Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems to speak on "Open Source, Open Education and Eco-friendly: Can Sharing Improve Policy?" in Washington DC on 5/5.

We're thrilled to announce that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be keynoting this year's Personal Democracy Forum, joining New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in a one-on-one conversation on the flattening of politics.

We're hard at work pulling together this year's fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum conference, which will be taking place this May 18 at Pace University in NYC along with a participant-driven unConference on the 19th, and I'm pleased to share with you the emerging schedule for the main day. (Note: what follows is subject to change.)

I'm spending most of the week at eTech, one of O'Reilly Media's premier gatherings of technologists, that happens every year in San Diego. I have fond memories of attending this conference three years ago, when it included a special day on "Digital Democracy" focused on the emerging impact of the internet on the last presidential election. I'm not sure what I'm going to learn here, but I find it refreshing to get out of the political environment every now and then and talk with people who are used to making things that work, who take for granted that the systems they are working on will get overthrown every few years, and who know that the best ideas are probably being developed out on the edges, by some kids in a garage...

A couple of months ago I attended and spoke at the

Right now I am in Los Angeles at the Mobile Off-Deck conference. But this Friday I will flying up to Stanford University for the annual Mobile Persuasion conference where I will be speaking at 9:15am on a panel entitled "Big ideas in Mobile Persuasion: Changing our politics, our environment, and ourselves" where I am cited to speak about using mobile phones for social change and how that relates to "persuasion."
It should be interesting considering whenever I usually speak on this topic I normally talk about how Mobile is not a persuasion medium when it comes to politics. But since being asked to speak at the conference I have been thinking more about this issue lately.
If you are in the Palo Alto area stop by for what promises to be some really interesting conversations and presentations!

Save the date of May 18, folks, and make your plans to be in New York City, because this year the fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum is going to be our biggest and best conference yet. The theme this year is "The Flattening of Politics"--how the distance is rapidly disappearing between the people at the top and bottom of campaigns, political media and voter activism.

Yes, it's true, the site does look a bit different! (Hey, all you RSS subscribers, come take a look!)

A big thanks to everyone who worked on the site redesign: Josh Levy, our associate editor, who has sweated every tweak; Katherine Dillon and Kate Thompson of the design firm DillonThompson, who gave us our template; and Adam Mordecai, Aaron Welch, Neil Drumm and the other good folks at Advomatic who got under the hood and made it work.

Our goal with this design was to make the most dynamic part of the site, the PDF blog, more visible, and to add a new section of premium content focused on company reviews. While we were at it, we cleaned up the top navigation bar, which was getting a bit busy, and added a right rail series of "bits" that will allow us to highlight various standing features of the site, including the premium section, books we like, and the PDF Newswire, which features feeds from a bunch of other great political technology blogs. You'll also be seeing more about the 2007 PDF conference, starting with a big announcement next week.

Here is another interesting conference exploring the Mobile Web in developing countries. MobEA V- Mobile Web in the developing world will take place in Banff, Canada May 8th 2007 Collocated with the WWW2007 conference and is brought to you by the W3C and AT&T Research labs.

Aim and Scope

We are in the midst of a mobile revolution. Mobile Web Initiative spearheaded by W3C is making a strong stand on how to realize the vision of pervasive mobile computing. Services provided have to be adapted to the usersí wants and needs. To do this, we need to go beyond technology, and understand the human-centric aspects of mobile computing. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in emerging innovative applications for mobile users in the developing world. W3C has started a number of initiatives along the direction of Mobile Web Best Practices, Device Description Working Group, Device Independence Working Group and others.

Topics of interest for technical papers include, but are not limited to the following:

- Real-world projects relying on Mobile Web access in Developing Countries

- Key applications to leverage the development/use of mobile web in Developing Countries

- Analysis of the potential demand for data service / mobile web access in Developing Countries

- Regional differences in Asia/Africa/Central Europe/Middle East/South America/...

- Analysis of Mobile Web usage in Developing Countries

- Usage of Mobile Web technologies in emergency responses in rural areas

- Analysis on the way the Mobile Web could improve people lives in Developing Countries (education, healthcare,...)

- Challenges to make the Mobile Web really useful (not just usable)

- Analysis of the main value added of the Mobile Web vs. a mobile phone (voice only) vs. a computer in an Internet cafe? :

o Are cheap PC a competing platform to web-enabled phones ?

o Can a web-enabled phone play the same role in Developing Countries as the PC at home in Western Countries

- Role of voice and multimodal technologies/applications

- Technical challenges to have web-enabled phone being the alone/primary way to access the Web

o Content authoring from a mobile phone?

o Use of the mobile web as a tool of political activism

The topics of interest are particularly important for the Spring 2007 timeframe to align MWI with the users, the carriersí/operators deployment strategies and of course the application/service providersí.

