A new 2-form for connections on surfaces with boundary

A natural gauge-invariant 2-form is introduced on the space of connections over a compact oriented surface with boundary. It is shown that this 2-form descends to the moduli space of flat connections, under a group of based gauge transformations. An explicit expression (in terms of holonomy variations) is given for the resulting 2-form, and it is related to the symplectic structure of the extended moduli space introduced by L. C. Jeffrey.