A view of the CN Tower and the Toronto skyline, as you fly into the city. Photo by Micah L. Sifry I've just come back from two days in Toronto attending and speaking at MESH, which bills itself as "Canada's web conference," a tagline that, judging from the big and enthusiastic crowd at the Allstream Centre, seems altogether merited. This was my second time at MESH, and it has doubled in size since 2009, when I was last there. The conference is the brain-child of five friends--Matthew Ingram, Stuart MacDonald, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans and Mike McDerment--each of whom have day jobs in media, marketing, and law-related fields and who deftly manage to the weave the various threads of their personal...
Archive: Year: 2011
With Personal Democracy Forum 2011 less than two weeks away, we're excited to announce a few more amazing keynote speakers and panelists, and one great new breakout session that we're adding to the already packed breakout program. (A full list of speakers and bios are up here.) First, we're happy to welcome back keynoters Beth Noveck and Clay Shirky to the PdF main stage. Noveck just finished a two-year stint at the White House as deputy CTO for open government, and she will be talking about the ongoing transparency movement. Shirky will be playing host to a series of hand-picked demos by students in New York University's Interactive Technology Program, which is partnering with PdF to host the conference. Building on our...
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...
The view from NYU's Kimmel Center, where #PdF11's breakout sessions will occur, only with more leaves on the trees. Photo by Micah L. Sifry We're pleased to announce the details of this year's breakout sessions at Personal Democracy Forum (you can still register for the June 6-7 conference at NYU, here). They're organized around five primary tracks: Global Digital Activism, Online Politics and Organizing, Media Revolutions, Evolving We-Government, and Deep Dive conversations. In the Global Digital Activism track, we're going to have a mix of traditional panels and something new, sessions with some of our expert keynote speakers who will be expanding on themes they are covering in their shorter plenary talks. And in keeping with our expanded focus on the...
The PdF Network is PdF's premium membership service, designed to give those working in government, politics, advocacy, and many more sectors, unparalleled access to industry experts and resources. As we work to upgrade the network, launching at the end of summer, we're offering the PdF Network's bi-monthly call series to the public at no cost. Katie Harbath. Our conversation with Katie Harbath about the current and future uses of mobile in campaigns was chock-a-block with useful insights. As the chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2010, Harbath conducted a variety of fascinating experiments with mobile, and she shared lots of valuable takeaways with us. The big ones are, first, that rising numbers of Americans are going online...
A quick note on why I am so excited that Sami Ben Gharbia of Tunisia's Nawaat.org human rights group blog and Global Voices will be speaking at PdF 2011 next month as part of our slate of keynoters exploring the rapid pace of change in the Middle East and North Africa. A few days ago, Nawaat.org turned down a major award, the 2011 Arab e-Content Award, because the prize is sponsored by the government of Bahrain. In a statement, the group referred to its policy of avoiding government support, and condemned the Bahrain government for the arrest of scores of bloggers and human rights activists & the arbitrary blocking of websites and blogs critical of the government and its ruling...
It's fascinating to look at how quickly the depiction of Barack Obama in the online collective subconscious known as PicFog has changed in the wake of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. PicFog aggregates the photos that people are sharing in real time, using the twitter API, and combining pictures from Twitpic, Yfrog, Plixi, and Twitgoo. It wasn't that long ago that the photos that people were sharing each other tended to be variations on this: Now he's the height of cool: You can troll the site for more Obama images here. Warning, some are definitely not safe for work....
We are pleased to announce the preliminary schedule for all the plenary sessions for this year's Personal Democracy Forum. You can see the schedule at a glance here (Day One June 6, Day Two June 7); here's a more detailed overview of what we'll be focusing on: The theme of this year's event is "Agents of Change." We're aiming to move the focus away from technology itself to what people do with these new tools; how key actors like organizers, political leaders, volunteers, and followers interact; and how these players are learning from and adapting to the new environment they are themselves helping create and shape. On Monday June 6, we'll start by hearing from three leading voices who are changing the...
As Nancy Scola noted here yesterday, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina may be an unlikely video star, whose David Plouffe-like "strategy update" to the campaign's base has been getting almost as many views as one from the President announcing his re-election bid. But an email today from Obama to his list titled "Big things" seemed oddly disconnected from the obvious passions firing up his core base at the moment. The email is a straight-out fundraising appeal that starts out: If it were easy to do the big, meaningful things we believe will make our country better -- if it were quick -- someone would have done those things long before any of us showed up. We've chosen to do something hard. You know...
Now that President Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have all declared their intentions to run for President in 2012 and rolled out their initial campaign websites, and another leading contender, Sarah Palin, has also unveiled a revamped website for her political operation, SarahPac, it's possible to begin sketching the contours of the 2012 election online. And so far, the inside-the-beltway political media is missing the big story. It's not Facebook. It's the data, stupid. Unlike in 2008, when reporters had to be led by the nose to cover the Internet's emergence as the central battlefield of the campaign, this time around no one needs any convincing. Neither do the campaigns. Compared to past elections,...