Personal Democracy Forum 2010

Personal Democracy Forum is the world’s leading conference exploring and analyzing technology's impact on politics and government.

For six years, PdF has attracted thought leaders and the most connected, driven people in the industry to come together and learn.

I got invited by Google as one of the 20 Google Fellows - selected based on their experience in turning ideas into action and developing new applications of technology in the political or civic arena.

Busy schedule from Wednesday to Saturday: Bootcamp, PdF day 1 (inc. Google Fellow meeting & Microsoft’s coctail parties), PdF day 2, Unconference

TwitterSlurp Feed

CivicoLive

Audience

Bootcamp Using video and personal storytelling for

mobilizing your cause: http://invisiblepeople.tv

Word Tree is an interesting visualization/analysis/search tool for unstructured text: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Word_Tree.html

See how social media has been used to get clean water for more than million people: http://www.charitywater.org

Google Sidewiki breaking censorship/moderation in web discussion boards and comment threads? http://www.google.com/sidewiki

A new kind of fund-raising strategy for non-profits: http://www.causebee.com

A nice story about random act of kindness: http://sites.google.com/site/93dollarclub

InvisiblePeople.tv

Word Tree with Google Suggest Data

CharityWater.org

Causebee

Google Sidewiki

93 Dollar Club

Day 1 Video archive: http://pdfnyc.civicolive.com Twitter feed:

http://personaldemocracy.com/twitter Using Word Trees to visualize Google

suggest data: http://bit.ly/ctr7f9 Mass-audience visualizations that let

experts find hidden patterns from social media data: http://flowingmedia.com/gallery.html

Collect, visualize and analyze your social network from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or email with this open source Excel plug-in: http://nodexl.codeplex.com [examples]

Political campaign, transparency or participation platform releases by Google, Microsoft, IBM, ElectionMall, VoteIQ…

Phrase Net (by Flowing Media)

Phrase Nets use a simple form of pattern matching to provide multiple views of the concepts contained a book, speech, or poem. The image below is a word graph made from Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice." The program has drawn a network of words, where two words are connected if they appear together in a phrase of the form "X and Y”.

For instance, "Jane" and "Elizabeth" are connected by a thicker arrow since the phrase "Jane and Elizabeth" occurs 10 times in the novel. The result of this simple pattern matching scheme is a surprisingly coherent view of some of the concepts in the books.

NodeXL

Day 2 Opinion Space - engage diverse

communities, solicit and display their viewpoints, and highlight the most insightful suggestions, U.S. State Department as first client: http://opinion.berkeley.edu/

Morningside Analytics discovers and monitors online networks that form around particular ideas and identifies thought leaders with standing in these audiences: http://morningside-analytics.com

You ask and vote on questions for the candidates. The top ten questions will be presented to the candidates. Candidates will post their video answers. You decide if they actually answered the questions: http://www.10questions.com

Opinion Space

Morningside Analytics

1Questions.com

Unconference

Great tool for real-time collaborative text writing: http://piratepad.net/pdfuncon

Summary

"We have 21st century technology, but we're using 20th century paradigms

to run it."