[<a href="http://storify.com/lynetter/luvvies-and-boffins-at-the-science-museum" target="_blank">View the story "Luvvies and Boffins at the Science Museum" on Storify</a>] This week saw the second gathering of Google’s Luvvies and Boffins -- this time with added boffinry courtesy of London’s Science Museum.

The idea came from Eric Schmidt’s MacTaggart lecture, delivered in Edinburgh last summer, in which he said Britain needs to bring art and science back together if its creative industries are to have a successful future. Guests were handed lapel badges denoting “Luvvie”, “Boffin” or the Renaissance “Luvviboff”.

Besides great cocktails and conversation, the evening featured a stellar line-up of computing-themed activities. There were guided tours of the new Turing Exhibition, up-close demonstrations of the Babbage Machine in action, and hands-on soldering workshops to make Lumiphones.

As an added bonus, our evening coincided with Science Museum Lates, a monthly night at the museum for adults only. Geek activities abounded -- punk science comedy, a cockroach fancy dress tour, even an impressively silent disco.

Overall, it was a wonderful evening, as the Storify below attests.  Thanks to the Science Museum for being such great hosts, and to everyone who came along.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations, Google EMEA

“The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there.” It’s a saying that rings especially true in the world of technology. But while innovating requires us to focus on the future, there are times when it’s important to look back. Today—the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth—is one such moment.

Statue of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park

Turing’s life was one of astounding highs and devastating lows. While his wartime codebreaking saved thousands of lives, his own life was destroyed when he was convicted for homosexuality. But the tragedy of his story should not overshadow his legacy. Turing’s insight laid the foundations of the computer age. It’s no exaggeration to say he’s a founding father of every computer and Internet company today.

Turing’s breakthrough came in 1936 with the publication of his seminal paper “On Computable Numbers” (PDF).  This introduced two key concepts, “algorithms” and “computing machines”—commonplace terms today, but truly revolutionary in the 1930’s:

• Algorithms are, in simplest terms, step-by-step instructions for carrying out a mathematical calculation. This is where it all started for programming since, at its core, all software is a collection of algorithms.
• A computing machine—today better known as a Turing machine—was the hypothetical device that Turing dreamed up to run his algorithms. In the 1930’s, a “computer” was what you called a person who did calculations—it was a profession, not an object. Turing’s paper provided the blueprint for building a machine that could do any computation that a person could, marking the first step towards the modern notion of a computer.

Considering the role computers now play in everyday life, it’s clear Turing’s inventions rank among the most important intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century. In the evolution of computing, all paths trace back to Turing. That’s why Turing is a hero to so many Google engineers, and why we’re so proud to help commemorate and preserve his legacy.

In 2010, Google helped Bletchley Park raise funds to purchase Turing’s papers so they could be preserved for public display in their museum. More recently, we’ve been working closely with curators at London’s Science Museum to help put on a stunning new exhibition “Codebreaker - Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.” This tells the story of Turing’s vast achievements in a profoundly moving and personal way, through an amazing collection of artifacts—including items loaned by GCHQ, the U.K. government intelligence agency, never before on public display. Topics addressed include Turing’s early years, his code-breaking at Bletchley Park, his designs for the Pilot Ace computer, his later morphogenesis work, as well as his sexuality and death. The exhibition opened on June 21 and is well worth a visit if you’re passing through London in the next year.

And finally, we couldn’t let such a momentous occasion pass without a doodle. We thought the most fitting way of paying tribute to Turing’s incredible life and work would be to simulate the theoretical “Turing machine” he proposed in a mathematical paper. Visit the homepage today— we invite you to try your hand at programming it. If you get it the first time, try again... it gets harder!

Turing was born into a world that was very different, culturally and technologically, from ours—but his contribution has never been more significant. I hope you’ll join me today in paying tribute to Alan Turing, the forefather of modern computing.

Posted by Andrew Eland, Engineering Director, Google U.K.

