Young Europeans do not want political parties in their lives. Only 4% of young people (15-29 year olds) participate in a political party or trade union (on Euronews (2:02 mark) from Eurostat statistics). This is a clear figure of what young people want or do no want. Political party politicians and their acolytes would quickly blame the education system, capitalism, the television or even the Playstation for the lack of interest in politics of young people.

Paul Rieckhoff founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, asks, "What can we do to bring internet based technology to the war zone? New media consultant Eric Kuhn responds.

At PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.

Mark Pesce, digital ethnographer from University of Sydney Australia, asks, "What do we do to make the idea of participation so alluring so seductive that people want to participate?" Hear the author of Open Source Democracy and Life Inc Douglas Rushkoff respond. Both Pesce and Rushkoff were speakers at PdF2009 conference in New York.

PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.


Interested in hearing more from Mark Pesce or Douglas Rushkoff? Watch Pesce on The Dangerous Power of Sharing at PdF2009, or watch Douglas Rushkoff on the New Renaissance at PdF 2008.

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.

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.

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."

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).