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Rhonda Hauben has posted some pithy perspectives on last Monday's Personal Democracy Forum, an all-day event held in New York City. She gives an especially deep review to SEIU head Andy Stern's presentation (which I found useful because I missed it while preparing my own remarks).

She summarizes PDFs strengths and weaknesses:

[PDF gave] a chance for staff people in the in the Democratic and Republican Parties and others to come and network and hear a bit about each other's practices. But the broader question of politics from the citizen's and netizen's point of view got lost in the process. How the Internet will affect politics in the U.S. is a question that is grander than understanding how it will affect the practices of the Democratic or Republican Parties. The conference also focused on blogging and bloggers as the main aspect of using the Internet to impact politics and journalism.

This is also a narrow perspective. In conversations with people outside of the panels and even occasionally in comments from those on the panels themselves, there was the observation that online conversation has an important impact on politics. Yet there was no time during the conference to explore how newsgroups, mailing lists and other forms of discussion forums can play a useful role in political activity.

Also the example of how the Netizens movement in South Korea has been impacting politics and journalism was not a formal part of any panel discussions. The one mention of it from a panel denied that the Internet was having an important impact in South Korean politics . . . [snip] . . . the campaign by Roh Moo Hyun for the Presidency of South Korea in 2002. Korean Netizens had created online fan clubs for Roh to discuss what to do about the political problems in South Korea. They created online forms like OhmyNews and utilized technologies like text messaging. The Korean netizen movement had succeeded in making it possible for Roh to win the Presidency . . . [snip] . . . Is it possible to learn from the experience of the Dean campaign in the U.S. and the Roh campaign in South Korea to understand what online forms can be helpful in a political campaign challenging corporate and other forms of entrenched power?

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