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.

Following yesterday's announcement about the Obama Administration's cyber security plans, Douglas Rushkoff has responded by expounding on his own idea (which I've mentioned here before) for a public-based distributed defense network. He writes in the Daily Beast,

the appointment of a czar to manage yet another highly centralized, top-down extension of the administration only betrays our chronic, almost constitutional inability to engage in distributed warfare by distributed means...Because of the 'Net's decentralized nature, cyberwarfare is less like an artillery battle than it is like hand-to-hand combat. We are all on the frontlines; each of our computers the potential weak spot in the network.

I'm going to start posting, as much as possible, about the variety of fantastic speakers and panels we're having at Personal Democracy Forum this year, and I'm starting with one of the most unusual, our session with authors Doug Rushkoff and Tara Hunt on "Building the Social Economy: CraigBucks, NewMarks and Making Whuffie."

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.