What Do the Techie Politicos Do At PDF?

So while participating in the Personal Democracy Forum conference (that it sounds like will be rebranded to the "Participatory Democracy Forum", it was hard not to also notice in passing what everyone else was doing at the event since I was often plugged in at the back of the room... so I thought it would be fun to write about it.

During the conference sessions, people were...
- watching/participating, mild but not much Q&A
- on laptops (80-90% had) - usually in the middle of the sessions (closed up/saving energy @ the end)
- on pdas/checking (majority - blackberries)
- occasionally stepping out to take calls (but frankly not as often as I'd expected)

Those on phones/pdas were...
- returning voicemail
- checking email
- stopping phones from ringing

Those on laptop were...
- blogging
- checking email
- viewing yelp for restaurants nearby (just saw that once)
- reading news online
- occasionally messing with social networking sites (mostly facebook & twitter)
- watching the occasional youtube video, esp between panels so could have volume

In between and outside conference sessions, people were...
- networking, meeting each other
- chatting about issues/ideas and panels
- making jokes about Twitter (there was a lot of that)

So it was in a sense just like any other conference except more wired and definitely on the power user side of things. I will note that most people had multiple windows open on their laptops and were juggling a lot of different tasks.