Last year’s Personal Democracy Forum was hot, just about everyone wanted to attend PDF and with the Presidential Election pending, participation in the political process. and finding out how Internet and Web Technologies play into shaping our future government, made the Personal Democracy Forum as important as the TED Conference – and a who’s who list of attendees, registered.

I also managed to crash the party last year and wrote about it in the Personal Democracy Forum After Party at TheAnalyticsGuru blog ( Andrew Rasiej invited me to come this year – what a difference a year makes ..ha, ha).

Well, now that I’m attending PDF 2009, might as well tell you what Personal Democracy Forum will be like this year and what will be discussed at the conference.

Here’s a list of individuals who will be speaking at Personal Democracy Forum this month and here’s the schedule which is pretty rich and intensive as it will cover how our government is being re-invented by the internet and revitalized by citizen participation.

Sessions that particularly interest me on day 1 are – The Blogging of the Bureaucracy: How to Use Social Media From Inside Government with Jeanne Holm, Gwynne Kostin, Janice Nall, Jed Sundwall, Matthew Burton (moderator) and Twitter as a Platform for #Organizing and #Fundraising: Amanda Rose, Allison Fine, Abby Kirigin, David All, Rachel Sklar (moderator).   Unfortunately, both are taking place at the same time, but then, I’ll have friends attending with me and we’ll split ourselves across sessions.

The PoliTech Demos: Apture, Linkfluence, OpenCongress are going to be interesting, no doubt, and The Obama Broadband Initiative and the Future of the Internet featuring Josh Silver, James Assey are  sure to bring up material that will be new and groundbreaking.

On day 2 of  PDF 2009 Facebook with shine as  Social Networks and Social Revolutions with  Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook will be featured.  Also a session on  Participatory Politics to Participatory Medicine: The Coming Revolution in Health Care with Susannah Fox, Esther Dyson, James Heywoodand another session on Mapping the Networked Public Sphere: How Blogs, Mainstream Media and Official Sources Interact with Ken Deutsch, Stan Magniant, Vincent Ducrey will be “must attend”,  for me.

If you want to attend, it costs $455.00 today or $695.00 if you buy your ticket the day of the event.  However, if you want to attend, do this:

• Create your membership here (http://personaldemocracy.com/user/register).
  
• Select “PdF Network” as your membership option.
  
• On the Next page, enter the promo code 535PDFCOMP in the promotion code field.
  

Good luck and I hope to see you at the end of June at PDF 2009.