Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 21-22 in Barcelona, at the Torre Agbar (pictured below). To get on the mailing list for more details, go to www.personaldemocracy.eu and sign up!
During last year's election, candidate Barack Obama staked out an expansive position on the ways that technology and the internet could be harnessed to open up the political process to ordinary citizens. And so far his administration has been delivering on many of his promises, most notably with projects like Data.gov, IT.Usaspending.gov and the Open Government Initiative, and potentially as well with the as-yet unfinished Recovery.gov site. Not only is the administration steadily making the federal government more transparent in its spending activities, it's beginning to involve the public directly in conceiving and drafting policy. Judging by their comments at this week's Personal Democracy Forum, and their work, like Vivek Kundra, Macon Phillips, and Beth Noveck seem quite comfortable trusting the "wisdom of crowds" and opening up the administration to approaches that trade some loss of control for a big increase in public participation.
But one element of his technology innovation agenda seems stuck in control mode: Obama's so-called "online townhalls." Yesterday's health care forum is a case in point. As far as I can tell, there was nothing about the collection of questions from participants online that made Obama's forum anything to get excited about. People were invited to submit questions via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but while this generated a lot of input--including a healthy number of video questions--so what?
That's if for me until Tuesday, folks, as I'm tacking on an extra day to the holiday. Enjoy your weekend.
(With Micah Sifry; White House photo by Pete Souza)
Via TechRepublican, we have video of RNC new media director Todd Herman's presentation at PdF '09 earlier this week. Herman's talk certainly caught attention, but what was also fascinating was to take in the reactions to it amongst the conference crowd. Our Andrew Rasiej described the audience as falling about 80% on the left side of the political spectrum and 20% on the right, but the more interesting split might have been between the political and the technological. While generalizing is generally a dumb thing to do, one impression take from the contemporaneous Twitter stream was that some more tech-minded folks applauded Herman's words about making transparency a "purple issue" while the more political amongst the crowd tended towards skepticism of the idea of a more open Republican Party.
But that's admittedly just a crude read, and you don't take my word for it. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you can watch Herman's preso while reading the Twitter stream and it will seem as though it were happening in real time. Wow.
The first half-hour of yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College was given over to a pair of introduction and then opening remarks from President Barack Obama. The White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh...
Once again, President Barack Obama will be taking questions from the Internet. Saying "inaction is not an option," Obama announced through a YouTube video that the White House will today host one of their special-blend online townhalls that mixes together Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and live video streaming on White House Live. The special guest? The president himself. The subject? What Americans are wrestling with when it comes to health care costs, coverage, and choice. Obama will field some of the questions plucked by his staff from the more than 450 YouTube responses to his announcement, as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds. Health care staff will reportedly be on hand to field stumpers, and the White House promises to follow up with some of the questions that they don't get to today. The event starts at 1:15pm EDT, but head on over to Facebook now to watch as they set the stage and prepare for the event. It's not entirely clear that they're aware that the camera is already on.
The White House is promoting today's online town hall by posting some of the YouTube video responses smack dab in the middle of the WhiteHouse.gov home page. Is that you, top left?
Well, at least the first batch of recaps, reminiscences, and assessments of the just wrapped Personal Democracy Forum 2009 are starting to bubble up. But don't spend all day trawling the Internet looking for commentary. I'm here for you. Let me do it. We'll highlight more as they come in, but here's a few to get us started:
Please, by all means, add links in the comments to your own or your favorite reviews.
By just about any measure, it's already been a rather remarkable second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009 in New York City, where we've been hearing directly from some of the people at the white-hot center of tech-empowered political, social, and economic change -- as well as some of the thinkers with the most unique perspectives on that change. And in case there was any question going into the event, the verdict is clear: this conference will be tweeted. Hard. An astonishing 15,000 PdF-tagged tweets have flowed in the last day and a half, coming from more than 2,700 people (which, interestingly, is far more people than the number of folks physically present here in the Jazz at Lincoln Center space).
And you can dive into the full Twitter stream here. Be forewarned, though, that it this point the stream has swelled into an ocean of content. Lucky for us, it's belatedly occurred to me that we can with a few handy-dandy search terms parse out the tweets emanating from particular sessions from this morning's line-up. So, go ahead and catch up on the conversation around what we're learning about innovating from within government that featured the White House's Vivek Kundra (from whom we get our title above), Macon Phillips, and Beth Noveck. Then catch up on the discussion around presentations by State Department's Alec Ross on citizen-centered diplomacy, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg on social networks and social revolution, Michael Wesch on YouTube culture and authenticity, Mark Pesce on the culture of sharing, Todd Herman on "tak[ing] the lid off" of the Republican Party, and Dan Froomkin on the journalism of accountability.
For a taste of longer coverage, the Wall Street Journal's Marisa Taylor reviews the "battle over broadband," Kundra's unveiling of a new IT spending dashboard was covered by the Washington Post's Kim Hart, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, NextGov's Gautham Nagesh. The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Chou covers a discussion on the youth vote. And Write Like She Talks' Jill Zimon has been doing good work compiling live blogs of this morning's sessions, and she'll be powering through a number of this afternoon's break-out panels as well. For more coverage, check out what Google News and Google Blog Search turn up about today's events.
(Photo by magnifynet...and, okay, okay, it was take yesterday. Tag your more recent photos with "pdf09," folks)