Discount for the Personal Democracy Forum

One of my favorite events of the year is the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) (full disclosure: I have had myriad business ties to PDF and am now engaged as a consultant with them.)

I consider PDF to be my home base for learning about what’s new and hot in the social media, politics and civics space. This year’s conference is shaping up to be awesome and Beth and I have the honor of talking about our book, The Networked Nonprofit, on Friday morning.

This year’s agenda includes:

-An in-depth look at how the internet fosters freedom and democracy, with speakers from all sides of that debate: Jimmy Wales, Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Evgeny Morozov, Ory Okolloh, Ethan Zuckerman, Cheryl Contee, Newt Gingrich, John Perry Barlow and Clay Shirky.

-Shop talk from online innovators from both sides of the aisle, including Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington, Jane Hamsher, Mindy Finn, Rob Willington, Todd Herman, Natalie Foster, Stephanie Taylor, Dan Cantor, Eli Pariser and Ryan Gravatt.

-Visions of the networked future from thinkers like Howard Rheingold, Tim O’Reilly, Aneesh Chopra, Nick Bilton, Bernard Avishai, Craig Newmark, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash, Jen Pahlka, Bryan Sivak and Susan Crawford.

And as an added incentive, Micah Sifry, co-founder of PDF, is offering readers of this blog a $100 discount on their registration!  To save $100 on registration, go here:

https://personaldemocracy.com/product/pdf_2010_early_registration and use the following code: AFINE

Let me know if you’re coming, I’ve love to say hi there!

Demand Question Time!

As always, my friend Micah Sifry and his pals at Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident are up to some good fun!

If you didn’t see the debate that President Obama had with the House Republicans last week, you absolutely must. It was inspiring to see elected officials have real, civil dialogue about real issues. Here’s a clip:

This needs to continue, it’s good for the country, for the citizenry, for these kinds of exchanges to continue. to that end, Micah and friends launched a new site this morning called “Demand Question Time!” It’s pretty self-explanatory, let’s get our elected leaders to keep doing this. Micah asked me to sign onto the effort on Monday and it was a no-brainer for me. Of course, Micah has a cross-partisan group of supporters working with him on this including Mike Moffo, David Corn, Mindy Finn, Jon Henke and Glenn Reynolds.

Please go and sign the petition and share it on Twitter and Facebook – no more politics as usual!!

Our “Aha” Moments

I had a terrific time as part of a panel yesterday at Baruch College called Social Media and Technology: What Nonprofits Need to Know. The event was co-sponsored by the Personal Democracy Forum. The other panelists were:

• Andrew Rasiej, Founder of Personal Democracy Forum
• Deanna Zandt, Media Technologist, Consultant, and Author of the forthcoming book: Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking

The moderator was the spectacular Kyra Gaunt, muscicologist, anthropologist, technologist and every other ologist you can think of!

Farra Trumpeter was in attendance and wrote a terrific summary of the event. But a conversation began during the session on Twitter and continued afterwards that I thought was great fun. Micah Sifry, Andrew’s co-founder at PDF, was tweeting the event. Kyra asked the panelists about their personal “Aha” moments with social media. Mine was the amazing story of the women of Kuwait who used their blackberries, often beneath their burkas, to successfully pass full women’s suffrage in 2005. That was the story that led to my writing Momentum. The end of that story was this spring when, again using their blackberries and personal networks, four women were elected to the Kuwaiti legislature!

Micah started to use the hashtag #aha on Twitter and asked others to tweet their own personal social media aha moments. For hours last night, people around the world were sharing their stories. They included:

• Micah kicked off the tweets by writing: My SocMed #aha moment was when someone in a #SXSW panel asked the mod for a #hashtag & neither of us knew what he meant
• antheawatson: Arriving May 08 in rural IN as an Obama FO + finding group of vols with an office doing voter contact. They met on MyBo.
• Sarah Granger: My #socialmedia #aha moment: launching Gary Hart’s presidential exploratory blog early 2003. Instant community.
• Pierre Omidyar: @pierre: My #aha: 1996: people using eBay to defy stereotypes and connect unexpectedly with strangers over common passions.

