We're hard at work pulling together this year's fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum conference, which will be taking place this May 18 at Pace University in NYC along with a participant-driven unConference on the 19th, and I'm pleased to share with you the emerging schedule for the main day. (Note: what follows is subject to change.)

First, we're excited to be able to announce that Phil de Vellis, a.k.a. ParkRidge47, the creator of the "Vote Different" video (a.k.a. "Hillary 1984") will be speaking this year on a panel on "Message Jamming with Online Video." His bit of voter-generated content has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube, and million times more on TV and cable, proving that this really is the year of "The Flattening of Politics," the theme of our conference.

The schedule is still in formation, but right now the plan for the first half of the day is to have a series of keynote talks and conversations in the Schimmel Theater at Pace focusing on how participation in politics is changing thanks to the ability of tens of millions of people to connect, create, share, fundraise and network together--with and without the involvement of leadership from above.

We're going to start earlier than usual this year, at 8:30am, because we've lined up Larry Lessig of Stanford University to kick things off with a talk on free culture and free politics.

He'll be followed by two presentations on the demographics of political participation online, by Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet Center and by Henry Copeland of Blogads. Rainie will give us the big picture, and Copeland will zero in on what readers of political blogs do.

Then we'll turn the stage over to Yochai Benkler and Thomas Friedman for two talks exploring the flattening of politics. First Benkler, the author of the seminal work The Wealth of Networks, will examine what happens when a billion people can now effectively own the means of producing and disseminating ideas, and what the shift from a capital-intensive broadcast model of politics to a people-intensive network model is doing to our political and media systems. Then Friedman, best-selling New York Times columnist, will talk about how our political establishment is (or isn't) responding, how countries around the world are being transformed by networked politics, and the challenges and opportunities we now face.

We'll then have a couple of quick demos of sites and tools that we think exemplify these trends (details TBA), followed by a coffee break.

Continuing the morning, we'll take a close look at the networking of politics with three speakers: Farouk Olu Aregbe, the founder of the 300,000+ member "Million Strong for Barack" group on Facebook; Matt Stoller of MyDD.com and social network sociologist danah boyd. They'll cover everything from the rise of the "netroots" phenomenon to the challenges politicians face making "digital handshakes" on "virtual receiving lines."

The morning keynotes will finish with several exciting speakers, but I'm not at liberty to give you the details yet.

After lunch, we'll have a serious of concurrent panels including speakers like Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Kim Malone, Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Cheryl Contee, Eli Pariser, Sara Horowitz, Josh Marshall, Ruby Sinreich, Craig Newmark, Joe Trippi, Becki Donatelli, Andrew Keen, Ellen Miller, Chris Rabb, David All, Todd Ziegler, Allison Fine, Clay Shirky, Liza Sabater, Brian Dear, Ben Rattray, Steve Urquhart, Mindy Finn, Mike Turk, Zack Exley, Walter Fields and Robert Greenwald. (UPDATE: John Aravosis, Anil Dash, and Ian Bogost have recently confirmed their participation.) I'll soon have more details to share, but here are the titles for each session:

-Navigating the New Media System
-Money Online: Where is It? How to Get It?
-Why Open Platforms Matter
-Is Cyberspace Colorblind?
-Social Networks, Tipping Points and Organizing
-Embracing Voter-Generated Content
-Web 2.0: Cult of the Amateur? A Debate
-What Will Congress Do Next? Net Neutrality, Copyright, Regulating Online Networks, etc
-How to Build Powerful Online Communities
-Message-Jamming with Online Video
-Online Politics Overseas: Lessons from England, Australia and Latin America

We're also organizing an "Idea Market" where we'll have 15 to 20 tables staffed by experts on a wide range of topics, and participants will be able to browse as many as they like. Subjects we'll cover will include:

-Converting Online Support to Offline Activism
-All Things Mobile
-Net Neutrality as a Civil Rights Issue
-Nurturing Hyper-local Online Communities
-RSS for Beginners
-Mapping Money and Votes
-Fun with Widgets
-Organizing in Second Life
-Learning to Videoblog
-The Practice of Distributed Reporting
-Interoperability: Why it Matters
-Getting the Most out of Google/YouTube

If you have a topic you'd like to see covered, or you'd like to host one of these tables, please drop me a note at micah-at-personaldemocracy-dot-com.

Trust me, you don't want to miss this year's PdF. Register now to reserve your ticket, and to join in an attendees-only online social network for pre-conference connecting, during-conference schmoozing, and post-conference post-morteming. Special rates are available for students and employees of non-profits; email dorit-at-personaldemocracy-dot-com for details.

More details soon!

Campaigns & Elections | Conferences & Events | Emergent Democracy | Grassroots Activism
Micah L. Sifry's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati