PdF 2010: Preview of the Plenary Sessions and Keynotes

We have an amazing array of keynote talks planned for Personal Democracy Forum this year. While we're still tinkering with the exact schedule, here's an advance look at what to expect on each day of the event. This isn't the final schedule--we have a few surprise guests still in the wings--but as you make your plans this should give you a solid guide of how the plenary sessions of this year's conference will run. If you haven't registered yet, don't wait til the last minute: we fully expect to sell out. Register here.

Thursday, June 3 -- Day One

Can the Internet fix politics? That's the question we'll be wrestling with all through the first day of keynote talks and conversations. Different people have different views about how politics may be broken, and the degree to which people empowered by technology can fix it. Expect to be provoked by a wide range of views--optimistic, pessimistic, and from everywhere on the political spectrum.

After a 8:30am morning welcome and call-to-arms from me and Andrew Rasiej, PdF's co-founder, we'll spend the first hour from 9:00-10:00 in two one-on-one conversations with people who are showing how the internet can support fundamentally new ways of people working together to solve problems. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and Ory Okolloh, the founder of Ushahidi, have each built a world-spanning online platform. On Wikipedia, people share and edit knowledge of almost every topic under the sun; on Ushahidi, anyone dealing with a public crisis (be it natural or manmade) can gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. If politics is best understood as all the things that we have to do with each other to address and resolve public projects, both projects are models of a radically new form of self-governance.

Then from 10:30am thru 1pm we'll have a rapid-fire series of ten minute talks from a diverse group of thinkers and doers, each of whom will be offering their thoughts on the day's theme. You'll be hearing from Saul Anuzis, John Perry Barlow, Ralph Benko, Anil Dash, Jane Hamsher, Scott Heiferman, Todd Herman, Clay Johnson, Michael Malbin, Eli Pariser, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, and Deanna Zandt. (Not necessarily in that order, though.)

After lunch, the conference shifts into two sets of concurrent breakout sessions, grouped around specific tracks like Media, We.Gov, Quick-Start Guide, Advanced Online Organizing, and Developers, plus a few miscellaneous sessions. More on those in a forthcoming post (though some early details are posted here).

We'll reconvene the plenary at 4:30pm with two special sessions. First, we'll have a couple of handpicked demos from people building cool new sites and/or tools for politicking. Then, we'll shift the conversation about the role of the internet in fixing politics to more of a global horizon, with Julian Assange, Evgeny Morozov, Cheryl Contee and Ethan Zuckerman each giving a talk under the heading: "In Search of a Theory of Change--The Internet and Democratization." We expect this to be a memorable and provocative session. To top it off, at 6:30pm we'll all head nearby to the Morgan Library for a big conference cocktail party.

Friday, June 4 -- Day Two

While we're not straying from the conference theme, on the second day we want to look beyond current events and learn what some of our smartest thinkers and doers see as how politics, government, and society are going to be transformed as we all get hypernetworked. First, after another rousing 8:30am welcome from me and Andrew, at 9am we'll hear from Aneesh Chopra, the White House CTO, on how technology is enable us to rethink government. Then at 9:30, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, the coauthors of the new book "The Networked NonProfit," will lead a participatory conversation on how organizations are opening up and turning themselves inside out to adapt and thrive in a networked age.

After a coffee break, at 10:30 we'll reconvene for a series of high-value talks:
"Rethinking the Open City": Jen Pahlka and Bryan Sivak
"Rethinking Economics": Bernard Avishai
"Rethinking Telecommunications": Susan Crawford
"Rethinking Media": Markos Moulitsas
"Rethinking Representation": Clay Shirky
Each of those will run roughly 20 minutes, followed by an in-depth conversation on "Rethinking Community, Literacy and the Public Sphere" with one of our great heroes, Howard Rheingold, the author of the books Virtual Communities and Smart Mobs.

After lunch, we'll have another round of breakout sessions. Then at 4:30, we'll come back together for another set of tech-politics demos. The day will conclude with a plenary conversation about the future of the internet, politics and governance with Nick Bilton, Arianna Huffington, and Tim O'Reilly.

As I said above, don't wait til the last minute to register. This year's PdF is promising to be our best ever. You don't want to miss it.