#pdf13

On June 6th 2013, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York I joined Alex Fowler, Sasha Romanosky and Sharon Bradford Franklin for a panel on "Battling Big Brother", moderated by Andrew Rasiej. Full program of the conference, and speakers, available here. 

I took this opportunity to note that the ubiquitous notion of cybersecurity didn't mean much, and that we needed to shape what cyberpeace looked like. I will be working on this notion more in the months to come, and will of course share the work as it takes form. Rod Beckstrom (former President & CEO of ICANN, and founding Director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity Center) was kind enough to quote me about cyberpeace in his afternoon talk about cybersecurity (full talk video here), and I have received many emails with ideas and suggestions for shaping cyberpeace: I am glad that this concept triggers people's curiosity.

Alex Fowler

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 Andrew Rasiej & Sharon Bradford Franklin

Sasha Romanosky & Andrew Rasiej 

We are now facing a huge bravery shortage. And it's a bravery shortage because we have the tools to go start a conference, a newsletter, a community, a tribe. We have the tools. We have the tools to connect people, to speak up, to start a movement, to make these long arc democratic changes and we are not using them....When there's a fork in the road you need to take it. You don't have the choice to ignore it. You either have to say: I will do nothing about this. Or you can pick yourself and say: sure I can do this, I don't need cash or permission or authority...figure out the people whom I need to influence. I can't buy them but I can influence them by building connections, by building a network around what I want do. 

"F U, like I 'finally understand.'" - Shaka Senghor, 2013 MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow, explains that "tech deserts" need as much publicity as "food deserts" in public policy and social justice discussion.

Shaka's call-to-action is clear - he challenges us consider how the jail and prison systems are tech deserts. He envisions a world where the formerly incarcerated can re-enter society without lagging behind in understanding basic technology tools and in fluency of the digital world.

This was a unique talk at PDF13. Shaka detailed personal anecdotes of his transformation from prison. Shaka had been recommended by Joi Ito, another PDF13 speaker, to share his story, "Breaking Out of the Tech Desert."

"Keep interneting hard" - Rachel Weidinger, Director at Upwell.

Rachel joined the Tumblr fellows at PDF13 for a chat during lunch time on Day One of the conference, and we were enthusiastic to welcome her. She shared details on how she leads online campaigns for her client: the ocean. There are hundreds of conversations that she and her team monitor regularly from Shark Week to overfishing. 

Check out Rachel's talk, "When Sharks Attach, Jump Into the Water," and learn about her work which includes sharkinars, social media analytics, and helping people "surf" conversations on the internet. 

#PDF13 gave its attendees a glimpse into our future world. We learned about Singularity University, a new educational institution designed to prepare students to tackle real-world problems.  A variety of civic startups demonstrated how data can be uses to dramatically improve the provision of social services to the most disadvantaged members of our communities. Advances in technology and medicine will allow us to constantly monitor our bodies and intervene when we are about to fall ill. 

Despite the promises of technological progress, the problems we will face in this "new world" are old ones. Kimberly Bryant's talk reminded us that we still need to work on creating inclusive communities where women and minorities are not left behind. Panels on technology policy proved the age-old question on what is the proper role of government will never go away.  We are trying to discover how staid institutions, like government and universities, can adapt to our changing world.  

There are many reasons to be optimistic. From the speakers to the attendees, there appeared to be a real desire to tackle these problems.  Everyone appeared to be interested in forming private-public coalitions and reaching out to some of their political opponents to begin working on solutions.  This desire to cooperate is perhaps more exciting than all of the gadgets and software that we can create. 

Dan Whaley, speaking now at #PDF13, is the founder of Hypothes.is, a non-profit platform for organizing and peer-reviewing the world's knowledge.

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.