John Edwards Cameo at PDF

One of the highlights of PDF was when Elizabeth Edwards spoke to the crowd via Skype - she was supposed to attend in person but her flight was cancelled. And at the end of her Q&A, John Edwards came home and answered a two-part question for the PDF attendees about the Internet and how it has affected campaigning in general and the '08 election specifically. He gave a great answer, shown on this ABC News video.

Campaign Internet Directors Turned Up the Heat in Person

Here's a post just published at The Huffington Post "Off The Bus" that I wrote (mostly - they do have editorial prerogative!) about what transpired on Monday, including a video. It's from a panel called "What Worked, What Didn't" for the campaigns online during the primaries. The panel included six tech strategists for six campaigns: Obama, McCain, Clinton, Paul, Romney & Edwards and was moderated by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Having been in their shoes, it was difficult to write about the panel without interjecting my own experiences on the topics, but Tracy Russo did a fabulous job defending the points she made online in the offline forum which is now traveling around the web so I knew that was what readers would want to hear the most about. The rest of the article is an attempt to cover some more of the important issues touched on during the panel discussion that I (and Mayhill Fowler made this point as well) wish would have been a bit longer.

Here's Mayhill's post about her experience at the conference and her remarks about what it was like as a presenter and why she was there as well as what it means to her and all she's learning about journalism.

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.

Twitter Debate Online Leading Up to PDF Conference

Beginning a little bit ago, two reps from each campaign are debating issues related to technology on Twitter. Given 1-2 questions/day through the end of Tuesday's PDF '08 conference, the campaign reps will be responding to each other and commenting on issues, 140 characters at a time.

Easiest to follow at summize.com, check out the hashtag #pdfdebate. The participants, @ anamariecox, MikeNelson, and LizMair, are a Time magazine blogger, outside advisor for Obama, and RNC Online Communications Director, respectively.

So far Mike Nelson is dominating the conversation with a lot of great information. We'll see how the rest of the weekend transpires...

See also: the piece I wrote about the Twitter debate for The Huffington Post "Off the Bus".

Countdown to Personal Democracy Forum '08

In eleven days, I'll be traversing Central Park on my way to Lincoln Center for the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 conference June 23-24 in New York City. PDF, as it's called, is the major annual conference for everyone involved in the technology behind politics and advocacy (databases, action centers, blogs) and the tools that teach us about government (like mashups and online polls). PDF is run by the same people
who publish the techPresident site and they always have fabulous speakers.

Conference info can be found here, and they just posted the agendas for day 1 and day 2.

This will be my first time to attend. I've known about it for a few years, but there was always a major reason I couldn't go - and I'm still upset about that! So I'm really looking forward to seeing a lot of people in person who I've worked or conversed with remotely but never met.