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.

Here's a little bit of background about Marc and Javier, as well as the first three contributing bloggers they've brought on board: Bente Kalsnes, Laura Bononcini and Rafa Rubio. If you would like to join in as a PdF Europe blogger, please contact Javier directly (javier-dot-majan at personaldemocracy-dot-eu) or start a user-diary, tag your posts "Europe" and we'll find you.

Marc Lopez has studied in Law and Political Science and decided to set up NuestraCausa with Javier after some years of working in the field of politics and public administration. In 1999 he was elected MP of the Catalan Parliament and in 2003 he became the Chief of Staff for the Minister of Agriculture of the Catalan Government, position that he held until November 2005.

Javier Majan is a political analyst specializing in 2.0 politics and Social Networks. He studied Political Sciences and Sociology, and he has worked on projects related to the Internet since 1999.

Bente Kalsnes has a MA from Georgetown University's Communication, Culture and Technology program. In addition to writing articles for Norwegian publications such as Mandag Morgen and Morgenbladet, she blogs about politics, technology and media
here. She is also cooking up wild ideas with the political geeks at TechPolitics.eu.

Rafa Rubio is Doctor in Constitutional Law and Professor in Complutense University (Madrid) and a Partner and Consultant in Dog Comunicacion. He is specialist in Politics 2.0 (electoral campaigns and e-participation)

Laura Bononcini works as a political consultant in Italy for international clients coming from the ICT-TLC sector. She is one of the originators of the “Inter-parliamentary Group 2.0” project, an association of Italian MPs and Senators who have decided to create a platform of debate with businesses and citizens on Internet-related issues. Born and raised in Belgium, she graduated in Political Science and International Relations at the French university “Sciences-po”.