Personal Democracy Forum 2010 Archive

(Photo: Esty Stein / PdF)

Personal Democracy Forum 2010 introduced new ideas and challenged old ways of thinking. There was Eli Pariser's explanation of how social networks might limit our access to divergent points of view (Thanks to what he called the filter bubble); Susan Crawford's challenge to the idea, modestly suggested by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, that Internet entrepreneurs and policymakers can continue to avoid interacting; and, via Twitter, Wales' reply. Jed Miller coined a new term — "evangelrealist" — and defined it.

Jen Pahlka of Code for America elaborated on her idea of accountable citizenship in the 21st-century city, and with Pahlka, Gov 2.0 advocate Tim O'Reilly and Washington, D.C. CTO Bryan Sivak speculated on how media and government's relationship to one another will change to survive in that city.

At the PdF Unconference on June 5, a roomful of developers and urban Internet nerds persuaded the New York City Public Advocate to learn to use Twitter for himself.

And that's just a narrow sliver of all the ways PdF exposed the way we're changing how we think about technology in politics, both local and national. Nancy Scola summarized many of them here.