After 30 hours of intense coding - and personal visits from Vice President Neelie Kroes and journalist and blogger Cory Doctorow - it was time for the 37 hackers of 11 nationalities who took part in Hack4Kids to find out who would win the 5000 euro first prize awards.

In the Child Safety Track, the jury awarded:

• First Prize: to Team Bodoques (Spain/Italy) with their eyeTime Tool informing kids and parents about the duration of their online session.
• Second Prize: to Team Soe (Germany/Sweden/Cambodja) with their SecondFriend chat app allowing kids to chat with counselors from helplines in an easy, intuitive and privacy-friendly manner.
• Third Prize: to Team Milktooth (Italy), with their Milktooth filter activated by the presence of the parents’ phone (by bluetooth) and filters of content that are picture/ad specific so that kids and parents watching the same website see customised pages.

In the Child Creativity track, the jury awarded:

• First Prize: to Team Water (Finland), with their Waterbear tool to make coding for kids easier, so that they not only use digital products and services - but also understand them and learn how make them!
• Second Prize: to Gianluca Cancelmi (Italy), with his semantic WikiQuiz including social media aspects.
• Third Prize: to Team LeGarage (France), with their Kwizzle space invader quiz.

MEPs Sabine Verheyen, Róża Maria Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, Sean Kelly and Petru Luhan awarded the prizes at a special ceremony in the European Parliament.



The next step for all the sponsors (Google, Orange, Vodafone, Facebook) is to work with the coders to see if we can turn their ideas into real tools that can be used to make the web a better - and more creative - place for children and families.

Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Counsel

When the advertising world convened this week in the South of France for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, we pitched up our Big Tent to debate innovations in social media and the marriage of technology and creativity.

Our first session featured Noelle Jouglet from Kony 2012 sharing how their documentary video garnered 100 million hits in 6 days and mobilised thousands of young people around the world to take part in advocacy work against the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Bradley Horowitz from the Google+ team shared his insights into how the social web is providing new ways for everyone from Barack Obama to Cadbury to interact with their supporters in meaningful ways. Both speakers shared important lessons about how to empower audiences for the marketers in the audience.



In the second of our Big Tents in Cannes, Arianna Huffington and Iain Tait from Google’s Creative Lab took part in perhaps a counterintuitive conversation for a technology company: how to best disconnect from technology in order to recharge your creative juices. After sharing how long each speaker slept the night before, Arianna and Iain’s conversation explored issues as diverse as breaking our obsession with being ‘always on’, the Tetris challenge of your inbox and making time for your soul.

After this busy week of Big Tents we’ll be recharging our batteries ahead of our next event in Sendai, Japan on the role of technology in preparing and responding to crises.

Posted by Jon Steinberg, External Relations

As Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and popular science author, recently wrote:

“It would be an exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing explained the nature of logical and mathematical reasoning, invented the digital computer, solved the mind-body problem, and saved Western civilization. But it would not be much of an exaggeration”. 

For proof, look no further than the stunning new exhibition “Codebreaker - Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy” which opens to the public today at London’s Science Museum. This tells the story of Turing’s vast achievements in a profoundly moving way, through an amazing collection of artifacts -- including items never before on display.

Photos from last night’s gala opening 

This exhibition is especially close to our hearts at Google, since not only is Turing a founding father of computing, in a way he is also the father of our collaboration with the Science Museum.

A few years ago one of Google’s senior engineers heard there was an idea to stage an exhibition about Turing. He got in touch and volunteered to help; and from that small seed, Google’s association with the Science Museum has now blossomed into a fully-fledged partnership.

In this, the centenary of Turing’s birth, we’re proud to sponsor such a fitting tribute to one of computing’s true heroes. The exhibition will be open until the end of June 2013, and entry is free, so do visit if you can.

Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations

Our second Big Tent of the week took place in Tel Aviv, where we delved into the impact of the Internet on democracy, civil society and education. Large public protests, sparked by online social networks and similar in some ways to the protests sweeping the Arab world, have swept over Israel.



By enabling each of us to express ourselves, and reach a national and global audience, participants agreed that the Internet allows new voices to influence the political process. Israel’s Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar invoked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to describe how the net is providing the means for a move from representative to direct democracy. This bottom-up revolution, he said, poses a challenge for politicians and the media who were previously the gatekeepers of information.

Our Big Tents aim to voice diverse views, and we certainly heard a wide range of opinions in Israel. Representatives from politics, traditional and new media posed powerful questions. Do extreme and violent voices dominate the online debate? Is traditional media more scared than leading in the face of the online challenge? Why did the Arab Spring not deliver a single new democracy?

Journalist Ilana Dayan put those points and more to our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who was making his first visit to Israel following a trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While he accepted it’s impossible to predict exactly the impact the internet will have on society, he described villages he had visited which - with the advent of smart mobile devices - have gone from having access to no information to all the world’s information. That, he said, must mean a better future.

The Big Tent rolls on, next stop is a beach on the south of France where we’ll be debating innovation and creativity at the Cannes Lions Festival. You can view all previous debates on our Big Tent YouTube channel.

Posted by Doron Avni, Head of Policy and Government Relations

Fri June 22, 16:00, correction made in final paragraph, names of MEPs added.

The EUhackathon is back in Brussels - and this time, it’s about online child safety.

A year ago, we hosted an inaugural EU Hack4Transparency, bringing together crack coders from all over the world with the goal increasing transparency on the Internet. Today and tomorrow, programmers are at the Google Brussels office for 30 hours of continuous coding. Entries this year come from 11 countries: France, the UK, Romania, Poland, Finland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and even Cambodia.

The new hackathon is part of the European Commission’s Better Internet for Kids initiative. Five civil society organisations: eSkills, Family Online Safety Institute, European Schoolnet, eNACSO and Missing Children Europe, are lending their support. Corporate contributors include Facebook, Orange and Vodafone, all of whom have dispatched engineers are to assist.



The coder’s task is to develop the best tools, websites or applications that will enhance children’s safety and creativity online. Our goal is to raise awareness of child safety and online creativity - and generate innovative ideas and solutions. European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes is a keen supporter.



Children are central to this latest EUhackathon and are being given the opportunity to participate in the competition. Our youngest hacker is 13 years old! A total of 25 teenagers from the European schools in Brussels, aged between 12 and 15, will assist, participate and get first hand experience of computer coding.

These children and their teachers - ultimately, the people who will use the tools created during the hackathon - will get to vote for their favourite entries, and their opinions will be taken into account by the jury in their deliberations. On 16:15 on 21st June, MEPs Sabine Verheyen, Róża Maria Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, Sean Kelly and Petru Luhan will hand out EUR 5,000 prizes to the first prize-winning teams at an award ceremony in the European Parliament.

Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Manager, Google Brussels

(Throughout this week, we’ll be presenting posts on our Big Tent and its travels around the world. The first dispatch comes from Ireland.)



It was a historic venue for a 21st century debate. We brought our Big Tent to the famed “Round Room” of Ireland’s Mansion House to coincide with the Organization of Security and Cooperation’s meeting on Internet Freedom. Here the First Dáil assembled on 21 January 1919 to proclaim the Irish Declaration of Independence. This week, here we assembled the Irish high tech community with diplomats and officials from 56 member countries to launch the update of our Transparency Report and to debate the danger of government control over the Net.



The danger is certainly rising. More than 40 countries now censor or filter the web, up from only four a decade ago, according to the Open Net Initiative.  Our Transparency Report details the requests we receive from governments around the world to censor content or collect information on Internet users. This report has proven a powerful tool for freedom of expression. This biannual update shows how some Western governments, not just the usual suspects are censoring legitimate Internet search results.

As the report’s creator Dorothy Chou explained, Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine, she asked the audience, if an entire country came clean. This would give a global look at freedom in their country. The more transparent a government is, the less likely it will be to censor or request information on users. At least, the authorities will think twice before cracking down on the Net.

