Did you attend Personal Democracy Forum 2010?
Check Nancy Scola's recap of some of the sessions and what other attendants wrote about the conference.
And we will give you information about PDF Europe conference very soon!

• Germany | The resigned President and the power of social media
  Last week Horst Köhler resigned as Federal President of Germany after some comments on the German peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. As reported by Spiegel online:

  The president had become the target of intense criticism following remarks he made during a surprise visit to soldiers of the Bundeswehr German army in Afghanistan on May 22. In an interview with a German radio reporter who accompanied him on the trip, he seemed to justify his country's military missions abroad with the need to protect economic interests.

  "A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that ... military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests -- for example when it comes to trade routes, for example when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes," Köhler said.

  But it wasn't the radio interview to lead to his resignation. PEP-NET founder Rolf Luhers explain how German social media played a role in that. He reports in fact that the first to pick up Köhler’s  remarks was a fairly unknown blog called unpolitik.de. Other bloggers followed but none of these posts made it to the mainstream media (a detailed roundup in German can be read on carta.info ).

• Spain | Net Neutrality: a controversy that needs a political intervention?
  In Spain there's lot of talking about Internet business models and the neutrality of the operators that provide the connectivity infrastructure. And things might change quickly, according to what César Alierta, president of the telco Telefónica, declared last month: "Clearly, Internet search engines use our networks without paying anything, which is lucky for them and a curse for us. But that can not continue, we are the networks (...), we do it all. That will change, I believe it”.
  But some public servants don't seem to agree: Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, former president of the Spanish region of Extremadura, wrote an op-ed on El País, asking the government and politicians to work on the controversial topic.

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.

Wednesday Aneesh Chopra returned to San Francisco to meet with tech leaders and innovators about where we are re: national technology planning since he's now been CTO for several months. An eternal optimist, he spoke with Tim O'Reilly on the Web 2.0 Summit stage at length about the work ahead, wooing the crowd with his positive energy. But the message is clear: he's dedicated to getting things done in Washington.

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.

I was taken aback by email from devex on Monday that said "Buried in the $787 billion economic stimulus legislation ...is $286 million for technology upgrades at the U.S. Agency for International Development." I mean, USAID is the definition of "dinosaur". They'll never spend that much money well. But it was really driven home to me be by the article in Washington Technology which cut to the chase - "In a recently released study, research firm IDC estimates that the stimulus will generate more than $100.1 billion in technology spending during the next five years." I'm getting it. We're going to spend a lot of money on technology in the next few years. What do we do to make it worthwhile?

I really like the approach that Forum One is pitching - defining "shovel-ready" online, civic-infrastructure projects [disclaimer, though I no longer work there, I helped found Forum One, have great affection for the place, and have an ongoing financial interest. That said, this is still a good idea.] As Forum One CEO Chris Wolz explains, these initiatives will "enable governments, nonprofits, citizens and businesses to work together to solve important social problems." These are the modern equivalent of traditional infrastructure which has included "town halls, the highway system, and government R&D labs."

So far they've proposed five projects and are looking for ideas for five more. Here is the first batch:

Matthew Burton has a vision of supporting government with an open software platform managed by a foundation. A "Mozilla for government" if you will. He'll be online today at 2pm answering questions and taking comments about this vision as well as his other projects. Join in!

At a talk on Monday, Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation (Andrew and Micah are advisers to the Sunlight Foundation), said "there is a fundamental cultural change that has to happen not only with government to embrace the notion of openness but even in the NGO sector to understand that 'of, by, and for the people' now has to become 'of, by, for, and open for the people' (at 2:15 in the video clip).

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.