments on the topic: 

• EU | The Brussels Blogger Study
  Brussels based PR company Waggener Edstrom has recently published a study on the EU blogosphere, called the Brussels Blogger Study (here available - but not downloadable). Many eurobloggers attended the launch event of the report (you can see all the Twitter reaction with the hash tag: #bbs10) [edit: as it was pointed out, almost all of them attended the event via Twitter, after Jon Worth - who was actually there - started tweeting. And he precised: "Odd then that I heard about the event via other bloggers, and had to invite myself to attend"]. But many of them weren’t convinced with the criteria that were used to determine influence and ranking.

• UK | The UK Spending Challenge: the open source approach

Are you taking part to the spending challenge launched by the UK government?
Richard Fahey analyzes the initiative in depth, comparing the initiative to the Obama Administration’s SAVE Award, a competition that was so successful (over 38.000 ideas were submitted) that it has been turned into an annual event.
Then Fahey points out the importance of "the open source approach" to cut unnecessary spending:

• Italy | Wikicrazia: public policies and online collaboration... in action!
  PDF Europe speaker Alberto Cottica proposes an interesting experiment of web collaboration: next September he will publish a book called "Wikicrazia", exploring how public policies can be shaped and changed by the web and the new ways of online collaboration. At the beginning of June he has published the last draft of the book, asking for comments and creating a debate on the different topics he dealt with in the book.
  Every week Cottica is  publishing a post, analyzing the contributions of his readers and sharing how they helped him writing a better book: so far he received 98 (very detailed) comments.
  The experiment will continue until the end of the month, so - if you understand Italian - become a "wikicratico" and help him!

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!

Dialing 311 has changed the way citizens around the U.S. and Canada interact with their local governments by making it easy to call in with questions or complaints.

These days, city and county officials are upping the ante by making it possible for residents not just to send queries down the line, but to see what their fellow residents are reporting too.

The result? Community mobilization, faster resolution of problems, and even the occasional good Samaritan solution.

Join the PdF Network on Thursday, April 1 as Ben Berkowitz, Founder/CEO, SeeClickFix shows us how technology is "peeling back the layers of bureaucracy," one pothole at a time.

Thursday, April 1st at the PdF Network
Your Town, Online: The Future of Internet Community Reporting
1-2 p.m. Eastern

Join the call!

Check out our upcoming PdF Network calls...

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.

Can participatory culture shape public opinion?

The 2008 presidential campaign in the United States was full of examples of parody used to spread a message of change and mobilize voters. But average citizens are also now more aware of the possibility to modify and circulate images and related messages also when it comes to protest against politicians.

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).

I'm pretty confident that danah boyd's was the most talked about talk during the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 Conference in New York City. I can say this because she was mentioned more than 750 times in the twitter stream during the 2 days of the conference. Michael Wesch got a lot of buzz - almost 600 mentions - and Jeff Jarvis and Mark Pesce (who gave a really powerful talk last year too) did well, each getting almost 500 mentions. But boyd topped them all.