Tom Watson MP will be speaking at next month’s Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona. In this short interview we give you a quick run down on Britain’s first blogging minister, the man credited with bringing digital engagement to government in the UK.

In a recent post over on Techpresident, Micah unpacked the three branches of We.Gov. The first is the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. While I agree strongly with Micah on all 3 points, for me what none of these quite get to is perhaps one of the most powerful uses of the web within the realm of We.Gov – the ability for people to use the Internet to come together and reimagine public value, not (just) public services per se.

Today, FutureGov will be leading a session at the first (and hopefully last?! ) Reboot Britain, an event pitched as an event aimed at exploring “how this new digital world can help revive the economy, rebuild democratic structures and improve public services”. The session falls within the Political Innovation Camp stream curated by the thoroughly democratic Paul Evans following on from some other fantastic looking sessions on the drivers of change and how we can push for the adoption of social media as a tool for (hyperlocal) engagement in local government.

A couple of weeks ago I agreed to take part in the Parity Podcasts series, aimed at interviews with technical and business people working in the area of Collaborative Information Management and Web 2.0. In the podcasts the people share their knowledge and experiences of developing and deploying systems and solutions.

It’s been a big week in the world of digital government, what with the first Minister for Communications Stephen Carter announcing that he is in the process of drafting a ‘Digital Britain’ action plan as well as the launch of the Digital Inclusion action plan (I’ll be returning to these in a post shortly). So it seemed rather timely to find myself having a coffee and a chat with the Internet tsar Derek Wyatt MP last Thursday.

Over coming months, this section will be dedicated to conversations with leading figures in the public, private and voluntary sectors about the future direction of local government, the demands that are likely to be placed on it in coming years and how it will work with its partners and customers to change the way it works to better meet the needs of the people it serves.