Personal Democracy Forum Conference 2009

Here's a quick plug: If you missed this year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, our partners there, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, have been uploading videos of some of the speakers. Below, watch what was arguably one of the most talked-about presentations of the conference—social media researcher Danah Boyd on The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online, in which she examines the social, political and economic divides between MySpace and Facebook. You can find the other videos on PdF's YouTube channel.

image via ckramer at flickr.com

Earlier today, Vivek Kundra, the country's first federal chief information officer, debuted a federal "IT dashboard" on USAspending.gov that gives citizens and officials easy access to the government's technology spending, with project descriptions, status updates, evaluation reports and contact information for managers. Mr. Kundra, displaying the new site at Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at Lincoln Center, called it the "golden source" of IT spending information.

"Now, for the first time, the entire country can look at how we're spending money and give us feedback," Mr. Kundra said. "What this dashboard is going to allow us to do, for the first time, as we democratize data, as we make information available, we go to the golden source of that information. ... We're going to tap into some of the best ideas and the best thinking."

Mr. Kundra's IT dashboard, which he first announced on May 27, is a follow-up to Obama administration transparency initiatives like Data.gov, which makes more than 100,000 government data feeds and statistics—from census data to toxic waste release information to health studies and testing scores—available online in one place.

The IT dashboard displays data received from about 28 agencies (from the Department of Labor to the Department of Transportation), information on more than 7,000 federal IT investments and detailed numbers on more than 780 "major" projects (worth $38.6 billion total). The dashboard allows users to examine projects by line item and look at project spending and progress in different charts and graphs in green, yellow and red color codes to indicate whether or not those resources are spent effectively. There are also pictures and contact information for agency CIOs, and social media tools for sharing information.

"What the Obama administration is committed to is laying a new foundation for transparency, accountability and responsibility, especially in how we manage IT investments."

>>READ THE FULL STORY ON OBSERVER.COM

openplanningproject.org

Streetsblog's Aaron Naparstek.

At the end of day one of the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, as the majority of attendees mingled with beer and wine in hand during a post-conference cocktail hour, a group of about 20 good-government advocates, Web developers and general techie types gathered for a special session called Hacking the City.

According to the conference materials, the purpose of the event—which was something of a local supplement to the more nationally focused panels that had been taking place all day—was to discuss “how online journalism, advocacy and community-building tools are being used to hack the urban political machine, rewrite city government's operating system and transform city dwellers' relationship to their local politics in New York.”

The conversation was led by members of The Open Planning Project, DIYcity founder John Geraci, and Streetsblog editor-in-chief Aaron Naparstek, who began by opening up the floor to thoughts on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement earlier in the day of a new contest for Web developers to design online and mobile applications out of city data, which will soon be made available in a programming-friendly format ("opened up").

The contest, called Big Apps, takes a cue from Washington D.C.’s Apps For Democracy challenge, Mr. Naparstek noted. But, he asked, “What can we do” with city data here in New York City?

Danah Boyd.

This morning, Danah Boyd was spitting out the social media Kool-Aid at Personal Democracy Forum. "Many of us believe that technologies can be these great equalizers," said Ms. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, during her keynote speech at the Jazz at Lincoln Center auditorium. "They can bring everybody on board, they can make a welcome, lovely place and that anybody can participate in if only they had the access."

But in fact, she said, sites like MySpace and Facebook are mirroring, even magnifying, our social, political and class divides.

"MySpace has become the ghetto of the digital landscape," Ms. Boyd explained to the crowd. And many of us in these social environments, she said, "have gotten into the habit of crossing the street like we always do to avoid the riff raff."

In her research, conducted over four years for her Fall 2008 dissertation at Berkeley, she found that what we're seeing is "a modern incarnation of White Flight." Facebook users who cancelled or abandoned their MySpace accounts are more likely to be white, educated and privileged. Compounding the problem is the press, Ms. Boyd said, "an institution that stems from privilege," which narrated MySpace as "the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior."

>>READ THE FULL STORY ON OBSERVER.COM

personaldemocracy.com

The sixth annual Personal Democracy Forum Conference, organized by our partners in this Web site, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, is taking place Monday and Tuesday at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The conference, which focuses on the intersection of technology and politics, will feature keynote speeches from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and White House Chief Information Officer Vivak Kundra. A host of tech, political and journalistic luminaries will also be speaking and participating in panel discussions, including Jeff Jarvis, Craig Newmark, Ana Marie Cox, Frank Rich, Rachel Sklar, Nate Silver, Steve Israel, Jerry Nadler, Andrew Hoppin and many others.

We'll be at the conference all day, both days, attending workshops and blogging here and on observer.com as often as possible. Topics will include: How technology is improving government and city life, government 2.0 initiatives, broadband access, local online politicking, and more. (The full schedules can be found here.)

Be sure to check back for updates.