• Italy | Is transparency compatible with “robots.txt”?
  PDF friends David Osimo and Alberto Cottica point us out a story from Italy about a “transparency project” launched by the Italian government.
  The initiative, launched some time ago, aimed at publishing relevant information about civil servants, such as paycheck and days of absence. But, as this article points out, most part of this data (including those about the ministry itself) has been published in a directory which is not possible to reach by search engines – using the robots.txt file with “disallow:/operazionetrasparenza/”.
  Here’s David’s take on the story: “The implication is that searching with google the name of a person, you will not find these data. You will have to know that the person is employed by a public administration, and visit the website and check the name. This is obviously limiting the real transparency of the public data.
  I assume the excuse is related to privacy: there are different privacy implications if a personal information is searchable or not. This is an important matter, which I would like to understand better. Yet in this case it appears as an excuse. Real transparency needs machine-readable data, and using robots.txt is a clear contradiction of the principle of transparency."
  Plus, David has another point to make: why is transparency applied first of all to (against) public sector workers and their behaviour instead on how the P.A. spend public money?

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(thanks to Nancy Scola).

EU | Are you ready for (y)EU?
Julien Frisch introduces the Web Communications team of the European Parliament.

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...

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.)