During last year's election, candidate Barack Obama staked out an expansive position on the ways that technology and the internet could be harnessed to open up the political process to ordinary citizens. And so far his administration has been delivering on many of his promises, most notably with projects like Data.gov, IT.Usaspending.gov and the Open Government Initiative, and potentially as well with the as-yet unfinished Recovery.gov site. Not only is the administration steadily making the federal government more transparent in its spending activities, it's beginning to involve the public directly in conceiving and drafting policy. Judging by their comments at this week's Personal Democracy Forum, and their work, like Vivek Kundra, Macon Phillips, and Beth Noveck seem quite comfortable trusting the "wisdom of crowds" and opening up the administration to approaches that trade some loss of control for a big increase in public participation.

But one element of his technology innovation agenda seems stuck in control mode: Obama's so-called "online townhalls." Yesterday's health care forum is a case in point. As far as I can tell, there was nothing about the collection of questions from participants online that made Obama's forum anything to get excited about. People were invited to submit questions via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but while this generated a lot of input--including a healthy number of video questions--so what?

Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 21-22 in Barcelona, at the Torre Agbar (pictured below). To get on the mailing list for more details, go to www.personaldemocracy.eu and sign up!

Hey all PdF2009 attendees and virtual fellow travelers! If you want to access the conference schedule, speaker bios and tweets about the conference all in one fell swoop, check out our mobile app, built by PdF staffer Joshua Sherman. Here's a screenshot:

Here's how Jim Walsh of Wired for Change, the sponsor of this session, describes its focus:

"More and more candidates are taking their campaigns online, but technical and strategic know-how remain a major hurdle to turning online support into real world results. Join a conversation on the future of online campaigns at the local level, how using data effectively is key to winning, and how organizing tools are changing to reflect the new realities."

What could a future White House 2.0 look like? How could millions of people collaborate to help govern the country? Jim Gilliam's web site, White House 2, is one possible answer, but there are many others. This session is going to start off with a presentation from Jim looking at the top challenges that came up when building the application, to see how his lessons learned might be applied on a larger scale. In an email note to his fellow panelists, Jim said he was going to focus on seven areas:

-virtual ballot stuffing

This session originated with a paper by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen that I saw him deliver more than a year ago at the Politics Web 2.0 held in England at the University of London, Royal Halloway. His paper was called "The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication and Communicative Overload," and while he disguised his ethnographic field research somewhat in the paper, it was clear that he was describing the chaos of a presidential campaign in the final weeks before a big-state primary.

This session is about a different kind of health care reform that is underway, one that is led by people rather than government. In a word, the internet is fostering a big power shift at the consumer level. More and more, power is shifting to health consumers, or so-called "e-patients"--they are networking with each other and thus nibbling away at the power of doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurers, etc.

Time for a quick update about next week's Personal Democracy Forum.

Our goal for this panel is to spur some cross-partisan discussion of what it's like to organize online and gain traction for your issues when your side is in power and when your side is not in power.

Here's how Sujatha Jahagirdar, the moderator of this session, describes its focus: