9:33am Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer for the federal government was first to present today and he unveiled a new platform: the IT Dashboard. This tool allows the public to see where the federal government is spending money for information technology–who the contractors are, how much money each state receives, as well as information about federal agencies. This was probably the highlight of the PDF 2009 conference so far. There was a lot of anticipation for this talk after it was reported in the media last night that Kundra would unveil the IT Dashboard here. The Dashboard is in beta, and it will be opened up to the public for comments when a blog is added next week. Kundra was joined on stage by Macon Phillips, the New Media Director at the White House.
10:02am The second speaker today is Beth Noveck, who is the US Deputy Chief Technology Office. Micah Sifry called her book Wiki Government “the Bible” on the subject of government 2.0. She is talking about the Open Government Initiative, which is a way that the public can provide feedback about policy to the government. This is a very new way of making decisions in the federal government. Check out the Open Government Dialogue where everyone and anyone–even the “birthers” who deny the President Obama is a US Citizen–has an opportunity to voice their concerns about policy. The Open Government Initiative also has a blog at the Office of Sciene & Technology that accepts comments from the public, which is a first.
10:49am Todd Herman is speaking now on “The New GOP Web Presence.” Herman is the New Media Director for the Republican National Committee. He pointed out that during the McCain campaign, the Republicans didn’t use the new web tools and they didn’t organize. He actually recommended that Republicans start reading Saul Alinsky! The gist of his talk was an admission that Republicans were indeed behind Democrats right now in terms of technology and organizing, but that this wasn’t always the case and there is nothing inherent about the Republican party that is anti-technology. A few small partisan scuffles just broke out here at PDF 09. First an audience member repeatedly shouted something at Herman, who deftly to the man that he would be able to ask questions at the microphone after his talk. Then during the Q&A, Jay Rosen of NYU charged that Herman did not adequately account for the Bush administration’s efforts to block transparency efforts. Herman responded, correctly in my view, that he was not here to defend the Bush administration. This is one of the problems with trying to hold a non-partisan political forum like this. It will have a clear bias based on the political leanings of the leadership and members. I think Andrew Rasiej (the founder of PDF) said that the conference is about 80 percent liberal and 20 percent conservative.
11:07am Micah Sifry is now interviewing the director of marketing at Facebook, Randi Zuckerberg, about how Facebook has went from a social network for college students at Harvard to one of the major tools for online organizing for social and political causes. To be honest, this is a very unenlightening segment of this conference. Zuckerberg does not seem to have a lot of data or insight about how Facebook is being used by activists or some of the problems they are facing in using it. One of the interesting factoids to come out of her talk, though, is that Facebook use in Iran has dropped by 50% according to Zuckerberg. Memorable line from Zuckerberg: “Free speech is hard.”
11:37am I’m now listening to a very good talk by Alec Ross, who is the Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Office of Secretary of State Clinton. His talk is called “21st Century Statecraft: Fostering Citizen-Centered Diplomacy and Development.” His talk is focusing on the way that social media is shifting power from traditionally powerful institutions such as the state to people. The best lines of the day, and perhaps the conference, came from Ross just now: “If Paul Revere lived today, he would have just tweeted” and “Today, we can all be Paul Revere”. There have also been some excellent examples of the power of social media to allow people to organize. Ross pointed out how in Columbia, two young men used Facebook to organize a protest against FARC and over 10 million people turned out.
11:55am I’m listening to the cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch talk about the significance of YouTube in our culture. It’s such an entertaining talk that I’ve had trouble taking notes here during it. You should definitely check it out at the PDF conference website when they post the videos of the talk online. This is one of the better talks of the conference–it’s basically about why YouTube has become so big and what its significance is. Not clearly a political talk, but it’s made me realize I really need to learn more about this medium.
12:16pm Mark Pesce is speaking now on “The Dangerous Power of Sharing (Power)”. Sorry, no live-blogging for this one. I had trouble focusing on that talk.
I’ll try to come back to the live-blogging for some of the afternoon breakout sessions.
2:33pm I’m at the breakout session called “How the Internet Ecosystem Can Improve Journalism” with Frank Rich of the New York Times, Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine, Scott Simon of NPR, and Dan Gillmore from the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. There are several debates happening on this panel that are very interesting. First there was a debate about the role of social media in journalism and particularly the use of Twitter to get stories out of Iran. Frank Rich was very skeptical of how effective Twitter has been during that uprising: “The message is more important than the medium,” he said. Scott Simon had a lot of positive things to say in defense of how Twitter and social media is helping NPR. In the past, he said, someone would yell out in the newsroom and ask if anyone knew an immigrant family to interview for an immigration story. Now they just tweet this message out to the public and find people to talk with much faster. Another debate is about media consolidation and who is going to control the media. Rich was arguing that large media conglomerates such as Rupert Murdoch’s will continue to exist and thrive despite the effect of the internet on the media right now. Dan Gillmore was more hopeful that smaller, independent voices in the media will thrive but he cautioned that the emergence of broadband and telephone companines joining together may be a threat to independent content on the web.
4:02pm The day is almost over here at the PDF 2009 conference, and I’m here listening to a panel talking about “Why Blogging Still Matters: The Ongoing Vitality of the Netroots and the Rightroots.” The panelists are Scott Rosenberg, Eric Boehlert, Dan Froomkin, Jon Henke, and Ana Marie Cox (AMC). AMC kicked off the panel with a list of terms that would be part of the drinking game for the panel–if you don’t follow AMC on Twitter, you may not get this joke. They then discussed a few reasons why blogging still matters: 1) it’s a place to hear about stories besides Michael Jackson, 2) it still often does a better job than the mainstream media (Froomkin) 3) it doesn’t matter and it never has mattered but it’s not going away (Scott Rosenberg), and a few other things that I missed (I’m sorry, I told you I wasn’t very good at this). The next question was what can bloggers learn from the mainstream media? One thing that was mentioned is the importance of linking to sources and not assuming that the audience is familiar with these sources. Ana Marie Cox said that one thing that bloggers can learn from reporters is that it’s ok to call yourself a reporter “even if you sit around all day because that’s what I do.” Dan Froomkin asked a very intresting question: was the blogosphere ever a meritocracy and if it was, is it still? AMC responded that most things in life aren’t a meritocracy because otherwise “I would have more power” which got some laughs from the audience. But she did point out that there are a lot of bloggers out there who love the medium enough that they write for its own sake and their material sometimes does get picked up leading to more . The best line of the panel was definitely from AMC in response to a question about anonmyous bloggers: “I feel the same way about anonymous blogging as I do about anonymous sex: if you don’t know who it is then how do you know where to go back for more?”