From this starting point, the Big Tent explored the danger of international organizations, and specifically the International Telecommunications Union, to undermine the bottom-up, sometimes messy system of governing the Internet. Our own chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf outlined the issue in a video address that followed up from his recent New York Times op ed.



Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and State Department advisor Alec Ross continued to debate the issue. The Estonian president warned of “computer savvy despots” who would destroy Internet freedom, harkening back to another United Nations organization, UNESCO, and its attempt to strangle media freedom with a “new world information and communications order” in the 1980s.“ In Ross’s view, the free Internet faces an imminent attack from “monsters under the bed.”

The evening ended with an emotional and lyrical exploration of free expression from War Horse author Michael Morpurgo. He weaved together a tale about illiteracy, libraries and unicorns, ending with the vow to pursue his right to to say what he wants, and even “believe in unicorns.” The Irish band Hudson Taylor, who came to prominence on YouTube, closed the evening.

Big Tent now moves to Israel and to Cannes, to coincide with the world’s largest advertising meeting. Keep a watch out for upcoming reports of these events bringing together diverse viewpoints to debate the impact of the Internet on our world.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

At Google, we’re obsessed with building energy efficient datacentres that enable cloud computing. Besides helping you be more productive, cloud-based services like Google Apps can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year, we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to 80 times more energy-efficient than running traditional in-house email.  

We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole - documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications - stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our results show that a typical organisation can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps.

Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organisations. That’s what happened at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which recently switched its approximately 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction.

How is the cloud so energy efficient? It’s all about reducing energy use for servers and server cooling. Here’s how it works:

A typical organisation has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilised. And our datacentres use equipment and software specially designed to minimise energy use. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.

In fact, according to a study by the Carbon Disclosure Project, by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020:

• US companies could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2
• UK companies would save £1.2 billion and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
• French companies could save nearly €700 million and 1.2 million metric tonnes of CO2

We’ve built efficient datacentres around the world, even designing them in ways that make the best use of the natural environment, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure

(Throughout this week we'll be publishing a series of posts on our Green Blog about our activities at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Our full schedule at the conference is available here, and follow our activities as they happen at #googleatrio20.)

On Friday, we unveiled at the Rio+20 Conference the initial fruits of a unique collaboration with a member of the European Parliament and the Society for Conservation Biologists: a global, interactive map of the world’s “Roadless Areas.”

The project came about when we were approached by MEP Kriton Arsenis, the European Parliament´s Rapporteur on forests. He explained that, while most people using Google Maps want to know which roads will get them from point A to point B, the same information is useful for conservationists who want to know where roads aren’t. In his words:

The concept of "roadless areas" is a well-established conservation measure coming from conservation biologists from all around the globe. The idea is that roads in most parts of the world lead to the unmanageable private access to the natural resources of an area, most often leading to ecosystem degradation and without the consent of the local and indigenous communities. Keeping an area roadless means that the specific territory is shielded against such exogenous pressures, thus sustaining its ecosystem services at the maximum possible level. An important tool which will drive environmental, development as well as global climate change policy forward will be the Google development of an interactive satellite map of the world's roadless areas.

We were intrigued by Kriton’s idea, so we decided to give it a try.

Start with where the Roads ARE

We started by taking all the road data (plus rail and navigable waterways) in Google maps today, and importing that into our Google Earth Engine platform for analysis. For example, here is what the road network in Australia looks like when zoomed out to country-scale:

Australia road network – coastal population centers such as Sydney, Perth and Adelaide show up as dense road networks, whereas the interior “Outback” is more sparse.

Then figure out where the roads AREN’T

Based upon advice from Kriton Arsenis and his project collaborators in the Society for Conservation Biology, we decided to define a “Roadless Area” (for the purposes of this prototype map) as any area of land more than ten kilometers from the nearest road. Using the global-scale spatial-analytic capabilities of Google Earth Engine, we then generated this raster map, such that every pixel in the map is color-coded based on distance from the nearest road. Every pixel colored green is at least ten km from the nearest road, and therefore considered part of a Roadless Area. For example:

Prototype “Roadless Areas” in Australia - all green areas are at least 10 km from the nearest road

Or consider the island of Madagascar, home to some of the most unique species on Earth.