Submissions will be solicited and all papers are subject to peer review. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two peers and their collective comments will be taken into consideration to decide paper acceptance. We will maintain a rather high level of importance on the technical feasibility of the proposed applications for a telecommunications carrier managed service or a premise-based enterprise deployment at large scale.

This conference will provide an international forum to discuss issues on emerging mobile applications both from a technical and business standpoint. The chosen mix of papers will attract a large community of mobile application providers. The targeted audience will range from developers and technical managers to business level executives, providing a good mix of talent.

Submission

Submissions will be evaluated according to the relevance and originality of the work and to their ability to generate discussions between the participants of the workshop. The format of submitted papers must follow the same style as regular WWW2007 papers, including no page numbers. You are invited to submit a full paper describing completed work (up to 5,000 words) or a position paper describing work in progress (up to 2,000 words) not to exceed 12 double spaced, 8.5 x 11-inch pages (including figures, tables and references) in 10-12 point font. Include an abstract, five to ten keywords, and the corresponding author's e-mail address. At least one author of accepted papers must register for the WWWí07 conference before the early registration deadline.†Registration information will be available at the conference web site: http://www2007.org

Submission Information and Requirements

Workshop submissions for WWW2007 workshops must be submitted via the workshop submission web site, http://www.easychair.org/WWW2007Workshops/

All accepted papers for all workshops will appear in the conference CD handed out to all conference attendees.

Workshop papers papers must be submitted as PDF documents. No other format will be accepted. It is the responsibility of all authors to produce PDF documents that can be read and printed on any platform. Please check to ensure that you can produce PDF documents well before the submission deadline.

Workshop papers can be prepared using either LaTeX or Microsoft Word, although using LaTeX is recommended. (Other document preparation systems can be used, but are not recommended and no assistance will be provided in the case of problems. Authors using other document preparation systems are responsible for producing output completely equivalent to that produced using one of the methods below.) If using LaTex or Microsoft Word, the following style files must be used for submission of refereed papers and poster papers:

Important dates

February 12th 2007: Submission of full and position papers

13th March 2007: Notification of acceptance

27th March 2007: Camera-ready copies due

May 2007: Workshop day (TBD)

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings

Previous MobEA proceedings

MobEA IV 2006

MobEA III 2005

MobEA II 2004

MobEA I 2003

Organizing Committee Members

Rittwik Jana - Senior Technical Specialist at AT&T Labs Research. He received a B.E degree in electrical engineering from the University of Adelaide, Australia, in 1994. He received a Ph.D. degree from the Australian National University in 1999. He worked as an engineer at the Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO), Australia from 1996 ñ 1999 and as a member of technical staff at AT&T, New Jersey from í99 to date. His research expertise falls in the areas of IMS and mobile TV services, mobile middleware platform design, wireless channel modeling and interference cancellation. He has served as a reviewer and a program committee member for numerous IEEE conferences and journals. He has also successfully organized four previous MobEA workshops at WWW, 2003-2006.

Daniel Appelquist Daniel K. Appelquist is a Senior Technology Strategist working for Vodafone's Industry Initiatives and Standardization team, focusing on Mobile Internet topics. He represents Vodafone in the W3C and in the Mobile Web Initiative which he helped create, and within which he chairs the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group. Before joining Vodafone, Daniel was a pioneer in the field of Web content, working with publishers in the mid-90s to put content online using SGML and XML. He is a published author, speaker on technology topics, evangelist, sometime CTO and dot-com refugee. Daniel also presented at MobEA 2005 and co-chaired MobEA 2006.

Affiliation:

Rittwik Jana
AT&T Labs Research
180 Park Ave
Florham Park, NJ, 07932
Email:rjana@research.att.com

Daniel Appelquist
Vodafone Group Services
The Connection, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 2FN
United Kingdom
Email:Daniel.Appelquist@vodafone.com

Technorati Tags: mobea v, www2007, paper, mobile, web

To my mind, RootsCampDC was ultimately successful at taking an idea developed by geeks -- an "unconference" lacking hierarchical structure, where the attendees are also the presenters -- and making it tangible for everyone, including non-techie political activists.

There were a lot of people there, over 300 (BarCamp and the other RootsCamps have had far fewer participants), but the conference was pretty smoothly run. The data geeks got to talk to the policy geeks over beers, people who would have otherwise had no forum for their ideas found themselves leading sessions (a fun part of the conference was the introductory session, when everyone introduced themselves; the more interesting people were greeted with shouts of encouragement to present), and the idea of a wikified approach to politics and organizing began to make sense to some people.