• 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.

• Germany | Creating a more transparent Frankfurt
  Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt) is a new space for citizen participation: the aim is tracking local political decisions, making them more transparent and motivate citizens to connect locally and to discuss on how to change their neighborhood.
  The website offers information in form of geo-referenced data and documents properly tagged. It also offer an email service and space for comments and proposals.

• 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.

The study Show Us the Stimulus (July 2009, Good Jobs First) is one of the most comprehensive and systematic assessments of US state "recovery" websites. The authors of the report analyze the effectiveness and transparency of state websites in providing information on the different categories of stimulus spending, the allocation of funds across different areas of the state, and individual projects carried out by private contractors and their respective impact on employment levels.

The study shows that, while some websites achieve satisfactory levels of transparency, others are largely failing to provide online transparency with regard to the use of crisis response funds. Such variance among the websites per se is not particularly surprising. But why do some states perform better than others? Are there any factors that can help to explain these differences?

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.)

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The initiative, led by Jay Nath in the Department of Technology, was inspired by President Obama's transparency directive on his first day in office. They then looked at what had been done with Apps for Democracy in Washington, D.C.

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.

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.

The Senate's ad hoc Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing this morning. The subject: "Improving Transparency and Accessibility of Federal Contracting Databases." Senator Robert Bennett spoke for many of us today when he sat up on the dais in room 342 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and rubbed his temples over, and over, and over, and over again.

What prompted the subcommittee to convene today (if you can call attendence by two senators, Bennett [R-UT] and Chair Claire McCaskill [D-MO], a "convening") is a particularly difficult problem: what the American public, watchdog groups, and even Congress' own investigators know about the thousands of firms and individuals who make their money as federal contractors is trapped within electronic databases. Eight databases. Or a dozen database, depending on who's doing the counting. Databases with names like FPDS and ORCA and PPIRS, the last of which goes by the adorable nickname of "Peepers."

All told, there are a million lines of code involved. But there's really no all told here, because the databases don't talk to one another. For example, FPDS, the Federal Procurement Data System doesn't communicate with EPLS, which stands for Excluded Parties List. Which means that the FPDS-powered USASpending.gov website -- heralded as the American public's window into the inner-workings of government -- doesn't even know that contractors contained within it have been banished from government service for defrauding the United States government or otherwise behaving badly. What's more, on some of these legacy systems, a search for Contractor X, Inc. won't return results for Contractor X Inc. The shorthand for that particular wrinkle came to be, during the hearing, "the comma problem."

In fact, GAO's William Woods explained to the senators, the poor state of those databases meant that when his agency was asked by Congress to detail how many contractors were billing the United States government for work in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government watchdog group was forced by technology to admit its ignorance. "We could not answer those questions," said Woods. How many KBRs are at work in American war zones, being paid with taxpayer dollars? How many Blackwaters? Dunno.

Everyone was in agreement that that status quo is unacceptable. And so the question became, what do we do now? Enter problem number two...

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.