Prototype “Roadless Areas” on the island of Madagascar, home of the endangered Indri lemur.

From these maps it becomes more apparent how the simple construction of new roads can fragment and disturb habitats, potentially driving threatened species closer to extinction.

Finally we decided to try running this “Roadless Area” algorithm at global-scale:

Prototype “Roadless Area” interactive map at global scale.

Large roadless areas are readily apparent such as the Amazon and Indonesian rainforests, Canadian boreal forest and Sahara desert.

Caveats and Next Steps

The road data used to produce these maps inevitably contains inaccuracies and
omissions. The good news is that Google already has a tool, Google Map Maker, that can be used by anyone to submit new or corrected map data, and in fact this tool is already being used in partnership with the United Nations to support global emergency response.

We look forward to continued development of this prototype, which can help to turn the abstract concept of “Roadless Areas” into something quite concrete and, we hope, useful to policymakers, scientists and communities around the world.

To explore these Roadless Area maps yourself, visit the Google Earth Engine Map Gallery.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine

About two years ago, we launched our interactive Transparency Report. We started by disclosing data about government requests. Since then, we’ve been steadily adding new features, like graphs showing traffic patterns and disruptions to Google services from different countries. And just a couple weeks ago, we launched a new section showing the requests we get from copyright holders to remove search results.

The traffic and copyright sections of the Transparency Report are refreshed in near-real-time, but government request data is updated in six-month increments because it’s a people-driven, manual process. Today we’re releasing data showing government requests to remove blog posts or videos or hand over user information made from July to December 2011.

Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data in 2010, we also added annotations with some of the more interesting stories behind the numbers. We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this proved an aberration. But now we know it’s not.

This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.

In addition to releasing new data today, we’re also adding a feature update which makes it easier to see in aggregate across countries how many removals we performed in response to court orders, as opposed to other types of requests from government agencies. For the six months of data we’re releasing today, we complied with an average of 65 percent of court orders, as opposed to 47 percent of more informal requests. We’ve rounded up some additional interesting facts in the annotations section of the Transparency Report.

We realize that the numbers we share can only provide a small window into what’s happening on the web at large. But we do hope that by being transparent about these government requests, we can continue to contribute to the public debate about how government behaviors are shaping our web.

We’re assembling a Big Tent in Dublin tonight precisely to address these alarming issues. Estonia’s President Toomas Ilves is among the participants. Years after earning its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, his country fought off a cyber attack. The Estonian government emerged determined not to shut down the Internet, but to keep it open and free.

Burma’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kuy will also be in the Irish capital this evening to receive an Amnesty International award. As her experience and our Transparency Report show, freedom can never be taken for granted. We must remain vigilant in its defense.

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst

Around the world, Internet freedom is under threat. According to the Open Net Initiative, more than 620 million Internet users - 31% of the world’s total Internet users - live in countries where there is substantial or pervasive filtering of online content.

On Monday 18 June, we’ll be hosting a Big Tent on the Internet and free expression at the Mansion House in Dublin, as part of the official programme of Ireland’s Presidency of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

This event follows the thought-provoking Big Tent we held in The Hague last November, at which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the keynote speech.

Monday’s Dublin Big Tent features another special guest: President Toomas Ilves of Estonia, pictured at left. Years after earning its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, his country fought off a massive cyber attack. Instead of cracking down on the Internet, Estonia emerged determined to keep it open and free.

We’ll also be hearing from one of the fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf; the U.S. Department of State’s Innovation Advisor Alec Ross; and the author of the acclaimed book War Horse, Michael Morpurgo, who will offer a lyrical take on free expression in the modern world.

