We're hard at work pulling together this year's fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum conference, which will be taking place this May 18 at Pace University in NYC along with a participant-driven unConference on the 19th, and I'm pleased to share with you the emerging schedule for the main day. (Note: what follows is subject to change.)

After spending a week discussing with the global south about the digital divide, I find my self back in NYC, amazed at New York City Council Member Gail Brewer's staff bridging our own digital divide.

The Australian progressive group GetUp (it's kind of like Australia's Moveon) just posted a great video produced by Daniel Illic of Downwind Media in support of David Hicks, the only Australian who has spent the last five years in Guantanamo Bay after being arrested by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002.

Student safety on college campuses nationwide has become an increasingly serious concern. This week Rodger Desai, the CEO of Rave Wireless, announced during his panel at SXSW Interactive an initiative by Security On Campus, Campus Progress and Rave Wireless to make college and universities a safer place.

Steven Clift, who knows more than anyone I know about how countries around the world are experimenting with reinventing government in the electronic age, has a fascinating new post on his blog about a new service in England: the Prime Minister's office is inviting the public to petition him directly online. Right now, the top petition, with more than 1.4 million signatures, is urging Tony Blair to scrap a proposed vehicle tax. Clift adds:

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Leaders of non-profit organizations all across the country may want to sit up and take notice. Ben Rattray has opened the public beta of his new site, Change.org. Here's what he says about it:

This past Monday a bunch of RootsCamp alumni, led by Ruby Sinreich, Rik Riel, and avatars named errcheck Hicks and Effulgent Brown, organized an anti-war protest on Virtual Capitol Hill in Second Life. Sinreich (nom de avatar: Ruby Glitter) expected about 80 avatars to show up -- 40 more than Second Life usually recommends, due to massive slowdown issues -- but in the end 126 residents showed up to dance, wave signs, yell slogans, and show their support. It was, Sinreich says, a smashing success.

Adam Conner, who wrote a screed against about protests against Facebook's then-new "News Feed" feature back in September, is back with more Facebook fun, this time taking a close look at the Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack," which has the goal of getting one million Facebook members to sign on in support of Barack Obama.

It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to pull together the data on how the Republican presidential candidates are doing in terms of bottom-up support for their campaigns online, for which I apologize. Here's the headline: They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders* are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A.

To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo out of that equation, the Republican total drops below 2,000.