The theme for this year’s Personal Democracy Forum was “The Flattening of Politics” but the agenda was anything but flat. I was thrilled to attend and really excited EchoDitto was a sponsor. The whole day was full of excellent speakers and really interesting applications of technology to the political world. By lunchtime, we’d already heard from Larry Lessig, Thomas Friedman, Eric Schmidt, and a host of other key actors in the conversation about the role of technology in flattening the political conversation. (Seth Godin was fantastic speaker. Very engaging and certainly the best person to slot in before lunch!)
As Phil twittered away, I felt rather un-techie writing in my little Tibetan store notebook… but then I gave in and opened up my computer too, checking out the live chat where attendees were commenting on the speakers real-time. By lunchtime I was most excited about danah boyd’s Digital Handshakes on virtual receiving lines, where she suggested politicians block out time to make the one-to-one connections online—they set aside time to make phone calls, go to people’s homes and shake their hands in person, so why not reach out to the under-30 crew and make them feel special, crossing the rope line online too? We expanded further on the presidential campaigns in the afternoon as PDF closed with e-campaign directors for 5 of the presidential candidates! Will the next person in the White House be a tech president…and what does that mean? From the audience there were calls for authentic connectivity with the candidates…and questions were posed about the extent to which the future president of the United States will be active online. Joe Trippi gave us examples from the Dean campaign (e.g. the tuna fish example), and as people clamor for moments to get to know candidates’ genuinely, it made me think of Rosie O’Donnell’s video blogs.
Other highlights included Brian Dear talking about organizing on eventful, Ben Rattray gracefully handle a few technical difficulties (he was on a PC and not a mac, of course) as he presented on Change.org. I was personally really excited to see Gina Glantz presenting on Qvisory.org (seeing the live chat comments about Qvisory up on the big screen behind the presenters was pretty cool, though slightly distracting). I’ve been working on Qvisory and was pretty stoked to see the video EchoDitto made for the new website.
Till next year’s PDF, I’ll be visiting TechPresident and the PDF site often.
P.S. I won a 2 year free subscription to TypePad at the breakout session on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity Online. Rad :)
