• 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.

• 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".

• Italy | "Internet is freedom": Lawrence Lessig at the Chamber of Deputies
  There were high expectations for Lawrence Lessig's lecture at the Chamber of Deputies yesterday afternoon during the event "Internet is freedom". Some days before, the organizers asked people to tweet about the theme of the conference: the chosen hashtag was #difenderelarete, a reference to some recent bills attempting to limitate freedom of expression on the web. There were thousands of tweets and even more during the speech, making the topic the most popular of the day in Italy.
  But, apparently, mainstream media still don't get it: the lecture was preceded by a speech of the President of the Chamber, praising the Internet as a force of peace and innovation, and that is the only part of the conference that has made it to the news so far.

• Germany | Creating a more transparent Frankfurt
  Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt) is a new space for citizen participation: the aim is tracking local political decisions, making them more transparent and motivate citizens to connect locally and to discuss on how to change their neighborhood.
  The website offers information in form of geo-referenced data and documents properly tagged. It also offer an email service and space for comments and proposals.

• Spain | We can fix this only together...with or without you?
  In the past days the Spanish Chamber of Commerce launched an initiative to raise the confidence of citizens affected by the economic crisis. The campaign is called "Esto solo lo arreglamos entre todos" ("We can fix this only together") and it is willing to be "the biggest social therapy of the history", in the words of Susana Diaz, one of the consultant working on the project. The campaign consists of a website and several ads by both anonymous citizens and celebrities (the ad campaign costed 4 millions, according to Expansión).
  But so far it has not been well received by lots of citizens who felt betrayed by this sort of sharing responsibilities: on Facebook it is easy to find groups protesting against the campaign, with several hundreds of fans each. The protesters complain that the campaign is opportunist and demagogic, even creating a website called "We can fix this only *without them"*" to send "a message loud and clear to the organizers of the ad campaign and the state: we are not the problem.".
  (thanks to Anna Bellorbì)

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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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'.