Archive: Category: TechPresident

Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 20-21 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! And, for today and tomorrow only, we're making a special offer to PdF conference attendees and anyone else interested in attending next year's conference here in New York City, scheduled for June 21-22. If you purchase a ticket now, you can bring a friend for free. That's right, a two-for-one deal. Tickets are $495, or $395 if you are a government or nonprofit employee. This special offer is only good for today, June 29, and tomorrow, June 30. So, if you know you are...

Hey all PdF2009 attendees and virtual fellow travelers! If you want to access the conference schedule, speaker bios and tweets about the conference all in one fell swoop, check out our mobile app, built by PdF staffer Joshua Sherman. Here's a screenshot:...

Here's how Jim Walsh of Wired for Change, the sponsor of this session, describes its focus: "More and more candidates are taking their campaigns online, but technical and strategic know-how remain a major hurdle to turning online support into real world results. Join a conversation on the future of online campaigns at the local level, how using data effectively is key to winning, and how organizing tools are changing to reflect the new realities." This, of course, is the holy grail of internet politics, how to convert online support into on-the-ground action. And Jim's co-panelists--Patrick Ruffini (formerly of the RNC), Matt Compton of the DLCC, Clay Haynes of Catalist (the progressive data shop par excellence), and Colin Delany (of Epolitics)--are highly qualified...

What could a future White House 2.0 look like? How could millions of people collaborate to help govern the country? Jim Gilliam's web site, White House 2, is one possible answer, but there are many others. This session is going to start off with a presentation from Jim looking at the top challenges that came up when building the application, to see how his lessons learned might be applied on a larger scale. In an email note to his fellow panelists, Jim said he was going to focus on seven areas: -virtual ballot stuffing -how do you encourage good contributions? -how do you find the good contributions? -how do you build consensus with thousands of people involved? -how do you balance competing interests? -what about...

This session originated with a paper by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen that I saw him deliver more than a year ago at the Politics Web 2.0 held in England at the University of London, Royal Halloway. His paper was called "The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication and Communicative Overload," and while he disguised his ethnographic field research somewhat in the paper, it was clear that he was describing the chaos of a presidential campaign in the final weeks before a big-state primary. Further discussion revealed that he was talking about the Obama campaign in New York, and in particular how its staff did (or didn't) deal with the overwhelming flood of volunteers and groups that sprung up in Manhattan to...

This session is about a different kind of health care reform that is underway, one that is led by people rather than government. In a word, the internet is fostering a big power shift at the consumer level. More and more, power is shifting to health consumers, or so-called "e-patients"--they are networking with each other and thus nibbling away at the power of doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurers, etc. It may not be universal health care, of course, but it's a really interesting shift in the dynamics of how the system works. And it may have real political ramifications, as the trend accelerates. For some interesting background reading, check out: -"The Social Life of Health Information," a June 2009 report by Susannah Fox...

Time for a quick update about next week's Personal Democracy Forum. First, we’ve added two lunchtime breakout sessions to stay on top of breaking events: *On Monday at 1:00pm, we’ll have a workshop on “Social Media and Iran” led by Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, Davar Iran Ardalan of NPR (and author of the memoir “My Name is Iran”), John Kelly of Morningside Analytics (see their report on mapping the Iranian blogosphere), and our own Nancy Scola, associate editor of techPresident, whose been doing a fantastic job condensing all the daily news around Iran. *On Tuesday at 1:00pm, we’ll have a conversation on “Accountability Journalism Online” with Jay Rosen of NYU and Pressthink interviewing Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatchdog.org (and until recently a blogger...

Our goal for this panel is to spur some cross-partisan discussion of what it's like to organize online and gain traction for your issues when your side is in power and when your side is not in power. With people like Mike Turk (former e-campaign director for the Bush-Cheney campaign of 2004 and then the RNC, more recently an adviser to Fred Thompson in 2008), Mindy Finn (deputy under Mike at the RNC and more recently Mitt Romney's e-campaign director), Natalie Foster (the new media director for Organizing for America, at the DNC now, previously with the Obama campaign), and Ilyse Hogue (the interim executive director Moveon.org's director of political advocacy and communications), I'm sure there will be plenty to...

Here's how Sujatha Jahagirdar, the moderator of this session, describes its focus: Time Magazine declared 2008 the year of the youth vote. Two million more young people turned out the polls than the last election cycle, and youth turnout has risen steadily over the past three election cycles. What is working to turn out young voters? What role did technology play in driving this turnout? How can new online strategies – like open source voting systems, online voter applications, get out the vote tools help sustain this trend? Join leaders of the youth vote movement to examine these questions and more. What's great about this panel is the diverse angles it's going to bring together. Maria-Teresa Kumar...

Here's how Heather Holdridge of Care2, the sponsor of this session, describes its focus: It's a mad mad Web 2.0 world and hot platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming indispensable components of most online campaigns. The echo chamber of the blogosphere is a powerful voice for amplifying your message and the potential for mobile in the US grows daily. But even as we seek to reach the audiences and energy of these interactive online constituencies, is the decidedly "web 1.0" channel of email still getting results? At the end of the day, it's about finding and having the ability to connect with your supporters to have collective impact. This panel will explore the effectiveness of...