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.

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.