Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).

Day 2 of PdF took us from personal democracy through participatory democracy to hyperdemocracy powered by a series of smart white guys with great presentation skills. This is how I think it went down.

Watch a video of Jerry Michalski at the New Politics Institute talking about "small 'g' governance" and join us when we pick up the theme on Wednesday in a participatory interview with Jerry.

I finished reading rebooting america on the 4th of July - 44 essays by very thoughtful people. You can read it too on dead tree or electrons. Here are some of my favorite bits.

At last year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, Linkfluence gave a remarkable visual presentation about the political web under "Presidential Watch 08." The crowd responded favorably, particularly when we could see spheres of influence like the Obama and McCain websites with respect to progressive and conservative blogs. The data is fascinating to observe. Yesterday in Washington, they gave a similar presentation at the Fem 2.0 conference on the "Feminist web."

Tim O'Reilly announced a government 2.0 conference to be held in DC via twitter saying "Looks like the word is out, just before my #etech keynote where I was planning to announce it: Gov 2 Summit in DC http://www.gov2summit.com/." This is the latest in a whole series of events in DC focused on how technology will influence governance in the Obama age. Looks like we'll get "change we can believe in" or at least talk it to death.

Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 20-21 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!

I'm pretty confident that danah boyd's was the most talked about talk during the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 Conference in New York City. I can say this because she was mentioned more than 750 times in the twitter stream during the 2 days of the conference. Michael Wesch got a lot of buzz - almost 600 mentions - and Jeff Jarvis and Mark Pesce (who gave a really powerful talk last year too) did well, each getting almost 500 mentions. But boyd topped them all.

Due to the multiplication of breaking news related to online criminality in Italy (Facebook groups exalting famous mafia bosses, Google executives accused of defamation and violating privacy for “allowing” a video to be posted online showing an autistic youth being abused, growing concern about online piracy, etc..), the issue of Internet regulation has acquired a very important role on the Italian political scene.

The European Union is a proto-democratic polity, focused on the city of Brussels, dispersed over 27 member states and 500 million citizens, based on a story of overcoming centuries of violence and held together by complex administrative procedures and a small number of Europeanised elites willing to invest time and effort in bridging the gaps that are still obvious.