New York, NY - June 2009 - On Monday, June 29th, and Tuesday, June 30th, 2009, America's foremost leaders and luminaries from all segments of the Internet, new media and political arenas will converge in New York at Lincoln Center, Frederick P. Rose Hall, for the 6th annual Personal Democracy Forum (www.personaldemocracy.com/conference). Personal Democracy Forum is the world's largest conference examining how technological advances and Internet trends are reinventing politics, democracy, society and government.

Now in its sixth year, the two day event will be the most comprehensive to date, as an unprecedented cross-partisan roster of more than 1,000 opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists, journalists and bloggers converge to network, exchange ideas and explore the explosion of voter-generated content in 2008; the prospects for a new kind of e-democracy and collaborative governance; and all the ways the Internet, social networks, and mobile communications are fostering more transparency, accountability and innovation. This year's theme is "We.gov," focusing attention on how people are using the Internet and interactive communications technologies to transform governance through political campaigns, media, and civic action. Individuals can receive conference updates and share ideas with the organizers thru twitter.com/pdf2009.

"The Obama campaign and the election of 2008 ended the argument as to whether the Internet matters in politics. Now the political and media establishments are rushing to catch up to and define what democracy in the 21st century will be," said Andrew Rasiej, founder and executive producer of the Personal Democracy Forum. "Technology is changing civic society in ways that are challenging politicians, advocates, and organizations across the political spectrum to rethink their entire strategy for success."

"The new question we're tackling this year is 'Can we .gov, and how?'," added Micah Sifry, PdF's curator and the editor of techPresident.com. "After an election that saw an explosion of mass participation in all aspects of the process, now net-powered citizens expect to engage similarly with their government-how is Washington responding? We're going to hear from top public officials from both sides of the aisle, as well as top activists, who are all at the leading edge of answering this question."

The five main thematic tracks to be covered at PdF 2009, include:

• State-of-the-art online politics and advocacy.
  
• Exploring and defining government 2.0
  
• New organizing opportunities, tools and challenges.
  
• How to best build community and raise money online with social media
  
• The future of political journalism, blogging and networked media.

Personal Democracy Forum

Personal Democracy Forum

Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. We envision this site as one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens. Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to experiment with various ways of nurturing and expanding this conversation, ranging from blogging to investigative journalism, interviews, profiles and guest columns. The focus is going to be on new tools, processes, uses and trends--not on scoring partisan political points. We value your input and ideas.

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