Announcing PdF 2010: June 3-5 in NYC; Hold the Dates!
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, December 22 2009
Andrew Rasiej and I are excited to announce that next year's Personal Democracy Forum, our seventh, will be taking place on June 3-5 in New York City, with the main conference on June 3rd and 4th at the CUNY Graduate Center and an unconference on June 5th (location TBA). We're going to open early registration just after New Year's with special discount rates, so watch this space. In the meantime, we think you will want to hold the dates so you can join the illustrious group we have already confirmed as speakers:
-Saul Anuzis, National Chair of the GOP's Committee on Technology;
-Nick Bilton, Lead Technology Writer for The New York Times Bits Blog and Author of the forthcoming book, I Live in the Future (Random House/June 2010);
-Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and until recently a Special Assistant to President Obama for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy;
-Mindy Finn, Director of e-Strategy for Mitt Romney 2008 for President and founding partner of Engage;
-Jane Hamsher, founder of FireDogLake;
-Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post;
-Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, co-authors of the forthcoming book, The Networked NonProfit: Using Social Media to Connect with People and Further Your Cause (Wiley, June 2010);
-Ory Okolloh, co-founder of Ushahidi, a crowdsourced crisis application, and co-founder of Mzalendo, a website that tracks the performance of Kenyan Members of Parliament;
-Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, Virtual Communities and many other books and articles and arguably the father of us all;
-Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder and president of Games for Change;
-Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia;
-Erica Williams, Deputy Director Campus Progress;
-Deanna Zandt, author of the forthcoming book Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler, June 2010);
-Ethan Zuckerman, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
PdF, as always, is a work in progress, and we invite your proposals for speakers, panels, workshops and demos. The working theme for the conference is "What's Next?" and we're going to be exploring that topic as it relates to the elections of 2010 and 2012, the transformation of political advocacy, the impact of the real-time web, the explosion of mobile apps, the open data movement, and the positive and negative ways the internet is affecting politics overseas. We'll also have tracks for learning from the experts on how best to use all these tools and techniques to thrive in the political arena, and plenty of time and space for seeing your old friends, making new ones, and talking shop.
The Graduate Center is a beautiful venue right smack in midtown at Fifth Ave and 34th St, and we'll be taking over not only the Proshansky Auditorium and breakout areas on the concourse level, but also Segal Theatre on the first floor and the Dining Commons with its gorgeous atrium facing the Empire State Building on the 8th floor.