What a great way to extend the panel beyond the walls of the conference room and an absolutely perfect way of using Twitter to share experiences. Thanks, Micah!

Note: Micah just spotted a mistake here with his eagle eye. The tweet attributed to him above about SXSW was actually from Hash Tager. Micah’s “aha” moment is here.

Provocative Ideas from Personal Democracy Forum

Had an amazing time at Personal Democracy Forum this year (although, sadly I couldn’t stay for the whole thing.) Love the fact that I always come away from the conference wtih my head buzzing from all of the interesting ideas.

Here is the Day One recap.

And here is Day Two.

When the videos are posted from the sessions, I will be sure to post links to danah boyd’s amazing talk on the ghettoization of the web (what she called “white flight” from MySpace to Facebook) and Mark Pesce’s talk about working in the clouds. Really thought provoking.

But just as importantly, yesterday, Beth made it to California, two kids, one husband, and cello in tow. So, how do you get a cello to California, watch and see:

Rebooting Tawain

Last year I had the great good fortune to edit a compilation of essays with my friends at Personal Democracy Forum called Rebooting America. The essays are all focused on reimagining our democracy for the digital age. Essayists are a who’s who of digital luminaries including Joe Trippi, Newt Gingrich, Tara Hunt, Craig Newmark, with a terrific foreword by Esther Dyson.

We decided to walk our talk and “open-sourced” the book by posting all of the essays for free online. This may have depressed sales of the hardcopy book, but we weren’t in this to make money (alas) but to get these ideas out into the cyberworld and, more importantly, the real world.

Yesterday we received an email that shows what an interesting little journey these essays are having.  Charles Chuang, the founder of the Drupal Taiwan Community asking for permission to translate the book into Chinese to distribute online in Taiwan.  Why exactly did he want to do this, we asked.  For three reasons, wrote Charles:  1) Reboot Taiwan, 2) Encourage and engage like-minded people, 3) Promote cyber-activism concept to elder people in local political parties.  Can’t argue with any of those reasons!

We’ll keep an eye on his website at http://net2.netivism.tw/projects/rebooting-america to see how Rebooting Taiwan is going.

Big Change at Change.org

My friends at Change.org made a big announcement at the end of last week.  The email said that there is a total graphic redesign — but that’s not all.  Over a dozen bloggers have been hired to really drill down in a specific issue areas in a way that isn’t done elsewhere on the web.  According to the Change folks, “Each of these causes is guided by a leading activist who will be writing every day about their topic of expertise – covering news and commentary, profiling innovative organizations, and highlighting ways you can make a difference.

You can check out the new causes by going to http://www.change.org/causes or sample any of those below:
Global Warming – http://globalwarming.change.org
Women’s Rights – http://womensrights.change.org
Social Entrepreneurship – http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org

You can read more from Micah, and Newsweek.  Looking forward to participating here and watching the community grow.

Rebooting America is Launched!

Rebooting America, an anthology of essays that I co-edited with my friends from Personal Democracy Forum, was officially released this week.  It’s generated lots of fun conversations about whether and how we an reinvent our American democracy using new, social media.  I hope you’ll read the essays (including mine!) and consider buying a copy, too to support our “open-source” publishing model that encourages people to pay a fair vaue for our creative effort.

C’mon, take a peek!

Leave the ’60s Behind

As I noted in a recent post a few days ago, Sally Kohn wrote an editorial that was published in the Christian Science Monitor arguing that online activism is limited in its potential for impacting large-scale social change. I among others disagreed with her assessment. Sally responded yesterday in a thorough and thoughtful post on Daily Kos.

II am glad to see her articulate that social change encompasses both on line and on land activism. I have always believed this and most folks I know who are passionate about social change believe it as well. However, the key sentence that led me to push back against her argument is exacerbated in hers old style thinking about social change. From the editorial:

“By contrast, Internet activism is individualistic. It’s great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and ’70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.”

