Credit: TED/Richard Lewis

In the UK, politicians on the left and right have been scrambling to claim the mantle of transparent government as the battle heats up over who will next lead that country. Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown was behind the push to bring Data.gov.uk to the web last month, for example. Yesterday, in a talk delivered via satellite to the TED conference in California, conservative leader David Cameron hammered home the idea that his vision of government is one where "transparency," "accountability," and "choice" together serve as the pole star for all that political leaders do.

In his address to TED, a conference dedicated to discussing big solutions to big problems, Cameron celebrated some of open government's more concrete examples of data in action. The Tory leader namechecked number-driven crime maps, health care pricing comparison charts, and even Transform Missouri, that state's federal stimulus spending tracker.

Cameron sought to expand that list of open government goals by pledging that a Tory government, under this watch, would make public the details of all government contracting, including " performance indicators, break clauses and penalty measures." (For those of us in the U.S., it's worth judging Cameron's pledge in the context of the UK not having as well-developed an expectation of "freedom of information" as we do in the States.) From a press release from Cameron's office sent before the event:

Today, David Cameron will announce that a Conservative government will...tak[e] the radical step to publish all government contracts worth over £25,000 for goods and services in full. This will enable the public to root out wasteful spending and poorly negotiated contracts, and open up the procurement system to more small businesses.

Radical? Yes indeed, says the Prospect's James Crabtree, who finds Cameron's proposal very significant news:

People are missing the radicalism in his open contracts announcement. Cameron last night committed to publish the details of all government contracts. Not just IT contracts, which no one noticed they pledged to do in their IT paper before Christmas. ALL contracts. Every contract any contractor signs with a government department. Cleaners. Train operators. McKinsey being paid to write most of the Dhazi review. McKinsey running large chunks of Northern Rock. All of it.

For his part, Gordon Brown had his chance before a TED audience back in 2009, and he too celebrated the potential of technology -- only he focused on the idea that modern communications is creating a new sort of powerful global consciousness.

Personal Democracy Forum friend in Italy Antonella Napolitano passes along this story from the UK, where the Labour Party there is picking up and running with a spoof that was originally created by political bloggers. The target: campaign posters of David Cameron in which the conservative leader looks somewhat more flawless than he does in real life.

British writer James Crabtree has weighed in at The New Statesman with an absolutely fascinating prediction for the coming year of English online politics as the country heads into new elections: the balance of power and energy is going to shift from the right, which has long dominated the British political blogosphere, to the left. He writes...

Ears couldn't help but perk up when, at PdF Europe, a presenter showed this map of the European blogosphere and noted the almost total lack of overlap between national online conversations, but pointed to the middle of it all and said something to effect of 'that's Jon Worth.' As the European Union takes ever greater hold, with the legal enforcement of the Treaty of Lisbon just yesterday, is there a pan-European online political conversation? If not, why not, and should there be? The Brussels-based Worth, the blogger behind Euroblog, was nice enough to join me on IM for a chat.

Help us understand what the presenter at PdF Europe meant when identified you at the lonely center of that mapping of the European blog world?

First of all it's worth saying that Anthony [Hamelle of Linkfluence] was talking about political blogospheres, not blogospheres about cooking or Formula 1 racing. Essentially political blogospheres operate rather nationally in Europe. It's to do with languages, prevailing political culture, and the fact that the European Union as a whole does not necessarily lend itself to blogging. I am somewhere in that gap between the national blogospheres. I'm British, I live in Brussels, I am an EU politics person by background, and I can do tech. And I have been blogging about the EU for more than 4 years. So what transnational/EU wide political blogopshere that exists one way or another passes through my blog quite often.

I was not remotely surprised by what Anthony presented. It's essentially what I've intuitively understood.

Can you expand on that idea that "prevailing political culture" helps to explain why there doesn't seem to be a pan-European online conversation?...

I'm really pleased with how everything went at PdF Europe's first conference in Barcelona. We had a great mix of political hacks and hackers from all over the Continent, and the conversations buzzing in the hallways before, during and after each session are the best proof that people were connecting to each other in all kinds of fruitful ways. (Indeed, the continuing buzz on Twitter around the hashtag #pdfeu is the best proof to me that we planted many productive seeds at the Torre Agbar.)

