She's been uncharacteristically quiet since her confirmation as Secretary of State, but the Obama Administration's other rock star seems poised to change all that with her first big overseas trip to Asia - with the help of a Twitter-fueled blog audience that has increased three-fold since Barack Obama's inauguration. And while she inherits massive foreign policy challenges from her predecessor, Hillary Clinton also inherits a new media team at State that's at least a year into remaking America's digital image on the web.

Started under former Secretary Rice - and emphatically seamless, professional and non-partisan in its transition to Secretary Clinton - the expansion of State's online operation seems primed for President Obama's primary international goal: rebuilding the U.S. brand overseas.

This week's Government Computer News features an update on Intellipedia, the Intelligence Community's internal version of Wikipedia. While the project is going well, IC social software advocate Chris Rasmussen says that cultural barriers are keeping the project from crossing the chasm.

Today, we found out that Vivek Kundra, a proven government IT innovator, would be in charge of the technology that runs the federal government.

It's hard for most people to realize why such a job is so important: The title "Chief Information Officer" sounds just as bureaucratic as Assistant Deputy Liaison to So-and-So, and if you've never worked on a federal computer network, you won't understand the full extent to which better systems would make for better government. I've written before about how far behind some agencies are, but yesterday morning, I found an example that will hopefully make things clear:

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...

co-written and data assembled by David James

This weekend’s Government 2.0 Camp is further proof that something very exciting is happening around the concepts of open, participatory, self, government. The Camp, the inaugural event of the Government 2.0 Club, is one of a series of mostly volunteer-led events tackling the meaning and implementation of the next generation of democracy and government.

Approximately 500 people interested in Government 2.0 assembled. It was a diverse group, including government employees, entrepreneurs, government contractors, and interested citizens. Through discussions, panels, and lots of hallway conversations, the participants came together to figure out what Government 2.0 means, where it is going, and how it applies to their work.

They work to open up government, to build new, creative tools, push for transparency and make life easier for people - I call them the eGov geeks, and they are scattered throughout Europe.

Whether you call them politechnorati, eGov geeks or political hackers, they are giving new meaning to the word participatory democracy, which can be much more than “just” voting in an election every forth year. Most of them are working in the outskirts of political institutions, but influencing them by building tools that are vastly better than what the institutions can come up with themselves.

The events taking place in Iran for the past three weeks have made me thinking about this topic. Would the situation in Iran been different if access to the internet was part of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights?

According to legend, a man disguised as a pizza delivery boy used to shuttle secret communiques between the CIA's and NSA's respective headquarters, about 25 miles apart. This was before the two agencies' networks were linked in 1994, allowing them to switch to email. It's the archetypal example of how a simple technology can improve government, helping it work faster while saving money.

Twenty-five years later, Muncie, Indiana has done the equivalent. The Muncie fire department currently delivers messages to the chief's office via fire truck. About 20 times a day. The city estimates that each trip somehow costs $1500. Whether an accurate estimate or not, it is silly to use your firefighters as mail carriers. The fire department has discovered scanners, which will soon replace the fire trucks. Which is good, because the trucks are needed for other things.

During the last European Parliament elections in June, almost all different candidates around Europe turned to the Internet to engage voters in their own countries. The European Parliament didn´t want to be left out and launched a 2-2.5 millons euros three month internet campaign with the theme of “If you don´t vote don´t complain.” It was centered around websites like Ucount4EU, which featured information about the election and the roll that EP is playing in the lives of European citizens day to day; Can you hear me? in collaboration with MTV Networks International which focused on young Europeans ; and TellBarroso.eu where the President of the European Comission Durao Barroso asked for opinions about European challenges through an online poll.

In case you haven't noticed, a few days ago we launched a new "vertical" here at Personal Democracy Forum: PdF Europe. The idea is to gather a community of voices reporting, analyzing and participating in the ways the internet is changing politics in across the Continent, and to build a gathering place online for all the people who are interested in this November's first-ever PdF Europe conference (Barcelona, Nov. 20-21). You can find posts by using the url www.personaldemocracy.eu or simply coming here.

Like techPresident and PersonalDemocracy.com, PdF Europe will be a group blog overseen by Micah Sifry (editor), Nancy Scola (associate editor) and Andrew Rasiej (publisher). Our primary partners in this endeavor, and the leaders of the PdF Europe conference project are Marc López and Javier Majan of NuestraCausa, a network and a platform of projects about collaboration between governments and citizens that they co-founded. With their leadership, we are recruiting contributing bloggers for PdF Europe and also hard at work organizing the Barcelona conference.