PdF Worldwide Meetup Day: Sharing Our Stories
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, July 13 2011
In Los Angeles, a half-dozen PdFers gathered at Lucy's El Adobe. In Brussels, thirty folks met at the offices of Fleishman-Hillard, a PR firm. In Rome, it looks like the most stylish of affairs (see photo below; we are not surprised). In New York, we met at New Work City 2.0, a PdF-style place for sure. In Frankfurt, New York, Baltimore, Milan, even Sydney, Australia, we got together and talked about our common passion for how the internet is changing politics, government and civil society.
Joe Anthony, a former Obama campaign activist (whose travails with the 2008 campaign we covered closely), attended the LA Meetup and reported:
It was great to get a small group of like-minded folks together and we had some great conversations. I've been isolated to just a small handful of people I can even discuss these interests with in person, so I suppose I really need to get to more of these events ;0).
I met two new media guys from the Obama campaign, and it was definitely interesting speaking with them....
We all thought it'd be great to meet again, perhaps with a theme (ex. Toward the end we talked about how Gates/Jobs envisioned everyone having a personal computer, and how insane the idea seemed at the time. I suggested a 'crazy idea' theme. What would you like to see happen in 5-10 years?, etc).
In any event, I'm looking forward to the next. If I can help organize a meetup in the future, I'd be glad to help.
In Brussels, Laurence Modrego, the Meetup organizer, wrote:
We had 30 attendees in total, all enthusiastic people working in or around the EU institutions. We had an interesting, lively, open-hearted discussion with our speaker, one of the spokespeople of the Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council (every 6 months a different country takes the EU lead), who did great things on social media.
The general feedback from the attendees was that they’d like this PdF meetup experiment to be renewed. Our feeling is that yesterday’s event showed there’s great eagerness for PdF events in Brussels. We were really happy to see that our meetup was one of the first ones in terms of attendees just by NYC and Washington DC!
In New York City, we talked about how we were inspired by the wave of change spreading around the world, and pondering such questions as to what degree Americans were tuned into the new potentials of hyper-networked politics, and also how we personally were being affected. Talking with some attendees afterwards, I joked that maybe we should have called the meeting "Internet Anonymous" as at least part of our time was taken up sharing common frustrations with the flood of information coming our way, and also talking about how indeed, the Internet was our "creed" (if not "religion").
Over the next few days we'll be listening to your feedback about the Meetups; post your thoughts in the comments thread below or email them to meetup@personaldemocracy.com and I'll update this post accordingly. We're not sure what we should do next, but that answer has to be given time to bubble up from all of you.