The folks at UK-based mySociety are developing a new site called WhatDoTheyKnow that simplifies to process of making freedom-of-information requests and uses RSS to make it impossibly easy to keep track of pet issues.

I've been on the road since Thursday, first at a working meeting of the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), where I moderated a panel on the same topic, and today in Houston at a miniconference at the Baker Institute on the internet and politics. A couple of times over the last two days, I managed to pull out the N95 and shot a couple of fun, Qik videos with some of the folks I bumped into at NCMR. Check out Jane Hamsher, Susan Crawford, Robert Greenwald, Deanna Zandt, Craig Newmark and Tom Steinberg.

Our cousins across the pond continue to show that "government 2.0" isn't just something that we have to do "to" government, but it's something government can do "with" us. The Power of Information Task Force has just launched a contest called "Show Us a Better Way" that is calling for "ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated." They've put up 20,000 pounds for the winning idea, which is something like a gazillion dollars (these days). This is really kewl.

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.

Last July 30th, soon after terrorist group ETA killed 2 young policemen in Palma de Mallorca (Spain), social networks began to mobilize against the killings.

If in previous attacks this kind of protest was mainly expressed through individual blogs, especially through people posting black ribbons on their pages and commentaries, after this new attack online social networks were full of different tweets, images and status posts.