Personal Democracy Forum

We just returned from Personal Democracy Forum 2008 and are still processing all of the amazing talks, insights, and ideas we were exposed to. The conference was filled with some incredible people, including Craig Newmark (yes, thats Craig from Craigslist), Google evangelist Vint Cerf, Van Jones, Larry Lessig, Arianna Huffington, FCC commisioner Jonathan Adelstein, Obama girl, Mozilla’s Brian Behlendorf, Gilberto Gil the Minister of Culture for Brazil, Jonathan Zittrain, among others.

Its amazing and empowering to see so many different projects and people dedicating themselves to enabling democracy and bring information to the people. There are many working towards pushing the envelope of technology — connecting people with information. Projects such as E-Democracy, Open Congress, Remix America, MetaVid , are all striving to create new ways to look at and access information. At the same time, there was a large call to not only make the information available, but accessible and easy to reach for all citizens. The announcement of Internet for Everyone was a large part of this.

A few other highlights:

• Larry Lessig’s talk: The Declaration for Independence
• Sheila Campbell the Manager of USA.gov Web Best Practices at the U.S. GSA, spoke on the effort to get government websites to become more customer friendly (and less deparment centric), and more web 2.0. She pointed to the TSA’s new blog, which is being used to gather feedback from travelers and has helped to shape TSA policy. Campbell said, “If the TSA can do it, anyone can!”
• Mark Pesce gave one of the best talks of the conference called Hyperpolitics (American Style). Its well worth a read.
• Lastly, the conferenced utilized a live Twitter stream throughout, providing a wonderful interactive environment.