For a start there was good wifi, and #DigitalEU on Twitter generated some interesting discussion. Might be normal elsewhere, but that’s damned rare for an EU event! The fact that the panel was adequately narrow, and all the panellists respected each other, was handy, and there was a decent (and – for Brussels – reasonably young and gender balanced) audience.

This is not a comprehensive report, but a collection of odd thoughts from the event, in no particular order.

First, Marietje mentioned that in the last week she has received hundreds of e-mails about shark finning. What’s the value of those e-mails, as opposed to whatever else she might get mails about? Watch this speech from Clay Shirky at PdF in NYC and have a think. How should MEPs deal with this?

Second, there was a question from the audience from Marco Incerti from CEPS, asking whether if MEPs spend time blogging, tweeting etc., that doesn’t allow them time to do ‘real work’ – i.e. policy making. For me this is completely the wrong question to ask. If a politician is using social media well then they are opening their minds to ideas, debates and opinions from elsewhere and that should make them better at what they do – it’s not a zero sum game.

Third, this tweet for @NishmaDoshi, and a quick chat with her, got me thinking. Surely the only way the web is a leveller is if you have first mover advantage. Would I be on the panel this evening if I hadn’t been one of the first to blog about the EU? Would I have 2.5k followers on Twitter had I not been one of the early adopters? Later on you need a (business) plan, a structure, much harder work, or to be able to transform some other fame and fortune into a web presence (see how @NeelieKroesEU has managed to grow to 7k followers very quickly). Question is then if it’s possible to leverage online suppor, offline effectively – i.e. do the opposite of Kroes?

Fourth, in response to Laura’s assertion that Dutch MEPs are qualitatively the best on Twitter, I raised the issue of whether open or closed lists correlate with good Twitter usage – i.e. where a politician’s own personal future is on the line they are more likely to make good use of social media. Marietje seemed to agree. Lesson for the UK?

Fifth, Marietje rather vaguely mentioned that all it would need would be a couple of campaigns around which citizens could gather to help deal with these issues. Open government, or one seat for the EP were the issues she suggested. These are both really important matters, but don’t, I think, lend themselves to interesting and inclusive online campaigns. How do you measure openness – don’t you always want more? And one seat is not a SMART objective – within the life of the campaign it’s not achievable. Things like ACTA and net neutrality are just too geeky. So I wonder… But conversely we can’t just wait for the institutions to reform themselves – it’s just too glacially slow.

Finally here’s my EU in 140 chars Tweet – in response to a question from the audience!

If you’re an elected representative, what does an e-mail mean? If it’s from a constituent, individually written, it’s clear enough. But what about if it’s part of a campaign? In the clip above Clay Shirky argues that the predictive value of an e-mail for a member of Congress is zero, and with e-mail campaigns its impossible to rescue the signal from noise. Have we put the barrier to political engagement so low that it can cease to be meaningful? I can’t claim to have the answers, but watch the clip and have a bit of a think. The clip starts at the best bit of the presentation, but the rest is worth watching too.

PdF 2010 - pic © Personal Democracy Forum

I’ve been at Personal Democracy Forum in New York and I’ve started to get thinking about which US political organisation tools could be effectively used for politics in Europe. Here are a few ideas…

• Groundcrew – a system of rapid mobile organising via SMS, iPhone apps, and Google Maps. Could be used to organise Fair Votes Now flashmobs, get Swedish social democrat activists to particular Valstugan?
• Meetup Everywhere – simply and quickly organise events offline – everywhere! Use for fundraising events for politicians?
• See Click Fix – an idea similar to FixMyStreet in the UK, yet with 2 additional advantages – it works well of mobile devices, and it allows citizens to network between each other.
• go.usa.gov – a US government link shortener, style of bit.ly but with trust and reliability for government URLs. How about a similar one for UK, FR, EU twitter use? The original code is open source and the system is based on Drupal.

Last but not least: it’s not an organisational tool as such, but it is fun: hint.fm/seer – it compares the predictive Google search for two key words. Here’s the result for a couple of Labour leadership candidates.

Yes, of course this is terribly subjective, and some of the characters appearing on the compass may object to their positioning. ‘The system’ also sounds all too like something from Stieg Larsson but I can’t think of a better term for the moment.

But the essential issue is this: to what extent is PdF about changing the system from within, or changing it from the outside?

Take Tom Steinberg’s critique of the EU’s eGovernance funds and how badly these are spent. Yes, fair point, but if you’re Marietje Schaake then you know it’s total hell to change this and there are better battles to fight in the short term.

If you’re Jeremie Zimmermann, convinced in an almost functionalist manner that your arguments are right if you commit enough geeks to the cause, then how do you feel that Andrew Rasiej, conference organiser, has previously run for political office and with Micah Sifry the two of them run a blog (techPresident) about – essentially – insider politics?

PdF must remain a combination of all of the different tendencies represented on the compass, and it’s vital there is a respectful relationship between all concerned. The challenge now is to build on the Barcelona event and make sure those tensions are used constructively rather than destructively.

But as my T-Shirt at the conference on Friday said: it’s probably more complicated than that

In the diagramme: Tom Steinberg (web | twitter), Jeremie Zimmermann (web | twitter), Jack Thurston (web | twitter), Andrew Rasiej (web | twitter), Micah Sifry (web | twitter), Paul Hilder (web | twitter), Marietje Schaake (web | twitter), Tom Watson (web | twitter), Ellen Miller (web | twitter)