While we all know where to find the number one Euro (w)e-gov event next week (*cough* Barcelona), there is also another *fairly* important conference going on some way north around the same time.

Next Thursday sees the start of the 5th Ministerial eGovernment Meeting and Conference, which will be taking place at the Malmö Exhibition and Convention Centre, Sweden. As the event page says:

“It will be one of the major events of the Swedish EU Presidency and will include a Ministerial Meeting of ministers responsible for eGovernment, a Ministerial eGovernment Conference, and an exhibition of more than 50 finalists of eGovernment Awards.”

The conference is intended to agree a Ministerial Declaration that will set out the roadmap for eGovernment across Europe up until 2015. The Ministerial Declaration will be presented jointly by the Swedish Presidency and the European Commission on the first day of the Conference.

Straight forward enough, right? Well not exactly. The event has provoked plenty of agitating, with some prominent We.Gov figures intending to shake things up a little and disrupt proceedings from inside and out.

Going into bat for the We.Gov rebels is the British transparency and opengov movement, led by William Heath of Ideal Government. William and friends have pulled together the first popular European e-government conference, staged to take place at the same time as the main conference but offering participants the chance to agree “a memorable creative statement of what Europeans really want from e-enabled government.” Or as PDF speaker Tom Steinberg of MySociety puts it in his call to arms to attendees, “bring some pizzaz and usercentric worldviews to the fringe of a monster snoozathon.”

Meanwhile over on the other side of town at said monster snoozathon, fellow PDF Europe speaker David Osimo will be doing his best to disrupt proceedings from within. David has spent the last few months crowdsourcing a bottom up expression of the kind of Declaration the people (ok, We.Gov geeks mostly) of Europe would like to see. In support of transparency, participation and empowerment, the Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 will be formally presented at the event in attempt to trigger the curiosity and imagination of the Malmo delegates.

Coincidentally (or not so coincidentally), David will also be taking the opportunity to launch a report on Public Services 2.0 that we (David, FutureGov and Headshift) put together following on from the Public Services 2.0 event we ran earlier in the year as a way of bringing this agenda to the attention of Eurocrats, encouraging them to look beyond mega million pound egov initiatives and towards investing small sums in the array of bottom up initiatives challenging and changing public services across Europe.

So the stage is set for quite a week in the world of Gov and Public services 2.0 in Europe. eGov vs We.Gov – who will win? My money’s on the plucky underdog…