By coincidence, Myanmar’s recently freed Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Sui Kuy will also be in the Irish capital on Monday evening to receive an Amnesty International award. As her experience demonstrates, freedom can never be taken for granted. We must remain vigilant in its defence.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa

For the past six years, we have been embroiled in a debilitating dispute over digitisation with French book publishers and authors. Today, we are announcing agreements that end all our legal battles. We are forging partnerships that we believe will put France ahead of the rest of the world in bringing out-of-print works back to life.

Much of the world’s information is found on the printed page. But almost 75 percent of the world’s books are out-of-print and unavailable except to the lucky few who can find old copies in libraries. In order to make this treasure available to everyone, anywhere in the world, we digitised millions of out-of-print works in U.S. libraries.



Until now, legal challenges, not only in France, but also in the United States, have kept us from realizing our goal. French authors and publishers sued us, separately, for copyright violations back in 2006. U.S. authors and publishers also sued. Although we reached an agreement with the American Author’s Guild and Association of American Publishers in 2008, a U.S. District court in New York last year rejected the agreement.

In France, however, we have found a way to move ahead. Both the French Publishers Association (Syndicat national de l’édition) and the French Author’s Association (Société des gens de lettres) have withdrawn their suits.

In this win-win solution, publishers and authors retain control over the commercial use of their books – while at the same time, opening the possibility for out-of-print books to reach a wide audience. We remain hopeful of reaching a solution in the US allowing us to make the world's books searchable and discoverable online.

This agreement represents a new step in our broad support for French culture. Over the past two years, we have signed agreements with several French collecting societies representing musicians, screenwriters and other creators. Our international culture center is based in Paris.

We are taking other measures as well to support French publishing. As part of this agreement, we will sponsor publishers’ new Young Reading Champions Program, which promotes the pleasures of reading among young people. We are also supporting the Publishing Laboratory - le Labo de l'édition - which helps publishing startups and traditional partners test digital technologies.

Our project with the authors is equally exciting. We will support their initiative to build a comprehensive database of published writers, a process that will help identify copyright holders and help them receive payment for their works.

Our hope is that these partnerships will boost the emerging French electronic book market. They make France a pioneer in spreading knowledge in the digital world. Watch this space for more progress on putting the written page online – and keep on reading.

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partner Development Manager of Google Books France

After electing a new President in May, French citizens head to the polls again on Sunday for Parliamentary elections. Over 6,000 candidates are competing to win just 577 seats in the Parliament. It promises to be an exciting contest and, as with the Presidential election, you can follow all the action on our special politics and elections website, www.google.fr/elections.

Built together with French news agency AFP (Agence France Presse), the site gives easy access to up-to-the-minute information about the election. You can sort news and videos from Google News and YouTube by political party or specific campaign theme - and interact directly with with political parties via their Google+ pages.



Throughout Sunday evening, a special Google Map will show the results of the first round of voting. The results will be displayed live, as they are published by the Ministry of the Interior, across all of France’s 577 electoral districts.



The French website is the latest edition of our Politics and Election platform, which has so far been rolled out in the US, Mexico, Egypt and Senegal in an effort to give internet users easier access to information about elections.

See you Sunday, and as we say in French: bonne navigation!

Posted by Florian Maganza, Policy Analyst

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long, Japan and Google.org blogs)

When natural disasters strike, more and more people around the world are turning to the web, social media and mobile technologies to connect with loved ones, locate food and shelter, find evacuation routes, access medical care and help those affected, near and far.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen some powerful examples of technology helping people and organizations cope with disasters, including:

Families in Japan turning to person finder to locate loved ones feared lost;

Volunteers establishing SMS services and using crowdsourcing tools to collect information after the Haiti earthquake and engage the diaspora;

First responders using digital maps to coordinate efforts to provide medical care;

Students in New Zealand using social networks to form a volunteer army after the Christchurch earthquake; and

Online volunteer communities self-organizing to provide emergency crisis-mapping services around the world.

This is really only scratching the surface of the amazing things people are doing, and we’re just beginning to understand the potential. So we’re hosting a ‘Big Tent’ event in Sendai, Japan on 2 July to explore the growing role of technology in preparing for, responding to and rebuilding from disasters.

