Whether you choose Austin, London, or DC or can't even leave your desk, plenty of opportunity to join the discussion about the future of government. Check out the Policy not (much) Politics calendar of upcoming events.

We'll maintain a calendar for "policy (and maybe some politics)" events and conferences. Upcoming events include Netsquared, a call for participants for MobileActive08 in South Africa and Community Wireless in DC. Keep up with the variety of events that touch upon the future of democracy and participatory governance.

Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems to speak on "Open Source, Open Education and Eco-friendly: Can Sharing Improve Policy?" in Washington DC on 5/5.

We're thrilled to announce that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be keynoting this year's Personal Democracy Forum, joining New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a one-on-one conversation on the flattening of politics.

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.)

I'm spending most of the week at eTech, one of O'Reilly Media's premier gatherings of technologists, that happens every year in San Diego. I have fond memories of attending this conference three years ago, when it included a special day on "Digital Democracy" focused on the emerging impact of the internet on the last presidential election. I'm not sure what I'm going to learn here, but I find it refreshing to get out of the political environment every now and then and talk with people who are used to making things that work, who take for granted that the systems they are working on will get overthrown every few years, and who know that the best ideas are probably being developed out on the edges, by some kids in a garage...

A couple of months ago I attended and spoke at the

Right now I am in Los Angeles at the Mobile Off-Deck conference. But this Friday I will flying up to Stanford University for the annual Mobile Persuasion conference where I will be speaking at 9:15am on a panel entitled "Big ideas in Mobile Persuasion: Changing our politics, our environment, and ourselves" where I am cited to speak about using mobile phones for social change and how that relates to "persuasion."
It should be interesting considering whenever I usually speak on this topic I normally talk about how Mobile is not a persuasion medium when it comes to politics. But since being asked to speak at the conference I have been thinking more about this issue lately.
If you are in the Palo Alto area stop by for what promises to be some really interesting conversations and presentations!

Save the date of May 18, folks, and make your plans to be in New York City, because this year the fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum is going to be our biggest and best conference yet. The theme this year is "The Flattening of Politics"--how the distance is rapidly disappearing between the people at the top and bottom of campaigns, political media and voter activism.

Yes, it's true, the site does look a bit different! (Hey, all you RSS subscribers, come take a look!)

A big thanks to everyone who worked on the site redesign: Josh Levy, our associate editor, who has sweated every tweak; Katherine Dillon and Kate Thompson of the design firm DillonThompson, who gave us our template; and Adam Mordecai, Aaron Welch, Neil Drumm and the other good folks at Advomatic who got under the hood and made it work.

Our goal with this design was to make the most dynamic part of the site, the PDF blog, more visible, and to add a new section of premium content focused on company reviews. While we were at it, we cleaned up the top navigation bar, which was getting a bit busy, and added a right rail series of "bits" that will allow us to highlight various standing features of the site, including the premium section, books we like, and the PDF Newswire, which features feeds from a bunch of other great political technology blogs. You'll also be seeing more about the 2007 PDF conference, starting with a big announcement next week.