Micah Sifry – Personal Democracy Forum

Posted on 02. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn in Citizen Network, Politics

Introduction and Narrative: Personal Democracy Forum is an annual conference and ongoing weblog that focuses on how technology is changing politics. Personal Democracy Forum was founded by Andrew Rasiej, who has a background in music, education nonprofits and advising politicians. Micah Sifry worked on the first conference and was soon taken on as a partner. Personal Democracy Forum does not have a political partisan bias, “we have a bias towards celebrating the most innovative uses of technology that open up the process and make it more participatory, accountable and transparent,” says Sifry.

Main Goal: To serve two communities that are colliding with each other: technologists who are interested in hacking politics and political hacks who realize that they have to understand how to adapt to and make better use of this new networked environment. Personal Democracy Forum is a space to help these groups better understand each others needs and potentials.

Notable Achievements: In January Personal Democracy Forum started another side blog – Tech President, that focused on how the candidates are using the web and how the web is using them. It recently won a Knight Batten Award. Personal Democracy Forum has also become “an interpreter for lots of mainstream news reporters that are trying to understand this arena,” says Sifry.

A Surprising Realization: “The thing that never ceases to amaze me is when you combine hypernetworks and search, the result again and again is that the right like-minded people find you,” says Sifry. Often the people that PDF hears from are exactly the people Sifry is looking for, “they have their own really interesting experiences and insights.”

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: “I’m a great believer in always making new mistakes,” says Sirfy. As for the conferences, the biggest mistake has typically been over-programming. In running the organization as a whole it has probably been not knowing exactly where to focus, says Sifry. The lesson has been to only do a few things, but do them well.

Money: After four years the conference itself is modestly profitable and helps drive the editorial engine, though Rasiej who is the prime backer of the whole thing still has yet to recoup what he has put in.

While the editorial is running at a loss, Personal Democracy Forum does make a bit of money back in private consulting and hopes to eventually find a new revenue stream through content syndication.

Advertising is not looked at as a plausible model “I don’t think honestly there is enough demand for this kind of specialized content,” says Sifry.

Future Goals: “A partial answer to that, we own the URL techcongress.com.” But the main focus is on the yearly conference and based on the success of last year’s conference PDF is headed towards expanding it to a two day event with a third day unconference.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

I’m interested in knowing where the cutting edge is in online journalism that effects politics. The media system is a more open and dynamic and whether that’s changing the political discourse is one big subject. There is a lot of possibility to open up the political process through the use of technology and more people participating in what their representative are up to, monitoring them, giving feedback. The question is, now that the media has opened up how citizen journalism can move in and add to the role of watchdog that was formerly done by corporate sponsored media.