With the full schedule for Personal Democracy Forum 2011’s breakout sessions and plenary talks now posted, a little house-keeping is in order. We’ve added several new main hall keynoters for the plenaries, and lots of folks for the breakouts. Along the way we’ve also had a few previously-announced speakers who needed to drop out, either for personal reasons or unexpected scheduling conflicts. So, in a moment, the details on all that.
But here’s the big picture. As of now, we have 82 fantastic speakers coming, from as far away as Johannesburg and Cairo, from the Tea Party to MoveOn, from Microsoft to Mozilla. Of people who hang a party label next to their name for professional reasons, we’ve got seven Republicans and six Democrats (plus a Conservative from the UK and a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands D66 party, which is more liberal leaning). And, in a first for us–after years of working on getting better, we’ve almost achieved gender parity in our speaker pool, with 38 women and 44 men. (That’s 46% women, 54% men.) That’s not quite where it should be, in terms of “changing the ratio,” but hopefully it helps put to rest the notion that tech conferences or politics conferences are always going to be dominated by men.
In terms of new keynoters, the folks we have added to the plenary sessions are:
Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation;
Daniel Ben-Horin, co-CEO of TechSoup Global;
Richard Boly, director of eDiplomacy for the State Department;
Alaa Abd el Fattah, one of Egypt’s first political bloggers;
Riadh Guerfali, co-founder of Tunisia’s Nawaat.org pro-democracy blog;
Hank Hultquist, vice president for Federal Regulatory, AT&T;
Andrew McLaughlin, head of Civic Commons;
Beth Noveck, former White House deputy CTO for open government (tentative);
Emily Parker, policy planning staff, State Department
Anne Marie Slaughter, professor of politics and international affairs, Princeton University;
Omoyele Sowore, founder of Sahara Reporters;
And our list of additional breakout speakers includes Houida Anouar, Dan Beckmann, Heather Brooke, Sheila Campbell, Cheryl Contee, Katie Harbath, Marci Harris, Jeff Jarvis, Josh Levy, Katherine Maher, Eli Pariser, Tracy Russo, Nancy Scola, Brian Stelter, Rachel Sterne, Stephanie Taylor, and Deanna Zandt.
You can find everyone’s bios and descriptions of their speaking slots over on the conference website.
Bowing out for various reasons, including scheduling conflicts, family issues and the like: Sami Ben Gharbia, Adam Green, Patrick Meier, Stacy Mott, Danny O’Brien, Juliana Rotich, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin and Adam Thierer. We’ll do our best to get them to PdF 2012!