I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum’s 2009 conference, We.gov, at Lincoln Center in New York City.  This is the premier conference on politics and technology, and the first time I’ve attended.  It should be interesting.

Things just got started this morning with Joe Rospars, the New Media Director for Obama’s campaign and a co-founder of Blue State Digital, and Mark McKinnon, who worked on John McCain’s campaign as an adviser.  Then Mayor Bloomberg was supposed to be here, but due to some problems in the New York state senate, he had to stay at City Hall.  But he was able to talk to us via Skype.

I hope to get some pics up later.  It’s a bit hard right now since I’m sitting in an auditorium and can’t move very easily.

11:08am Currently Micah Silfry of PDF is interviewing Nate Silver from the blog Five Thirty Eight.  I’ve missed a lot of what he’s said.  I’m being a terrible live-blogger!

11:32am Gina Bianchini is now discussing the social networking company she founded, Ning, and is showcasing the PickensPlan and the rapper 50 Cent as effective users of Ning.  Apparently, over 200,000 people have signed up with the Picken’s Plan Ning site to organize around energy reform.  I believe Bianchini said that 60 percent of these users have met with their representatives.  That number seems very high–I’m not sure if I heard her correctly.  I’m also not sure why she focused on 50 Cent–seems like an odd example–but she was trying to point out how he uses Ning in coordination with Twitter and other social media to keep in touch with his fans.  I have thought about using Ning for Social Media Progressives since we are looking for a new home besides our Facebook site, but I still don’t get what the advantage of using Ning is over any other website or even our little Facebook page.  Bianchini isn’t explaining what is unique about Ning.  Wow, Bianchini just gave my friend Joseph Porcelli of Neighbors for Neighbors a shoutout as a model user of Ning.

11:50am Dana Boyd is up now talking about an issue that I didn’t think I’d hear about at this conference–the ways that race and class affect the debate about technology and politics.  She’s an ethnographer who studies the use of technology in society.  The issue isn’t just inequality access to technology, she’s saying, but the ways that people from different socioeconomic groups use technology, especially social media.  She’s talked for a long time about how minority kids and kids from lower-income families never made the jump from MySpace to Facebook, whereas kids from middle class and wealthier families made the jump quickly.  I’m not sure where she’s going with this talk.  She’s now making the connection to racial and class segregation, so I suppose she’s saying that we are segregating our lives online in addition to offline.  She worries that the internet will not increase tolerance as much as we might think because of this phenomenon.  We are still very much living apart from other races and classes even with social media.  This seems pretty obvious to me.  What is the solution?  I don’t think anyone believes that technology is going to get rid of racism or voluntary segregation of races and people from different backgrounds.  It is a thought-provoking talk though.  It reminds me of just how limited many of our social interactions are and it makes me wonder how we can bring about more interaction of different people, both online and offline.

12:24pm I’ve been looking forward to Jeff Jarvis’s talk, and he’s speaking now.  He’s an authority on the media and one of the most interesting thinkers about the ways that the media is changing.  He is famous for the quote, “We should do what we do best and link to the rest.”  His blog is BuzzMachine and  he’s also the author of the book What Would Google Do.  So far in this talk, he’s not talking about media, but is instead discussing what government can learn from Google and companies like it.  There are several issues he’s laying out here.  First, he’s saying that we have to give government permission to experiment, innovate, and yes, from time to time, fail.   Government should use the “beta” model of releasing things that are not quite finished, not quite perfect, and allow us to help them fix the bugs.  Second, transparency is great, but there’s a danger here because it creates opportunities for “gotcha” politics.  Third, how do we make government truly collaborative?  If we want government to be a network, what does it look like?  Fourth, “how can we turn the positive to the constructive?”  We have ideas about how government can improve and be more transparent, etc., but how can we build the tools that will achieve these goals?  Now Jarvis is walking around asking people what they think “Googley government” would look like.  This is a great way to get the audience involved and we’re getting some crazy responses, some funny responses, but also some good ideas.

12:45pm David Weinberger from Harvard’s Berkman Center is now speaking about “Truth and Transparency”.  I just saw him a few weeks ago for a Berkman Center talk with Doc Searles talk about the tenth anniversary of their book The Cluetrain Manifesto.   He has talked for a while now about the nature of facts.  Yeah, FACTS.  I looked up his bio, and unsurprisingly, he has a PhD in philosophy.  I really don’t understand what he’s saying, even though I’ve studied philosophy.  He’s saying something about how hyperlinks on the internet give us a better understanding of topics than paper does because facts are messy.  Because paper does not link to other paper, it limits our awareness of the connection of facts to other facts.  This is a very abstract talk and I’m not sure where he’s going with this.  I’m afraid that this is the kind of talk that makes people frustrated with philosophy.  Too bad.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  He is using Wikipedia as an example and comparing it to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.  Wikipedia has links, it’s incomplete, it admits that there may be problems, that there is disagreement about what the facts are.  Brittanica on the other hand acts like it is the word of God, that it is complete.  It doesn’t like to anyone else as though it is sent down to us from above.  “Multi-subjectivity gives subjectivity some of the heft that objectivity has”–that’s an actual quote from this talk, and it makes some sense when you think about it I suppose.  Finally he’s connecting this to government: sites like Data.gov and Recovery.gov.   These sites are embracing the link culture of the internet.  The government is finally admitting to the people that it’s going to take many people looking at the government’s information to get at what the facts about government are.

Alright, time for lunch.  I will be back for more live blogging during the breakout sessions later.