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.

I've been on the road since Thursday, first at a working meeting of the Sunlight Foundation in DC with people working on collaborative governance web designing, and then yesterday in Minneapolis at 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.

Last week at ETech, one of my favorite tech conferences, three Brits convened a delightful panel on "moving theft-based activism to the global stage." The title actually made the discussion sound a bit illicit, when really all the three were talking about was how civic-minded hackers have being taking government data that ought to be in public view, and making it available to all--with transformative and beneficial effects.