What if you could go online to tell the government you cared about something, and it would actually listen?

In a blog post and video this morning, White House digital director Macon Phillips announced that President Barack Obama's administration would soon launch a tool to do exactly that.

Called "We the People," the to-be-launched petitioning tool would allow anyone with a valid email address to float a petition to the executive branch. If that person can collect over 150 electronic signatures, it becomes "searchable" on WhiteHouse.gov, for non-strangers to join in on. If the petition collects 5,000 signatures, the administration promises an official response.

Today's announcement raised many eyebrows among thinkers and doers where politics, government and technology collide. It's an idea that sounds like it ranks up there with universal suffrage and apple pie as positive evolutions in American life — a way for regular folks to demand a response from their government on something important, and get a response. Folks who deal with online petitions and online organizing for a living have responded to the announcement with cautious optimism — it sounds nice, they say, but without substantive responses, no one will have any motivation to build a petition. Wait, these organizing pros say, and see what comes of this before passing judgment.

Here's a preview of Nordic Techpolitics, a conference that will focus on how technology is changing politics, government and societies in the Nordic countries.
The conference will take place in Oslo, next September 2nd. It is presented by Norwegian organizations Origo, Friprog, IKT-Norge, MediArena, in cooperation with Personal Democracy Forum.

We have all heard of the Nordic model that combines the welfare state with capitalism. But are you aware that there is also a Nordic model for techpolitics?
Nordic Techpolitics conference happens next Friday in Oslo and will help you explore the topic and create a map of what is going on in the Nordic countries.
Technological changes affect every aspects of society, and institutions and policy makers are struggling to catch up with the latest tools and possibilities. This conference – the first of its kind happening in the Nordic countries - will explore how we can use technology to improve politics and governance, increase participation and create smarter solutions in everyday life.

An event happening in October in Poland could turn out to be the biggest conference around open government data to ever take place.
Open Government Data Camp 2011 is the second edition of  an event that last year brought hundreds of people in London from more than 30 countries.
The camp, set to happen in Warsaw next October 20-21, is coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that promotes open data and knowledge in many forms, in partnership with Centrum Cyfrowe, a Polish think-tank that works on issues related to digital society.

After Facebook's "Like" button made illegal in a Germany state, Switzerland may be the next one in line to ban a popular "piece of technology."
Former software engineer Matthias Poehm has founded the Anti-PowerPoint party:

The APPP regards itself as the advocate of approximately 250 million world citizens (500,000 in Switzerland) who, every month, are obliged to be present at boring presentations in companies, at universities or at schools and who, up to now, have not found a political representation in politics.

As reported by the Guardian, there are economic effects in the position proposed by the movement, as their founder explains:

Matthias Poehm, founder of the Anti-PowerPoint Party, claims that €350bn could be saved globally each year by ditching the scourge of public speaking. Poehm believes that the software takes people away from their work and teaches them little. "There is a solution," he says. "A flipchart."

With 10,000 signatures the party will be allowed to run candidates in the parliamentary elections, set for October. So far fewer than 300 people have signed, though.

Just one day before a major hurricane is expected to rake the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard and days after the release of an American Red Cross study indicating that Americans increasingly rely on government and institutions to communicate through social media and mobile technology, there were a number of indications today that this reliance — while supposedly more durable than traditional methods — comes with its own drawbacks.

Aerial imagery via Public Laboratory

The folks at Public Laboratory recently showed off the latest frontier in DIY citizen science: infrared aerial imagery.

These images aren't just for show. A mix of volunteers, students and researchers have been using infrared imagery to solve mysteries about the environment around Brooklyn's historically polluted Gowanus Canal, which, as a U.S. Superfund site, is acknowledged as one of the most polluted places in the country. With development in Brooklyn taking off and the city, state and federal governments trying to figure out what to do about the mix of developer interest and history of pollution along this waterway, folks involved in the project say they can use a mix of aerial photos and infrared maps to answer questions for themselves about pollution and underground streams that might spread it around.

To do it, they've been affixing digital cameras to helium balloons and lofting them overhead during canoe trips along the canal. The Public Lab folks have figured out how to use a filter on the cameras to make them capture near-infrared light rather than the light we see.

Then, using Public Laboratory's Cartagen Knitter software, mappers can piece the resulting images together into cohesive maps. That DIY fact-finding is exactly what Public Laboratory is about, in a variety of ways; one post on Public Lab's website describes how to make an air quality sensor from a Roomba, for instance.

The photo that Public Laboratory's Liz Barry put online happens to be part of the plot where Whole Foods is planning to build a new 56,000-square-foot shopping center, but that's not the most interesting part for Eymund Diegel, an environmental planner participating in the grassroots mapping project around the canal.

