We love unconferences. What better way to have a discussion than an open format. The sponsors provide the markers and whiteboard, you sketch out the agenda and we go from there.

Open government? What can democracy look like in the 21st century? Countries like Egypt and Tunisia have used tech in radical ways to help foster revolution. Let’s tackle the day 1 issues as they transition into power, as well as planning how to make a more transparent, participatory and efficient government at home. The conversation is an open-to-all kickoff to the excellent agenda set for the the following days at Personal Democracy Forum 2011. It’s the best conference for politics + tech and you should absolutely come if you haven’t been.

On June 5, we’re looking to leave with a set of solutions – the best new programs, manuals, films, curriculum and other tools to empower civic engagement. Let’s build this resource together.

Register today for OpenGov Camp, or sign up to volunteer and help make the event possible!

Dennis Cahillane

Dennis Cahillane, Software Developer, writes open-source software to accomplish Digital Democracy’s goals. His first project for Dd was creating a secure gender-based violence database for use by our team in Haiti. His duties include information security, using PGP, SSL/TLS, and all available technologies to prevent remote exploits and attacks. Dennis is a lifelong Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He attended Indiana University, where he studied Math and Physics, and founded a Green Party student group. He then attended The University of Chicago Law School, where he studied intellectual property law and marriage law. While in law school, he clerked for a legal clinic aiding residents of low-income housing, and volunteered for the Obama ’08 campaign. After law school, Dennis practiced IP law in California, using his technical skills to analyze network routers and web-based recommendation engines. He enjoys traveling and has visited five continents. Follow him on Twitter LinuxFan2718 & PGP

Meredith Hutchison

Meredith Hutchison, Graphic Design & Photo Curation Intern, designs material for DD’s Project Einstein. She has worked as a photographer in Democratic Republic of Congo, building local media capacity in Kala Refugee Camp in Zambia, and is currently part of a consultant team evaluating land management and governance in Cairo. She is finishing her Masters in economic and political development at Columbia-SIPA and studied comparative literature at the University of Pittsburgh. Meredith is a steel-town girl proudly hailing from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter: @Merehutch

Ada-morena daCosta

Ada-morena daCosta, Development & Communications Intern, assists the Director of Development with research, database management, correspondence, and other administrative functions. Ada is a student at the Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School University (Summer 2011) concentrating in Media and Culture. As a member of the Association of International Development (A.I.D.), she played a leading role in organizing the first Food Security and Human Rights conference at The New School. She is currently creating a collaborative media project about Reel-Lives, a film-education workshop for marginalized, refugee and war-affected youth in hopes of demonstrating the significance of youth media programs and their relevance to human rights.

Ada has a passion and a knack for learning foreign languages– her most recent conquests are in Serbian and Arabic. She is interested in the intersections between communications, technology, human rights, social entrepreneurship, and development in post-conflict settings. She aspires to become a Communications Consultant. Follow her on Twitter: @Mangoleira

Phil Knerr

Phil Knerr, Software Development Volunteer, is contributing to our work in Haiti by assisting with a database project called Haiti Reporter that we’re implimenting and creating the ability offline syncing. Follow him on Twitter: @PhilKnerr

Liz Hodes testifies at NYC Council Tech Committee on Open Data

Introduction 029-2010, seeking to establish open data standards for all city agencies. Int. 029-2010 (formerly Intro. 991-2009) aims to increase government transparency and facilitate easier access to public data.

Beyond the ‘good government’ benefits of this legislation, the bill will also unlock City data to enable web developers and entrepreneurs to interact with City government in new and unforeseen ways. Data published under this legislation will be readable by any computer device, including laptops and phones, for innovative developments. This Gov 2.0 inspired transparency legislation targets application developers, startups, small businesses, and academics with the ultimate goal of strengthening the connection between government and the public, while re-energizing the small business-tech sectors and highlighting New York’s digital future.

You can read her entire testimony below. Please let us know your thoughts and ideas as we continue to push for open data as a crucial part of digital literacy in our schools and of democracy in the 21st century. For more information, please visit the New York Council Committee on Technology Blog or watch the video (Liz’s presentation begins at the 1:06:40 minute mark).

Digital Democracy’s NYC City Council Testimony – Council Tech Committee – Open Data / Int. 029-2010

But here in NYC, my task was to engage the kids in a conversation about what they’d like to see in the year 2020. Future Now is creating NYC’s Digital Storybook – a citywide youth  project about school, community, and  dreams. What better way to explore these themes than a mapping exercise  to literally add and remove items in their communities and on their streets.

Future Now Sponsors

Every 25 minutes, a different set of students filters through, listens to a short presentation and gets their hands on 3 computers, kindly supplied by us and Tekserve. Using a modified Ushahidi mapping tool with data overlayed from the NYC Data Mine, to give a real-life example of how opening government data can impact the lives of everyday New Yorkers and lead to a smarter city. In this case, I overlayed “Bike Racks” and “Low-Bridges”, as some of the only sets available in the Geo Data Catalog, but it proved effective. My example was built from bike racks, stating that in my vision of  the year 2020, gasoline would be expensive, the environment polluted, cars more scarce, and so encouraging the city to place a bike rack in front of my office would enable people to bike to work, making the city more peaceful, healthier and cleaner. Plus, if the government thought a bike rack existed where one didn’t, I could let them know about their error.

To make it personal, I then asked them what they would do if they knew how much money their school was getting compared to the neighboring school. Not only did that set off a flurry of ideas from the students, but the teachers got pretty excited as well. You can visit the website or see it embedded below to see their ideas. Of course their private information remains private.