A taste of what we four hundred or so folks gathered in Barcelona (as well as few thousand others following online) were up to, from the Associated Press:

Founder Andrew Rasiej said technology is changing civic society.

"What we discovered is that technology is giving power to ordinary people who can organize themselves using new tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to have an impact on the political process and to petition governments to be more responsive to their everyday needs,'' he said.

The conference comes at a time when more and more people are using the Internet to have their say. Examples include simultaneous global protests on climate change, democracy activists using Twitter in Iran or a French campaign against legislation that threatened to cut people's Internet connection for downloading copyrighted material.

Rasiej said that during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, out of 1.5 billion viewings of YouTube videos which mentioned Obama or McCaine, only 150 million were videos produced by the candidates.

Where a plug and a solid wifi connection never seem exist in the same space. Nonetheless, the PdF Europe Conference has been a vibrant carnival of discussion, quickly moving to its wrap-up in about an hour in the ground floor theater of the Torre Agbar. From the panels I've attended and the hallways discussions I've engaged in, two particular ideas have really caught my attention and provoked me to question my assumptions. The first is whether the Obama model, should it exist, is replicable in other countries and other lands, or whether its utility stops at the border of serving as an inspiration. In other words, is the recent American experience so unique to be an exception? The other is whether 'European conversation' exists that technology might amplify, and if not, whether digital communications spur useful cross-country engagement in Europe. And if it can, how widespread is the interest in having that conversation?

But that's just one woman's perspective on a multi-layered conference. Luckily for you, we've hooked up with a tremendous partner who is providing an eye and ear on the conference that is almost as good as being here, minus the tiny ham sandwiches they served for breakfast this morning. Civico is capturing and compiling what's going down at PdF Europe in a medium sure to suit just about everyone. There's slide presentations, there's audio, there's tweet analysis, and more. Check it out. (Photo by Jon Worth)

Blogging will be light (if not nonexistent) today as much of the PdF crew is on its way to Barcelona for the first ever Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference, to be held in Torre Agbar -- a.k.a. the rounded tower rising above the city on the right side of the photo above. (We'll also be taking a break from the Daily Digest through the Thanksgiving holiday, so check the blog for new content.) We'll have updates and coverage here as the conference progresses, and please do follow along with all the action through the Twitter hashtag #pdfeu. Hasta más tarde! (Photo credit: Gerard Girbes)

Our friends at SeeClickFix have some cool news to share today: The do-it-yourself civic platform is going multilingual. Citizens will soon be able to report non-emergency issues in their community to those accountable for the public space in 83 languages anywhere in the world using SeeClickFix on their PC or mobile phone. (And just in time for PdF Europe!)

Add it to the list of what separates you and me from a major world leader like Nicolas Sarkozy: his casual social media musings get fact checked by all the world. The French president's official Facebook page has turned into a lively playground of doubt after Sarkozy (or someone with the authority to post to his Facebook account on his behalf) posted his fond memories of a spontaneous trip to Berlin on November 9, 1989. The post included a photo of the then 34 year-old Sarkozy chipping away at the wall then bisecting the city of Berlin. "Arrivés à Berlin ouest, nous filons vers la porte de Brandebourg," posted Sarkozy, "où une foule enthousiaste s’est déjà amassée à l’annonce de l’ouverture probable du mur."

Hang on un minute, said a number of Sarkozy's Facebook followers. The accuracy of his recollection of that trip raised questions because (a) the actual fall of the Berlin Wall was pretty unexpected, often traced to an East Berlin spokesperson who got up on a stage and started freelancing about a new policy travel between east and west, and (b) there were public records kept on the travels of Sarkozy, who was already a well-known politician at the time. Sarkozy was at the wall, no doubt, and helped in some small way to bring in down. But was he there on November 9th? Some aren't so sure. And the French president doesn't have the luxury the rest of us perhaps do to fudge a bit online. The Guardian has the story.

Sarkozy's Berlin post has attracted some 1,300 comments, some of them convinced that the extremely self-aware French president is misremembering in a way designed to set himself in the center of history. That said, perhaps Sarkozy can take small comfort in the fact that "3,661 like this" post.