What's most interesting about this particular plot is that it looks to be the home of one of a network of now-underground streams that once fed into the canal and have become forgotten thanks to decades of industrial activity. He says the DIY maps built as part of the volunteer Gowanus project take points like that one — a consideration that, in the context of the Whole Foods project, might be dismissed as neighborhood folklore — and turn them into credible concerns backed by hard evidence. How, for instance, is the Whole Foods developer going to make sure pollutants don't get into that underground stream, if in fact it is there, and from there into the canal?

The Facebook button “Like” has been made illegal by the German state of Schleswig-Holstein: the state has in fact ordered all government offices to remove the button from their web presence and shut down any Facebook fan pages.

Thilo Weichert, head of the office for data protection in Schleswig-Holstein, issued a press release (here in English) declaring that the feature gives Facebook the chance of collecting information on German citizens for the next two years, violating German data privacy laws.

When President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year, he called on world governments — including his own — to return this September with promises to be more transparent, fight corruption and get more people involved in civic life.

Nearly a year later, his administration is co-chairing an international coalition of governments that have promised to follow through on those promises — but the initiative, announced in July, has just a few weeks left to deliver, and some critics aren't impressed with the way the administration is handling public consultation in the face of this short timeline.

Called the Open Government Partnership, the international effort intends to encourage governments to increase transparency, citizen participation, accountability, and technology and innovation through "action plans" each country should develop through the September start of a new United Nations General Assembly. The plan is to connect participating countries with each other and with experts in civil society organizations who will share their expertise as each country then implements its action plan over the course of the year. The first year of work should culminate in a self-assessment and another report compiled by "well-respected local governance experts," according to a roadmap published on the partnership's website.

To inform the creation of the U.S. action plan, White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and top regulatory official Cass Sunstein asked in a blog post yesterday for suggestions as to how the U.S could electronically archive records, publish compliance and enforcement data online, and promote corporate accountability. This post follows an Aug. 8 post seeking suggestions on data.gov, updating the federal web policy, and improving regulations.gov, a federal website to track and comment on proposed federal rulemaking.

As forces rebelling against the regime of Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi moved to gain control of the capital city of Tripoli yesterday, something strange happened: Tripoli's citizens could, suddenly, talk about it again with the outside world.

Folks like the British-Kurdish writer Ruwayda Mustafah and NPR's curator-in-chief Andy Carvin began to notice their old contacts — people in Tripoli like @TrablesVoice — speaking up on Twitter for the first time since an Internet crackdown in that country began in March. Google's rolling tally of its own incoming Internet traffic shows a sudden jump in traffic coming from Libya, even when compared to increased traffic since July.

It seems that as forces opposed to the Gaddafi regime attempt to take control of Tripoli and Libya as a whole, one of the battles being waged is over country's Internet communications and media infrastructure.

Rick Perry's online campaign will be THIS BIG. Photo of Perry at the 2011 Republican Leadership Conference: Gage Skidmore / Flickr

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has come out shooting on the campaign trail, with headline-grabbing bluster aimed at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Barack Obama himself — but underneath that rough exterior is a famously well-oiled fundraising machine. To keep its gears turning, the Perry campaign for 2012 will lean on many of the same online tactics that kept him in the Texas statehouse in 2010.

For many people, that might invoke the image of an Obama-style online campaign, full of phone banks and campaign emails to motivate repeated donations from small-dollar donors. But that's just one way to work online; Perry's fundraising modus operandi is to collect donations with higher dollar amounts from fewer donors, and one of the Texan's online consultants says the campaign will be deploying online tools to make that easier to do.

Perry has taken some jabs for demonstrating a less-than-complete grasp on social media, but his campaigns have been social-media savvy. He called Twitter "tweeter" in a video address to the Right Online conference in Minneapolis in June. In March, it was reported that he tried to block specific reporters from his personal Twitter account even though the account is public. Today, Ben Smith passed along one former Perry opponent's allegation that his 2010 gubernatorial campaign "created artificial people to Tweet." But Perry was one of the first governors to have a thoughtful Twitter strategy — keeping separate personal, gubernatorial and campaign accounts — and his campaigns are savvy, too. Last year, he sealed his 2010 gubernatorial re-election without investing much in collateral like yard signs or direct mail. That could have been as much a function of Perry's habit of winning as anything — he was en route to a third term as governor — but it's not a campaign move you'd make if you were wary of bucking the script and trying new things online.

"He's from West Texas and, that may just be his accent," said Ryan Gravatt, Perry 2012's online strategist and a veteran of his 2010 campaign as well. "But whether it's Twitter or 'tweeter,' he knows how to use it."