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.

Tom Watson MP will be speaking at next month’s Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona. In this short interview we give you a quick run down on Britain’s first blogging minister, the man credited with bringing digital engagement to government in the UK.

“All innovation involves the application of new ideas – or the reapplication of old ideas in new ways – to devise better solutions to our needs. Innovation is invariably a cumulative, collaborative activity in which ideas are shared, tested, refined, developed and applied. Social innovation applies this thinking to social issues: education and health, issues of inequality and inclusion.”

Charlie Leadbeater, Social enterprise and social innovation: Strategies for the next ten years

In a recent post over on Techpresident, Micah unpacked the three branches of We.Gov. The first is the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency.

While I agree with Micah strongly on all 3 points, for me what none of these quite get to is perhaps one of the most powerful uses of the web within the realm of We.Gov – the ability for people to use the Internet to come together and reimagine public value, not (just) public services per se.

UPDATE: MyConservatives.com now live

The Conservative Party will launch their very own take on My.BarackObama.com (or MyBo for short) later today - MyConservatives.com. Timed to be released ahead of next week’s Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, ‘MyCon’ (or even #MyCon, as it's bound to become known on Twitter) provides a very British take on Barack Obama’s revolutionary approach to online campaigning and organising.

Developed in conjunction with global digital media agency LBI, the Conservative Party will no doubt be hoping the site can achieve the same profile and uptake as its American counterpart, fêted as one of the driving forces behind Barack Obama’s historic win. Equally LBI will no doubt be looking to reach the legendary status of Blue State Digital, the people behind MyBO, in the new media world.

Rishi Saha (Head of New Media at the Conservative Party and speaker at next month’s PDF Europe event in Barcelona) stresses that while drawing on many of the core features of Blue State Digital’s MyBO platform, it has very much been developed with a UK audience in mind.

This post brings together two chapters of the recently published report Social by Social: a practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact. Commissioned by NESTA, it provides a collection of tools to engage communities, offer services, scale up activities and sustain public service projects both from inside and outside government.

Can participatory culture shape public opinion?

The 2008 presidential campaign in the United States was full of examples of parody used to spread a message of change and mobilize voters. But average citizens are also now more aware of the possibility to modify and circulate images and related messages also when it comes to protest against politicians.

This year’s European elections marked an all time high for disengagement and an all time low for turnout, reaching a meagre 43% pan Europe (that’s 20% - or a third - down on 30 years ago), worse even in the UK at an mightily undemocratic 34.7% (up from 24% 10 years ago mind).

co-written and data assembled by David James

This weekend’s Government 2.0 Camp is further proof that something very exciting is happening around the concepts of open, participatory, self, government. The Camp, the inaugural event of the Government 2.0 Club, is one of a series of mostly volunteer-led events tackling the meaning and implementation of the next generation of democracy and government.

Approximately 500 people interested in Government 2.0 assembled. It was a diverse group, including government employees, entrepreneurs, government contractors, and interested citizens. Through discussions, panels, and lots of hallway conversations, the participants came together to figure out what Government 2.0 means, where it is going, and how it applies to their work.

I'm in DC this weekend for the Gov2.0 Unconference, a semi-formal get-together to discuss all sorts of topics in the government/politics/technology/transparency milieu: mobile platforms for emergency management; how to engage citizens through social media; technology options for health care reform; digital privacy; tech tools for state legislatures; and on and on.

I'm finding, however, that this conference fit the pattern of most others: the sessions are okay, but they seldom yield any breakthroughs. Instead, the value of the conference comes from the break-time conversations that evolve by having all of these people in the same place. And this time, it is especially interesting given the people that are here...

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