From the new post:

“But inequality and racial injustice and corporate imperialism and other hallmarks of our modern society require dramatic, structural reforms — and while the puppet-master powers of the universe might give in to increased financial monitoring in the wake of Enron or increased carbon caps in the wake of Al Gore, let’s be honest: the fundamental built-in inequalities of capitalism and democracy as currently practiced in our country will not be resolved easily.”

Sally thinks big thoughts, that’s what makes her such an interesting person. She is passionate about trying to catalyze large scale reform, but the crux of my problem with this line of thinking; both the individualistic argument is that her entire frame for “radical change” is through a 1960s Civil Rights lens. Sally is a young person who is fluent with new technology, but limiting herself in her vision of radical change to the old organizing models that happened largely in the streets. As I mentioned, I heartily agree that change will happen online and on land. Sally only sees the on land component as mirroring what has happened before. I would challenge her to think about a new model of change; one that is being practiced and refined every day by millions of people around the country and around the world.

At the Personal Democracy Forum two weeks ago, Mark Pesce gave a brilliant keynote address on what happens when we’re all hyperconnected. Mark’s main point is that hyperconnectedness is not a continuation of the old. It is an entirely new model of how we engage with one another — and we don’t know yet what those new models will look like for systemic political change. Social change isn’t about taking old forms of protest and layering some blogs and emails atop. It’s a new way of people connecting with another, of creating scalable networks of activities with enormous capacity to share information, organize and mobilize, raise money and influence the debate in the media. By the very nature of network theory and social media, the way we connect, the way issues arise and are dealt with, will be fundamentally different in this new century. It’s time to leave the 1960s where they belong, in the history books.

Personal Democracy Forum (Day 2)

Amazing set of speakers at the plenary this morning at PDF.

Doug Rushkoff, the author of Open Source Democracy, opened the session. He gave a passionate denunciation of the oxymoron of putting the ideas of “personal” and “democracy” together. Going back to the origins of the notion of the individual in the Renaissance, Rushkoff explained that the rights of the individual reduce a sense of community and inevitably to more centralized, and powerful, government.

This was reinforced in the last century era of top-down media that mythologized the idea that people as individuals are powerful and that they don’t need one another to collaborate to solve problems. We gave problem solving away to others, elected officials, broadcasters, corporations, in this model. The apex of this model is the idea of “branding.” In Rushkoff’s words, “The brand doesn’t want us engaged with one another , it wants us engaged with it.” Hmmm, fighten words for Millennials who are very engaged with and confident in the social responsibility of various brands.

Rushkoff wasn’t totally negative and said that new social media can create the conditions by which we can finally do things for one another in local, place-based communities.

The next speaker was Morley Winograd the co-author with Michael Hais of, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics. He gave a great overview of the demographics of Millennials and their idealism. Where we diverged was that Morley is very optimistic about Millennial participation in government and public policy beyond voting. His belief is rooted in a historical perspective of civic change generations like the Greatest Generation, the Civil War generation that preceded them. I’m not as optimistic based on the data that informed the Social Citizens paper. Worth another conversation.

Finally, Larry Lessig, professor at Stanford Law School presented. If you’ve never seen Larry present, it’s a must see – like the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal. He gave a very persuasive presentation on the history of corruption in the US government and the grave threats to us now. I don’t have a video link for his presentation this morning, but you can the way he presents here.

Live Blogging from the Personal Democracy Forum

I am at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City today and tomorrow.

You can see a live stream of the happenings at http://qik.com/video/111625.

We’ve seen a few fascinating presentations this morning. We saw a demo of Linkfluence, neat spirographs of communities of bloggers through links between blogs.

Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake website was a great example of how a blogger can taken an issue (hers was the Valerie Plame affair), run with it and build up a following. However, I questioned her “actions” boiling down to taking ads out in newspapers. It’s very MoveOn.org. Is that the best we can do, take online passions and take it to on land media?

Then Patrick Ruffini spoke, he’s a conservative blogger. He said, “A small networked group beats a large atomized group any day of the week.” Interesting — but I wonder when those small groups become impenetrable cliques?

Interesting stuff, more to come!