• U.K. | What kind of campaign will Britain see?
  On the Guardian Kevin Anderson reflects on how (and if) British political operatives and activists will adapt Obama's strategies in this campaign: "If Facebook is good at organising groups, are there constituencies where issue-oriented organising might play a role in the outcome of an election? If the debates are the real innovation in this election, what role will the Twitter "spin room" play in public opinion?".
  Guido Fawkes, one of the top political conservative bloggers, leaves the first comment: "TV is king". What if?

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.

My trip to Gov 2.0 Camp LA commenced with a comedy of errors: lost luggage, a flooded hotel room and flooded streets due to the rains. After a night of little sleep, I arrived at the BlankSpaces co-working location to the company of like-minded people from diverse professional backgrounds but all joining the search for using technology and innovation to improve government. In camp style, we each used the 3 word model to describe why we were there. I thought the focus really centered around engaging new paradigms since people from government, major corporations, start-ups, film industry and media were all together to learn and share ideas.

While there was no shortage of technical expertise present, most of the concepts discussed spoke to a high level of education and interest in the Gov 2.0 space, with sessions ranging from how to properly define gov 2.0 to specific tactics to use in social media within government. The biggest takeaways from the event: focus on people, build replicable solutions, and engage in expansive, multi-pronged outreach and public awareness campaigns.

The study Show Us the Stimulus (July 2009, Good Jobs First) is one of the most comprehensive and systematic assessments of US state "recovery" websites. The authors of the report analyze the effectiveness and transparency of state websites in providing information on the different categories of stimulus spending, the allocation of funds across different areas of the state, and individual projects carried out by private contractors and their respective impact on employment levels.

The study shows that, while some websites achieve satisfactory levels of transparency, others are largely failing to provide online transparency with regard to the use of crisis response funds. Such variance among the websites per se is not particularly surprising. But why do some states perform better than others? Are there any factors that can help to explain these differences?

Because who would attend a "Summit on Customer Service," even if it was at the White House?

Today the White House bought together a bevy of CEOs to Washington to a forum on the somewhat sexier Forum on Modernizing Government. The Obama Administration wants to know what business knows about serving customers and clients, and streamlining operations. "Those are well known sciences" in the business world, promised Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig at the event, the opening and closing sessions of which were held in a small auditorium on the ground floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on a surprisingly spring-like January day in Washington.

The CEOs in attendance represented companies both long established and somewhat newer. In addition to Whirlpool's Fettig, the generally dark-suited crowd included Craig of Craigslist and Angie of Angie's List, as well as executives from Alcoa and Adobe, Microsoft and Trader Joe's, Southwest Airlines and Yelp. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer held animated conversations in the aisles as attendees moved between sessions. Their counterparts in government were in plentiful attendance too. Seated just in front ahead of me and to the direct right of Facebook's Chris Hughes was U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and to Kundra's right, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra. When Kundra and Chopra were joined on stage during the day's closing session by U.S. Chief Performance Office Jeffrey Zients, a Defense Department official made the crowd laugh by saying that the panel resembled "sort of the male version of The View."

And then there was Barack Obama...

If you can sign an electronic pad at the supermarket to pay your credit card bill, why can't you sign the touch-screen of your iPhone to sign a political petition? That question is now being put to the test by the Citizen Power Campaign in California, working with technology developed by a company called Verafirma.

Folks, with that, things here in the world of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident will be quiet for a while as as we enjoy some holiday downtime through the new year. We reserve the right to blog if things come up or the spirit moves us, but your inbox will be devoid of our Daily Digest until Monday, January 4th. From all of us to all of you and yours, we wish you a safe, happy, and inspiring holiday season.

An online fire is burning in Europe. It was set by what appears to be a designed campaign to transform the European intellectual property regime, towards a more restrictive set of rules directly affecting the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and information. We're seeing its implementation in Sweden, France, Italy, UK or at the EU level in Brussels.

This week is ending. I've been (still I am) in Moscow for a week of teaching at the MGIMO, as I do every six months. On the academic side, no big changes or problems - well, besides a drunk student who told me in front of the rest of the students that "this year everything is changing", for I will have to start teaching in Russian (!), because he couldn't understand English and my subject interested him very much (ignoring the fact that there was very good simultaneous translation!).

Ears couldn't help but perk up when, at PdF Europe, a presenter showed this map of the European blogosphere and noted the almost total lack of overlap between national online conversations, but pointed to the middle of it all and said something to effect of 'that's Jon Worth.' As the European Union takes ever greater hold, with the legal enforcement of the Treaty of Lisbon just yesterday, is there a pan-European online political conversation? If not, why not, and should there be? The Brussels-based Worth, the blogger behind Euroblog, was nice enough to join me on IM for a chat.

Help us understand what the presenter at PdF Europe meant when identified you at the lonely center of that mapping of the European blog world?

First of all it's worth saying that Anthony [Hamelle of Linkfluence] was talking about political blogospheres, not blogospheres about cooking or Formula 1 racing. Essentially political blogospheres operate rather nationally in Europe. It's to do with languages, prevailing political culture, and the fact that the European Union as a whole does not necessarily lend itself to blogging. I am somewhere in that gap between the national blogospheres. I'm British, I live in Brussels, I am an EU politics person by background, and I can do tech. And I have been blogging about the EU for more than 4 years. So what transnational/EU wide political blogopshere that exists one way or another passes through my blog quite often.

I was not remotely surprised by what Anthony presented. It's essentially what I've intuitively understood.

Can you expand on that idea that "prevailing political culture" helps to explain why there doesn't seem to be a pan-European online conversation?...