Last year I wrote a long post describing the curation of PDF11, and with PDF12–our ninth annual event in New York–starting Monday, it’s time for an update. A few things about the curation of PDF12 are different this year, though to a large degree we’re sticking with the model we’ve been using.
The biggest change, of course, is the addition of Christopher Wong as our lead curator. With me teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School this past spring, it was absolutely vital to bring on more hands and brains to pull the conference together. As we had hoped, Chris has brought an additional layer of expertise to PDF, drawing on his work in the fields of open culture, intellectual property and civic collaboration. He’s also helped broaden our international scope, and with China in particular the great unanswered question for internet freedom activists, he’s been invaluable in leading our coverage there.
Chris and I have worked closely together since the beginning of the year, sorting through speaker and panel proposals, juggling invitations and drawing on PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej’s rich array of contacts for support. Andrew and I are immensely grateful to Chris for tracking the literally hundreds of details required to weave together all the disparate threads of a conference with 135 speakers, and while he may try to avoid taking a bow on the main stage during the conference, trust us, he deserves a standing ovation for all his hard work.
As with every year, we set for ourselves several internal goals that we try hard to meet as we condense the conference into a working program. First, we aim to bring together the most compelling themes of the moment and to find speakers who can best convey those themes. This year, those themes are the Internet’s new political power post-SOPA/PIPA; the reverberations of the Arab Spring in the Middle East; the maturation of the open government movement; and new efforts to hack politics here and abroad. You might notice that compared to past PDF conferences during election years in the US that we haven’t put the presidential race on the front burner; that’s because, frankly, we don’t think it’s the same locus of innovation and civic engagement that it was four or eight years ago. (That said, we’re still offering several keynotes and in-depth panels on the latest developments in tech-enabled organizing and campaigning.)
A second important goal for us is to make sure PDF is as diverse and balanced in our speaker pool as possible. Here, I feel we’ve done pretty well, though perhaps not nearly as good as last year. With 78 male speakers and 51 female speakers, we’re at a 60-40 gender ratio. That’s not really parity, and the only explanation I have for it is that what I’ve called “the hydraulic pressure of male domination” of conferences hasn’t let up–and we didn’t do nearly as good as job as last year (when we were at 50-50) at resisting it.
In terms of political diversity, the number of speakers who work for official Republican party organs or campaigns outnumbers the official Democrats here at PDF (though we do have several top officials from branches of the Obama Administration). And given our big theme–the Internet’s new political power–I’m glad that we’ve managed to attract not only several of the biggest players in the anti-SOPA movement (which was itself crosspartisan) but also some important players representing countering views to what, admittedly, we here at PDM have taken a clear position on.
And finally, ethnic and racial diversity remains a challenge for us. Counting our guests from overseas, just over a dozen of our speakers represent cultures outside the dominant white and English-speaking world. This is of course ironic, as we white English speakers are the actual minorities, when it comes to the rest of the world. In that light, PDF still has a long way to go before we can reasonably claim to encompass the global conversation about tech and politics in all its richness and diversity.
As far as the structure of the conference, compared to last year, when we made deliberate decisions to actively shrink the number of breakout sessions (from 30 to 22) and build the plenary sessions around individual keynotes, we haven’t changed things all that much this time around. One new thing we’re adding this year, in response to attendee feedback, is a live question tool that will enable everyone watching main hall talks to post questions to speakers (as well as vote on and comment on submitted questions). Wherever time permits, we’ll try to ask some of those questions to speakers just as they finish their talks. Hopefully, that will help make the plenary sessions a bit more interactive while keeping the conversation at a high level.
Also, Personal Democracy Plus, our premium subscriber network, is now in full gear, and it’s offering two special services around the conference. The first is “Office Hours” with some of the many experts who are speaking at the conference. If you are attending the conference, sign up for some quality one-on-one time with the pros. And for people who aren’t attending PDF, PD+ will be recording all the breakout sessions on online organizing and campaigning, and making those sessions available to subscribers.
As with last year, techPresident’s writers will be covering the conference intently. And we’ll also do our best to aggregate all the other good content that other people post as they document their own experience of the event.
As always, there’s an intangible side to what makes a great conference, and that comes from things like the setting, the food, and most of all the serendipitous encounters that happen in the hallways. Our staff, led by Jen Vento and Anthony Russomano, work tirelessly to make sure the conference runs as smoothly as possible. It couldn’t happen without them.
June 09, 2012