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.

By just about any measure, it's already been a rather remarkable second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009 in New York City, where we've been hearing directly from some of the people at the white-hot center of tech-empowered political, social, and economic change -- as well as some of the thinkers with the most unique perspectives on that change. And in case there was any question going into the event, the verdict is clear: this conference will be tweeted. Hard. An astonishing 15,000 PdF-tagged tweets have flowed in the last day and a half, coming from more than 2,700 people (which, interestingly, is far more people than the number of folks physically present here in the Jazz at Lincoln Center space).

And you can dive into the full Twitter stream here. Be forewarned, though, that it this point the stream has swelled into an ocean of content. Lucky for us, it's belatedly occurred to me that we can with a few handy-dandy search terms parse out the tweets emanating from particular sessions from this morning's line-up. So, go ahead and catch up on the conversation around what we're learning about innovating from within government that featured the White House's Vivek Kundra (from whom we get our title above), Macon Phillips, and Beth Noveck. Then catch up on the discussion around presentations by State Department's Alec Ross on citizen-centered diplomacy, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg on social networks and social revolution, Michael Wesch on YouTube culture and authenticity, Mark Pesce on the culture of sharing, Todd Herman on "tak[ing] the lid off" of the Republican Party, and Dan Froomkin on the journalism of accountability.

For a taste of longer coverage, the Wall Street Journal's Marisa Taylor reviews the "battle over broadband," Kundra's unveiling of a new IT spending dashboard was covered by the Washington Post's Kim Hart, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, NextGov's Gautham Nagesh. The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Chou covers a discussion on the youth vote. And Write Like She Talks' Jill Zimon has been doing good work compiling live blogs of this morning's sessions, and she'll be powering through a number of this afternoon's break-out panels as well. For more coverage, check out what Google News and Google Blog Search turn up about today's events.

(Photo by magnifynet...and, okay, okay, it was take yesterday. Tag your more recent photos with "pdf09," folks)

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...