At this day-long forum, through a series of panel discussions, keynotes and technology demos, we hope to learn from some of the leading local and global, public and private sector voices on managing crises. The day's speakers will include:

Margareta Wahlström, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction;

Will Rogers of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies;

James Kondo, President of Twitter Japan;

Members of Google’s Crisis Response team, and many more 

We chose to host this event in Sendai - the largest city in Tohoku, the region devastated by last year’s Great East Japan Earthquake - to focus this forum on Japan’s impressive disaster response and recovery efforts, which demonstrated some new and innovative ways that technology can aid the efforts of responders to reduce the impact and cost of disasters.

While hard hit coastal areas remain bare, with only foundation lines to mark the many homes that have been lost and too many families still living in shelters or temporary housing, central Sendai and much of the Tohoku region are beginning to buzz with new life and commerce as the community rebuilds. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we’ve already learned a great deal from this region and the inspiring response and rebuilding work being done by people in Japan and around the world, and we believe there’s much more for Google, public and private sector leaders, NGOs and technologists to gain by coming together here.

For those interested in joining us in Sendai, please register to attend here. Though space is limited, we’ll accommodate as many of you as we can.

Posted by Nigel Snoad, Crisis Response Product Manager

Throughout Europe, we have been working hard to aid the often wrenching transition from offline to online journalism. We have forged partnerships with newspapers and newspaper associations and sponsored a series of digital journalism contests. Our latest effort comes in the Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where we worked with the Open Society Fund to support a series of journalism awards.

The Czech and Slovak Journalism awards are eight years old, so we wanted to bring something new to the event. Our answer was to create organize "public online voting” for a special Czecho-Slovak award. Our sponsorship also supported two entirely new online categories, the Google Digital Innovation for professional journalism and the Google Digital Innovation for citizen journalism.



A total of 685 entries from 409 authors too part, almost a hundred more than the previous year. Online blogs comprised the single largest share of all entries. The winners of the Google prizes are:

Google Digital Innovation: Citizen Journalism

Czech Winner: Mikuláš Kroupa, Michal Šmíd, Lenka Kopřivová: "A memory of the nation"

Slovak Winner: Editorial team SME a SME.sk - "Online updates from the day of voting about ESM and government trust"

Google Digital Innovation: Professional Journalism

Czech Winner: Petr Holub, Sabina Slonková (Aktuálně.cz): "Corruption in health system vs 'Thanks, we are leaving' campaign"

Slovak Winner: Martin Filko "Series of blogposts about Slovak health system"

Czecho-Slovak Winner of public voting (the biggest impact on society):
Czech journalist Sabina Slonková (Aktuálně.cz): “Special investigation: Top secret salaries”

Congratulations for helping bring high-quality digital journalism to Slovak and Czech readers.

Posted by Janka Zichova, Communications Manager, Czech Republic and Slovakia

At the News World Summit in Paris this week most of the discussion was about how technology is transforming journalism. A good example is the rapid growth data journalism, the analyzing and filtering large data sets to uncover news.

Last November we announced our support for the first international Data Journalism Awards organised by the Global Editors Network and the European Journalism Centre. Winners were announced this week in Paris at the News World Summit.




1. Terrorists for the FBI (Mother Jones and UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, USA) Data-Driven Investigations (national/international)

2. Methadone and the Politics of Pain (The Seattle Times, USA) Data-Driven Investigations (local/regional)

3. Riot Rumours (The Guardian, UK) Data Visualizations and Storytelling (national/international)

4. Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk (Nikolay Guryanov, Stas Seletskiy and Alexey Papulovskiy, Russia) Data Visualizations and Storytelling (local/regional)

5. Transparent Politics (Polinetz AG, Switzerland) Data-Driven Applications (national/international)

6. Illinois School Report Cards (Chicago Tribune, USA) Data-Driven Applications (local/regional)

Congratulations to all the winners who will each receive a prize of EUR7,500 We hope you’ll take a look at their projects.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations, Europe, Middle East, and Africa