Digital democracy has engaged with participatory collaborative learning around the world, and each context reveals new insights for culturally-specific programming. Our scavenger hunt model allows for a natural progression to the conversation and working in groups helps to ensnare the attention of more distractable youth.

“OMG kids are on Facebook!” is one of my favorite challenges. Two skateboarders had finished mapping the perfect place for a skatepark in their community ahead of the other students and got distracted, finding themselves wandering the internet. Instead of telling them to go back to our site, I told them that no other students had added a photo to their posting so could they find the best photo to go along with their post, to make it easier for a politician to see exactly what they had in mind. The hunt was on, and they indeed found a great photo, without another distraction. I keep reiterating that this is a key aspect to the model of 21st century education – information management. Can students find information that is going to add value to their post. Do they know whether it’s creative commons and how publicly it can be used. There are still many steps before getting to that point, but this is a start.

A few real problems did pop up. School in a park, Open Road Park to be exact, is beautiful, but makes it hard to work with too much tech. The one good projector was taken by the Google Team, which meant improvising on the fly. The bigger problem though, was spell-check. When students were entering in their main body of information, a line would show up automatically under misspelled words. Every time students would backtrack and try to figure out the right spelling. This happened so often that I estimate it took about twice the time to create each entry as it otherwise would have. In the places where there was no spell-check, like in the titles, the entries are littered with bad spelling.

Solar Flashlight & Kazoo

Our work confronts language problems head on, mainly working with visual media such as maps, photos, videos, etc that can allow people to connect beyond these barriers. It’s important to consider language barriers even with native English speakers as well. And in NYC, it’s even more complicated, with our students on Saturday being from places as varied as Tibet, Thailand, Congo, Madagascar and Brooklyn.

At the end of all the trainings with us World Up, Google, IDEO, friends we love, Toshiba, each student group was part of a performance. step, musical theatre, mapping, graffiti, gardening, accapella, and cheerleading. My favorite (I know I’m not supposed to say that), was the group showing off their solar panel creations. Their English wasn’t very good, as half were newly from Japan, but their tech was amazing. They hack solar panels into all sorts of things, whether a portable charger for the 3rd world, a flashlight, or a musical instrument that sounds like an electronic kazoo. “It’s very efficiency!” exclaimed one of the leaders of the project.

The diversity of skills, backgrounds and ideas reminds me how much I love this city. I just hope that we stop censoring it and start supporting more of these kinds of initiatives for a better future.

Thanks to the Department of Education and everyone who came together to make this possible, to Humanity in Action, Pioneers and Andrew Rasiej for the development of similar project connecting schools in Amsterdam and NYC called Open My City, to DJ Moni for letting us know about Future Now and to Jerri Chou for dropping the LES by to check us out.

See more pics on the NYC Department of Education’s Future Now Expo site.

Indonesian Journalists at Digital Democracy office

Not long into the conversation, Kristianto expressed that in Indonesia, citizen journalism is very lively but it’s the demonstrations that are a lot harder. A recent incident of accusations of malpractice against a hospital brought support from millions online but when it came to taking to the streets, only 8000 or so came out. We spoke a bit about all of our conceptions of activism, the role of information and the changing tides of “action” in a digital state.

Another concern was that in East Java, some Islamic organizations ban Facebook saying that it is against the religion and sometimes it goes so far as people being arrested for posting illegal material on the site, under libel laws. Part of a 21st century journalist’s toolbelt is not only knowing what sites exist that can help spread information, but also the consequences of harsher punishments. If information isn’t in a public forum, the conversations will often continue, but in a more dangerous space.

The conversation took a shift to the complications of working with different legal structures and the always important question of verification. Having just seen the Prachatai episode of DdTv, Herry mentioned that it seemed to him our philosophy was similar to a quote from Prachatai Editor Jiew, that “democracy is not the answer. It’s the path to find something.” It was exciting to hear him say that and really opened up a lively discussion on the continuing problem that many in Indonesia view US culture as either ” American Idol” or “Iraq War” and see much less of the innovation, creativity and community-led media that we were talking about.

Muhlis then chimed in that, “It seems ideology is no longer important. It’s about communicating and helping people and help themselves.” I couldn’t agree more.

Excitingly, it turns out that Kristianto is also the principal of a high school of 300 students in Lampung, who just received news yesterday that they will be getting an internet connection. He says that he wants the students to learn about the kind of democracy we’d been discussing. Hopefully we’ll be able to connect with him on that. I promised to bring bagels.

Indonesian Journalists at Digital Democracy office

Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate with Digital Democracy as we  turned one year old.

Digidem Party Flyer

Over 200 people came to eat, drink, and be merry at the Open Planning Project’s gorgeous penthouse & rooftop in Soho, NYC for a party highlighting young change-makers in NYC. Even more tuned in to watch LIVE as we streamed interviews with people, asking them how they are changing the world. Filmed on our new Nokia n97s, by interviewers Michael Morgenstern & Dan Latorre, you can check out 20+ short answers, or contribute your own below. Others still added to our Twitfall by tweeting in their own responses.

Presenting 1 year of work to an amazing crowd of supporters

Thank you to our sponsors: TOPP for the amazing space, Henry’s Restaurant, Sustainable Party, Medea Vodka, and Dr. Joel M. Spiro MD (and Park Ave Liquors), WOMWorld/Nokia. Thanks to media partners TBD and StartingBloc. Extra special thanks to photographer Annie Powers for the wonderful pictures , to Anthony Ina for the beautiful flyer design, and to DJ Blanche Dubois.

Remember: please drink & program responsibly.

Showing off the Twitfall & Mobiles for change