A number of people have asked about opportunities for collaboration during this year's Personal Democracy Forum, and in response to their suggestions, we're pleased to announce that Monday evening June 29, immediately after the first day's formal sessions end and during the conference cocktail party, we're inviting attendees to lead or join in informal BOF sessions at Jazz at Lincoln Center. BOF as in "birds-of-a-feather flock together," that is.

Here are the details on three sessions that various folks have already been working on: Hacking the City, Demoing DemDash, and Open Questions/Citizen Media. We're also going to put up a conference wiki shortly, to enable attendees to sign up and start connecting around these session, post additional ideas, and also share other self-organized plans like themed dinners or late-night jaunts. Stay tuned for details.

(Photo of starlings in formation courtesy of Fi in Eden)

If you're not able to join us in New York City today for the first day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009, you might be interested in recaps and analysis of the initial chunk of the day from the likes of MediaBistro's Amanda Ernst, who covered the morning's opening keynotes. You might enjoy coverage of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's discussion of data-fueled open government by CNET's Caroline McCarthy, New York Future Initiative's Joe Pompeo, and the New York Times' Sewell Chan and Patrick McGeehan. And you can read Craig Newmark's summation -- "[the] future is being written at Personal Democracy Forum 2009 -- for a dose of the flavor of today's event.

But honestly, at this point the way to get a feel from afar for the discussions, idea generation, and critique happening at PdF '09 is to jump with both feet into the conference Twitter stream being captured by Twitterslurp, a tool built for us by the Bivings Group. It's nearly as good as being here. Seven hours into the event, we have 9,000 and counting, from just fewer than 2,000 different people. Wowza. Get reading. And if it's visuals you're after, check out what's popping up on Flickr.

Well, at least the first batch of recaps, reminiscences, and assessments of the just wrapped Personal Democracy Forum 2009 are starting to bubble up. But don't spend all day trawling the Internet looking for commentary. I'm here for you. Let me do it. We'll highlight more as they come in, but here's a few to get us started:

• Rory O'Connor has a run down of the whole program, which is a great overview if you weren't able to attend. He writes: "[N]o one questions any longer the primacy of the Internet and its attendant technologies. Instead, attention is now shifting toward how best to use these emerging media -- and the social networks that power them -- to transform the body politic."
• The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Chou covers yesterday's conversation of journalists about what, if any, role Twitter played in the Iranian uprising. Chou quotes the New York Times' Frank Rich: "As great as Twitter was for getting the story out, it overstated the revolution."
• Wired's Shelley Dubois reports that media anthropologist Michael Wesch wowed the crowd with his ethnography of "whatever." (If you caught Wesch's preso, here, for your re-viewing pleasure is "Charlie Bit Me" and attendant remixes. The original video has been viewed 105 million times. Million. I was an anthro major, so I know that the term of art in the field for that is insane.)
• The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas highlights the reception of the "King of Geek," otherwise known as U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra. Vargas makes a lovely allusion to the fact that holding the event in the Jazz at Lincoln Center space was fitting, giving all the riffing and creative experimentation that went on.
• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America's executive director Paul Rieckhoff, who has been pushing for veterans' rights creatively and persistently for some time now, was interviewed at PdF by Eric Kuhn about how IAVA uses Ning.
• Air America Media shot a bunch of video with attendees and presenters. Have a look. And we've got some videos ourselves, with more to come.
• The final tally of PdF '09 related tweets comes in at about 18,600, from more than 3,000 different folks. Amazing.
• And there was an entirely sensible act.ly petition floating around asking that next year's PdF not start at the unholy hour of 8:30 in the morning. It was barely light out! If you can find that petition, or if you started it, please pass along a link.

Please, by all means, add links in the comments to your own or your favorite reviews.

At last week's Personal Democracy Forum I was lucky enough to sit on a lunch time panel on the intersection of recent events in Iran and social media alongside Mobile Active's Katrin Verclas, NPR's Davar Iran Ardalan, Morningside Analytics' John Kelly, and YouTube's Olivia Ma. To organize my thoughts in preperation for the session, I quickly scribbled down a list of ten things I'd thought I'd learned from the early days of the Iran experience. No one, I'm fairly convinced, has a very strong handle yet on what went down in Iran when it comes to how technology drove the protests themselves -- or on whether tech-empowered support that provided some oxygen to the resistance movement. I, to be sure, don't. So in putting together my list I punted on big questions. Instead, I focused on process: What did we see about how new and old media mixed it up in the Iran context? What was the nature of the engagement for those of us with little real connection to Iran? What political elements served to trigger what social reactions? I called the list something like Scola's Top Ten Lessons from Iran, Some Big, Some Small.

After our panel wrapped, dozens of people came up and asked if I might post a copy of my lessons learned to the web. Okay, I'm stretching the truth. It was something like three or four people altogether. But there seemed to be enough interest to justify posting doing some very light editing of the list and posting it to this space.

Some of the ten I don't feel as strongly about as when I sketched them out two weekends ago. On others, I'm more convinced now that they're on target. Each of the ten needs to be fleshed out far more fully. But with the caveat that these are my rough notes on potential lessons (some of which might only be useful in their wrongness), I offer my thinking on ten things we might learn from Iran...