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From last wednesday until friday, in Berlin the german “blogger and other net inhabitants” conference re:publica’08 took place. For the second time, most of the german language blogosphere and international guests came into the great location of the Kalkscheune in the very center of Berlin (geographically, hence a center does not exist for real in this city).

About 900 people registered for the conference and I really don’t have a clue about the real numbers. It was a great meeting place to me with some coffee, club mate, beer based talks. I moderated a panel on political video podcasting on friday, which is online available (german only). Sebastian Reichel from the german Ministry of Work and Social Welfare, Robert Heinrich from the german Green Party, Bernd Steinmann from the labor union ver.di and scientist Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow Institute discussed about the now-and-then impact of political videos on the internet. I had a good time with these four very smart guys, who turned out not to be aliens in the online world.

Since I moderated a panel on the topic of Politics on the Internet at re:publica’07 too, I really enjoy a look forward on next years re:publica’09: in beginning of June the European Parliament Elections will take place, in September or October the german federal elections will follow. It will be a great time for discussions and in-depth-workshops for all those who are interested in internet based political communication.

I met a lot of very nice people. Old friends whom I met online for the first time more than 10 years ago, new faces I never met before but know for years via the net and absolutely new ones. I really enjoyed the time and hope to see all of you again next year.

(I did not write articles on anything regarding the conference since I was involved into the programs committee.)

I’m working on eCampaigning related stuff since 2002. This was the time when - during the Federal Election in Germany - many people believed we would see the internet to be the revolutionary power of campaigning. At that time, this was nonsense, of course. And it still is, since european politicians in general are offliners - mainly because of their age.

There is not much good literature on eCampaigning in a political context in Europe. At least, I do not know it and I strongly believe to be quite good informed on that. We have to read books like »Blog Wars«, like »The Revolution will not be televised« and to compare it to our political system and the background patterns of a very specific political culture in every single european country. To get a general understanding of what’s going on in terms of politica science, I usually recommend Pippa Norris «A Virtuous Circle», a truely great book on the change of campaign mechanism. Even though it’s not covering the last years of evolution of internet based political campaigning, it’s worth reading.

..I’m still protesting this shit« is written on a sign of a protester against Iraq war.

What I can’t believe: it’s obviously meant to be citizen media. But it’s “All rights reserved”, so nobody is allowed to reuse it without special permission of the person who made this shot.

I think it should - at least - be published under this license. This would help it’s spreading around the globe a lot, I think.

Commentaries on the german Social Democrats Party (SPD) are going nuts these days. Since losing the majority in the 2005 federal election, the oldest german party with more than 140 years of history is troubled. Most elections went down the drain, and the last one the SPD can claim to have won in the state of Hessen (Hesse) is leading into new trouble.

The former state party of the German Democratic Republic SED, later called PDS, has survived and can rely on some kind of trust especially of older people in the five eastern german states which formerly were the GDR. The SPD and the Green Party are more or less center-leftist parties, with a clear attitude towards the center of the system and partly even conservative. When some unionists and left wing politicians of the SPD left the party in 2005 to form a new party called WASG, the SPD was in deep trouble: the WASG was going to breed the ground in the western states of Germany. When former-communists of PDS and the still post-natal WASG joined forces and renamed to “The Left”, they clearly targeted at the west german parliaments: with 5%+ of the popular vote, you grab seats there

The voting in Hesse set up a new scenario for the SPD: before the election, they strictly denied the possibility of a coalition with the Leftists. After the vote turned out to be not very helping in setting up a ruling coalition, the party faced a public and internal discussion on how to deal with the Leftists. In eastern states, coalitions of both parties are nothing special. But the western states always were kind of taboo.

After some discussion, the leader of the Hesse SPD  Andrea Ypsilanti and the chairman of the federal party Kurt Beck agreed to some strange appearing model: the “Linke” should not be included in a coalition. But tolerating an SPD-led government built on a coalition with the Green party.

But despite all power games on highter party levels, some elected member of the parliament of Hesse is not willing to follow the party leaders choice, as turned out in the last days. Now Andrea Ypsilanti will not try to become elected in the beginning of April, the federal chairman of the SPD Kurt Beck is facing loads of criticism (he is said to have influenced the Hamburg elections in a very unprofessional way when announcing the then-expected Hesse deal).

So the oldest german party is in very troubled times now, behaving like a pile of chicken when facing a fox. Probably Kurt Beck will have to go, the foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is one of the speculated successors. But what’s already obvious now: bringing the SPD back on the right (or maybe left or centrist) track won’t be easy. And the former mighty working class partys influence will further decline.

Jeff Jarvis seems to be annoyed by all that horse race-talk about the primaries.

Well, Jeff. You really can’t imagine how crazy it is to see more or lesse exact copies of what’s reported in the US in Germany these days. It might be interesting stuff since I’d never say that the election of a new US president would not affect us here. But the details of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, the life, jive and drive of John Edwards and details of the life of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton and more or less nothing about their plans for the future, even little about their foreign policy (except positions on Iraq).

I think they only matter for one reason: it’s easy to cover for media around the world. Just copy and translate the US sources, mix it up and shake it once or twice. What you will get is a nice story of famous (well, not here) people fighting (well, not here, too) each other in “Highlander” mode: In the end, there can be only one.

That’s sensationalism, not journalism. It’s easy to cheer someone up when you already know he’ll come down again. And if you have about 10 people to write into the sky, you’ll be wrong just 8 times until primaries end.

Some minutes ago, the german federal court Bundesverfassungsgericht published a ruling on a complaint against a  law which was set up to provide the intelligence service of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia to so called “online searching”. Most of the badly conceptualized law was ruled to be incommensurate with the german constitution.

In Germany, many people awaited this leading decision. Even though it was just a ruling on a state law, it was clearly becoming a decision on how the police and intelligence have to deal with computer systems in general. The federal court ruled, that a new basic right is now to be respected by legislative and executive branches of the state: “a guarantee on integrity of information-based systems” is derived from and included in the personal rights.

The case which the Karlsruhe based court had to rule on now was just one in a series of rulings on the question, how laws for the internet age have to be designed and applicated. A lot of laws curtailing basic rights more or less like the european directive on data retention have to be ruled in the next months and several new ones will follow.

It will be a very huge discussion during the next days and weeks, to what extent todays ruling will affect the work of the parliament, the police and intelligence. Many people in Germany have started to watch what their politicians are doing in this very specific field of politics regarding the daily internet usage life. The expertise of politicians in the field of internet politics is still improvable, as the german minister of justice Brigitte Zypries (social democrats) was showing a few months ago in a now famous interview situation. A children reporter was asking about her online behaviours and she was answering: «What is this browser you are talking about?»