I'm really pleased with how everything went at PdF Europe's first conference in Barcelona. We had a great mix of political hacks and hackers from all over the Continent, and the conversations buzzing in the hallways before, during and after each session are the best proof that people were connecting to each other in all kinds of fruitful ways. (Indeed, the continuing buzz on Twitter around the hashtag #pdfeu is the best proof to me that we planted many productive seeds at the Torre Agbar.)

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced his "Connected City" initiative, rolling out a series of programs aimed at transforming how New Yorkers interact with and get services from city government. Building on his administration’s valuable 311 program, he promised to make government more accessible by translating city websites into six languages, distributing more information via Twitter (follow @311nyc) and social networking sites, enabling users to fine-tune their usage of NYC.gov around their personal information needs, and creating a free iPhone application allowing people to submit quality-of-life complaints to 311 directly from their phone.

As striking as it was that one of the very first acts of Barack Obama's presidency was to call for making the federal government far more transparent, participatory, and collaborative , open government advocates have waited eagerly and, ironically, mostly in the dark for some news on just how this new paradigm would emerge. In some ways, that wait is over.

There are few profiles of Earl Devaney, Obama's pick to head oversight over the spending of those $787 billion in recovery funds, that don't either lead with or quickly note the notion that Devaney looks just exactly like the former Secret Service enforcer that he once was. And that's because Devaney looks exactly like a Secret Service enforcer, down the fitted charcoal suit that he looks like he wants to grab with one fist and yank off his body at the earliest opportunity.

Devaney was once the Inspector General at the Interior Department, too, where he uncovered that Secretary Gale Norton's deputy was lying about his connections to Jack Abramoff, working to block a casino that Abramoff was interested in having built on behalf of a client. Related obstruction of justice charges put J. Steven Griles behind bars for a time. You might also know Devaney from his work uncovering the sex, drugs, and other assorted hanky-panky that went down in Interior's Minerals Management Service. Neither high-profile investigation earned him the undying gratitude of higher ups at Interior.

Devaney's propensity for old-style go it alone investigatin' is one of the reasons that this week's "National Dialogue" to build the best possible Recovery.gov website is so intriguing. As the head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board (or RAT Board for short) Devaney has an enormous -- and, frankly, quite possibly close to impossible -- task of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse of those federal dollars as they're spent from coast to coast, from Alaska to Hawaii. Tough job.

And so he's turned to the Interwebs. All this week, NationalDialogue.org is hosting an online forum for the submission and evaluation of ideas for quickly building a Recovery.gov that both keeps tabs on the spending of recovery funds and creates a forum in which the public can help to spot bad behavior. In the community forum, anyone can submit an oversight idea and rate others' ideas on a scale of one to five stars. Comments are also welcomed.

The National Dialogue on Information Technology is open to vendors, advocates, and plain old citizens alike, and is focused on five key tasks...

I'm in Austin, Texas for the Netroots Nation conference today and tomorrow, and will try to do some live video interviews as I bump into people and post them here. I'm speaking tomorrow on a panel on "Transparency, Participation and Reinvention in Government in the Next Administration Through Web 2.0 Tools and Culture," which I think could have had the shorter title of "Rebooting Government in 2009" but you get the drift.

Our cousins across the pond continue to show that "government 2.0" isn't just something that we have to do "to" government, but it's something government can do "with" us. The Power of Information Task Force has just launched a contest called "Show Us a Better Way" that is calling for "ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated." They've put up 20,000 pounds for the winning idea, which is something like a gazillion dollars (these days). This is really kewl.

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).