Credit: The White House

• Nope, that's not Wall-E in the front row of the White House theater, sitting between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, as we first thought. Through the miracle that is the "original size" feature on Flickr, you can zoom in and see that it's actually some kind of a purse. Probably Spielberg's.
• As part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign, the White House is running an Apps for Healthy Kids competition that offers up $40,000 in prize money for "innovative, fun and engaging tools and games that encourage children directly or through their parents to make more nutritious food choices and be more physically active." The contest seems to bring together some of the Obamas favorite things: vegetables and open government; they want developers to make use of the USDA's nutrition data that it recently released through Data.gov.
• The federal highway folks have was seems to be a new zoomy-in map of federal highway projects.
• And Ben Smith's "Remainders" end-of-the-day link post (which, we freely admit, inspired our "Clearing the Cache" regular feature) figures into a plot line on the rather enjoyable new CBS drama The Good Wife. What a world!

This Friday we have a special "Scandinavian edition" of the Europe roundup, brought to you by PDF friend Bente Kalsnes.
If you want you can send us stories or interesting links to look into. And don't forget to check our twitter account!

• Norway | The Prime Minister is in the playground
  The Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is inviting bloggers to his office this week to discuss about the government's new website, Samarbeid for Arbeid (which means, more or less, "working for collaboration"). The website is made of a blog and a Twitter aggregator, sorted by four topics. If bloggers or Twitter users want the Prime Minister to read their posts, they can register the blog or tag tweets with predefined keywords.

• 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'.

• Iceland | The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative
  Iceland is a country with huge economic problems but also with an ambitious idea in development to save freedom of expression: The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. It is a cross-party proposal (19 out of 63MPs are making the proposal) aimed at adopting the strongest press and source protection laws from around the world: "The goal of the IMMI proposal is to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedom of expression around world and in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers. To this end the legal environment should be explored in such a way that the goals can be defined, and changes to law or new law proposals can be prepared".

• Spain | Net Neutrality: a controversy that needs a political intervention?
  In Spain there's lot of talking about Internet business models and the neutrality of the operators that provide the connectivity infrastructure. And things might change quickly, according to what César Alierta, president of the telco Telefónica, declared last month: "Clearly, Internet search engines use our networks without paying anything, which is lucky for them and a curse for us. But that can not continue, we are the networks (...), we do it all. That will change, I believe it”.
  But some public servants don't seem to agree: Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, former president of the Spanish region of Extremadura, wrote an op-ed on El País, asking the government and politicians to work on the controversial topic.

Credit: DC Public Safety

• DC's public safety division has some fun with its 404 page.
• The White House urges folks to participate in federal agencies' idea-gathering phase.
• Dozens of independent federal agencies haven't put up open government pages, as they were encouraged to do.
• Maybe that's something that Beth Noveck, Deputy U.S. CTO for open government, will talk about in her upcoming session on "transparent government" with the Long Now Foundation.
• As you move from the so-called Silent Generation (65+) down the Millennials (18-29), finds Pew, faith in government's potential to make things better steadily increases. (This is an extra-recommended click-through. Lots of good data in that post.)
• Here's where you go to talk about the intersection of social media and law enforcement.
• An email -- direct from the outbox of "The Internet" itself! -- announces the dates for Politics Online 2010. Says 'Net, it'll be April 19th and 20th in DC.
• DC's OCTO holds a broadband summit.
• Mapping drone strikes.
• Jon Henke, Michael Turk, and Matthew Dybwad join the team at the digital media firm CRAFT.
• Some tweeters kindly request that CNN's best political team on television shut it during today's health care summit.
• TechRepublican's Meghann Olshefski recaps CPAC's digital bootcamp.
• Is your outreach appropriately diverse?
• The Office of National Coordinator of Health IT is now on Twitter, at @ONC_HealthIT.
• North Carolina Senate candidate Ken Lewis wants you to ask him anything.
• And finally, a bit of housekeeping -- that's it for me until Monday, as I'm taking a long weekend trip to the west coast. Have a good one.

(With Micah Sifry)

• 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?

• UK | The Conservative Technology Manifesto - and the importance of skunkworks
  The Conservative Party recently launched the Conservative Technology Manifesto "to make the British government the most technology friendly in the world" (Rishi Saha talked about the Conservative party strategy at PDF Europe): increasing broadband speed, improving access to government data, creating 600.000 jobs are the keypoints. Anyway the document is ambitious and it seems to have one very innovative commitment: creating "a small IT development team in government – a 'government skunkworks' – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects".

• Spain | eHealth Week 2010 in Barcelona
   “eHealth for sustainable healthcare: global changes through local actions”: this is the motto of the High Level Ministerial Conference on eHealth, that is taking place in Barcelona in these days (until March 18th). The program is ambitious: in the conference the most innovative projects driven by the EU Spanish and European regions will be presented, creating a debate on the importance of ICT and participation in healthcare and the contribution of entrepreneurs working in the field.

Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

• U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra reports back in with some basic highlights from his swing to the West Coast last week. On a stop in Silicon Valley, Kundra sat down to brainstorm with "venture capitalists and technology innovators" from companies like Mint.com, Mozilla, and Facebook. What'd they come up with? If you have the vision of a bald eagle, you might be able to make out some details in the storyboard above.
• Here's a map showing the real-time location of the 13 vehicles that the Census Bureau has out and about in the U.S., letting people know about the upcoming head count. Each van is doing its own tweeting from the road.
• Also from the census folks: you can read the census form online, but you can't fill it out there. Yet.
• "For someone who claims to hate the 'Democrat[sic]-media complex,' Breitbart sure knows how to work it."
• TurboTax -- as in, the people who make that tax preparation software -- takes to Twitter to respond to those who had criticized them for supporting a certain political TV show. They tweet, "Thanks everyone for your feedback, & for reminding us of what we value. We’ve pulled advertising from the Glenn Beck show."
• And Mr. Beck is also the target of a new campaign from the likes of MoveOn, Brave New Films, and the SEIU that makes use of that your-name-here technology to make fun of the Beck-board.

Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

• Over at the White House, they're trying out a new web campaign to push out into the digital ether, every day, one new number highlighting some key fact of their health care push; "1,115" is their number for the dollars spent, on average, for employer-based health coverage per family each month. The number will live in giant font, it seems, at the top of WhiteHouse.gov each day, and will go out via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.
• If a social network worked for the Obama campaign, why can't it work for a Polish social justice movement?
• And holding staff tweets against their bosses.

(With Micah Sifry and Nick Judd)