• Italy | "Internet is freedom": Lawrence Lessig at the Chamber of Deputies
  There were high expectations for Lawrence Lessig's lecture at the Chamber of Deputies yesterday afternoon during the event "Internet is freedom". Some days before, the organizers asked people to tweet about the theme of the conference: the chosen hashtag was #difenderelarete, a reference to some recent bills attempting to limitate freedom of expression on the web. There were thousands of tweets and even more during the speech, making the topic the most popular of the day in Italy.
  But, apparently, mainstream media still don't get it: the lecture was preceded by a speech of the President of the Chamber, praising the Internet as a force of peace and innovation, and that is the only part of the conference that has made it to the news so far.

• 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?

• E.U. | Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition
  Last week a document on Internet policy has been realeased by the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council. The document addresses Member States about illegal activities and how to fight them, but there seem to be a little confusion: copyright infringments, racist speech and child pornography are all together in the "Internet frame". A way to justify the imposition of Internet filtering?
  Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, has very strong words on the issue, defining the document 'disturbing'.

• Ireland | Your country, your call... to move Ireland forward
  Ireland government recently launched "Your country, your call", a competition whose goal is "to pick two truly transformational proposals so big that, when implemented, could secure prosperity and jobs for Ireland. Proposals that could help change the way we do things, allow businesses to grow, employment to be created and prosperity to flourish". The ambitious iniative has the backing of a wide range of companies and individuals and will offer two winners a cash prize of €100,000 each and up to €500,000 for implementation of their ideas.
  GovFresh explains in depth how the 'inspirational competition' works.

• Norway | When it comes to open data, potential is not enough.
  Norway and the other Scandinavian countries are potential open data champions, thanks to an established tradition of transparency in government. And it's true that there's a lot going on when it comes to open data: some months ago PDF speaker Bente Kalsnes listed an incredible amount of projects and initiatives.
  But apparently it's not enough to reach a noteworthy level.

• 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?

Due to the multiplication of breaking news related to online criminality in Italy (Facebook groups exalting famous mafia bosses, Google executives accused of defamation and violating privacy for “allowing” a video to be posted online showing an autistic youth being abused, growing concern about online piracy, etc..), the issue of Internet regulation has acquired a very important role on the Italian political scene.

When a big earthquake hit Abruzzo, Italy, earlier this week, the debate there over whether blogs and social media could be sources of real news got a jolt of reality. Surprisingly, it took one hour and a half for the news to be reported by national television and more than three hours before the main newspapers did the same in their online edition. People awakened by the quake used Twitter to spread the news even before news agencies. For a couple of hours Twitter was the only source available to Italian people to share news and information and, most of all, try to contact friends and relatives living in Abruzzo.