I found this picture of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip standing with the Obamas last week at Buckingham Palace rather startling.

(AP Photo/John Stillwell, pool)

The aging royals, grayer and more stooped than I remembered, were huddled awkwardly beneath of the towering shadow of our shimmering, still-under-warranty, kinetically energetic new President and First Lady. Were the British couple really so tiny or are the Obama’s so large that they dwarfed the royals almost entirely?

In Sunday's New York Times, there was an article about Verizon using volunteers to provide customer support. In the same way, I have suggested to government leaders that they can use the technologies inherent in the Web to facilitate collaboration among citizens themselves to deliver at least the first line of public services. Given the dim fiscal outlook of many state and local governments, citizen collaboration may be the only way that some public services can be adequately sustained in the future

That Verizon can get people to do this is a marvel to me. It should be much easier in the public sector, since people have a direct interest in the success of their community and government.

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran's information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn't have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there's more to it than that. I'm conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare. That is frightening. Here is how my thinking evolved throughout the day:

They work to open up government, to build new, creative tools, push for transparency and make life easier for people - I call them the eGov geeks, and they are scattered throughout Europe.

Whether you call them politechnorati, eGov geeks or political hackers, they are giving new meaning to the word participatory democracy, which can be much more than “just” voting in an election every forth year. Most of them are working in the outskirts of political institutions, but influencing them by building tools that are vastly better than what the institutions can come up with themselves.

The events taking place in Iran for the past three weeks have made me thinking about this topic. Would the situation in Iran been different if access to the internet was part of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights?

During the last European Parliament elections in June, almost all different candidates around Europe turned to the Internet to engage voters in their own countries. The European Parliament didn´t want to be left out and launched a 2-2.5 millons euros three month internet campaign with the theme of “If you don´t vote don´t complain.” It was centered around websites like Ucount4EU, which featured information about the election and the roll that EP is playing in the lives of European citizens day to day; Can you hear me? in collaboration with MTV Networks International which focused on young Europeans ; and TellBarroso.eu where the President of the European Comission Durao Barroso asked for opinions about European challenges through an online poll.

In case you haven't noticed, a few days ago we launched a new "vertical" here at Personal Democracy Forum: PdF Europe. The idea is to gather a community of voices reporting, analyzing and participating in the ways the internet is changing politics in across the Continent, and to build a gathering place online for all the people who are interested in this November's first-ever PdF Europe conference (Barcelona, Nov. 20-21). You can find posts by using the url www.personaldemocracy.eu or simply coming here.

Like techPresident and PersonalDemocracy.com, PdF Europe will be a group blog overseen by Micah Sifry (editor), Nancy Scola (associate editor) and Andrew Rasiej (publisher). Our primary partners in this endeavor, and the leaders of the PdF Europe conference project are Marc López and Javier Majan of NuestraCausa, a network and a platform of projects about collaboration between governments and citizens that they co-founded. With their leadership, we are recruiting contributing bloggers for PdF Europe and also hard at work organizing the Barcelona conference.

James Baldwin, an African-American writer and one of the most well-known pioneers of the civil rights movement, said: “You write in order to change the world ... The world changes according to how people see it and if you alter, even by a millimetre, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” I’m going to do my best to accomplish that alteration by humbly sharing my reflections in English and Spanish with the entire community of readers of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Digital applications that help in making political choices are becoming more and more common in electoral processes. These tools and technologies help us to “think”. They develop ideas through logical response routines similar to those that parties and candidates have and use in their political platforms and speeches. Interpretations of behaviour shape political orientations.

All the kids I talked to this summer while on vacation in Norway, told me that they never paid for music. Ten years after Napster's birth, politicians have started paying attention, but are they doing the right things?