A taste of what we four hundred or so folks gathered in Barcelona (as well as few thousand others following online) were up to, from the Associated Press:

Founder Andrew Rasiej said technology is changing civic society.

"What we discovered is that technology is giving power to ordinary people who can organize themselves using new tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to have an impact on the political process and to petition governments to be more responsive to their everyday needs,'' he said.

The conference comes at a time when more and more people are using the Internet to have their say. Examples include simultaneous global protests on climate change, democracy activists using Twitter in Iran or a French campaign against legislation that threatened to cut people's Internet connection for downloading copyrighted material.

Rasiej said that during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, out of 1.5 billion viewings of YouTube videos which mentioned Obama or McCaine, only 150 million were videos produced by the candidates.