These things must be qualified though, right?

So I?m sitting in a sports bar.? Sports bars are particular entities of the bar world in that they have televisions with sports playing on them while they serve the spirits of the normal bar.? This isn?t to say that normal bars don?t show sports on their televisions.? It just means that they are normally called something that starts with ?Mc? and they have fewer televisions.

This particular sports bar has a sponsor.? It?s a Fox Sports Bar.? Not to be confused as Fox, sports bar.? But rather it is a Fox Sports, bar.

Like I said, these things must be qualified.? Also not to be confused with quantified, which would be to essentially count something.? And I?m pretty sure there is only one of me here and there is only one Fox Sports, bar present at this time.? But that could change depending on the terminal.

Ah, yes.? I?m in a terminal.? Not conditionally, but in the transitional sense.? In this case transferring myself to a plan, which has now been delayed two hours.? If you thought to yourself, ?Bummer,? it was an understatement because I was already two hours early to the original flight.

Bummer.

So I?m sitting in a Fox Sports, bar, that resides in a terminal that is a part of an airport for which I am awaiting a plane to board which will take me to Atlanta four hours from now.

I?m involved in all of this because I have recently, at the point of this writing, left the Personal Democracy Forum Conference of the year 2009.? Following day one of the event I was certainly frustrated.? There were a number of reasons for this.? For one, which I?ve already mentioned, I was beleaguered by the progressive presence.? Yes, we are all tech people at this conference and we all want to talk about the influence of tech on politics.? But there are certain things that, while all of that is true, tech people on the left and right just don?t see eye to eye.

For instance, I do not want network neutrality regulated. Period.? Tech proponents of such a step are short sighted.? Talk to someone who manages a large infrastructure.? They will tell you that network management of packet transfer must take place.? Good luck with the regulated network neutrality Internet when your whole neighborhood is trying to get time sensitive streaming 1080p video across your network at the same time and we have locked in regulation that will take ages to alter.? In the spirit of Monty Python, ?I laugh in your general direction.?? Is network neutrality important?? Absolutely.? I will not argue that point.? But regulated neutrality is an entirely different beast.

But I digress.

Panelists were over heard making the following comments:

?This is what we need to do to see ?progressive? health care reform.?

?We need to pray to god for a hot summer to make people believe that global warming is real.?

?The ?Bush? recession.?

Additionally all our problems were blamed on the Bush Administration.? Obviously our current problems are entirely his fault, along with Batman, Darth Vader, and probably God.

My point in bringing this up is that if the objective of PDF is to study the convergence of politics and technology, then let?s do that.? It doesn?t necessitate bringing ideology into the mix.

I honestly believe that is what Andrew Rasiej and co-Founder Micah Sifry are trying to do.

I in no way believe there is an underlying motivation of promoting the ideals of the left.? And with that being said, heaps of praise must be bestowed on these two gentlemen for their fine work in putting together this conference since 2004.? It is interesting to consider the timing of this conference and the swelling online that began in Summer last year for Obama.? One must consider if more conservative presence (as in the attendees) was existent at last years event, how that may have altered the online dominance of the left during the election.? I don’t want to be ignorant enough to give PDF complete credit for what occurred.? But if 1000 people left the conference, and each one told 10 people, and those 10 people told 10 people…? You could see how easily the ball gets rolling.

The conference, all things considered, was a wonderful treat.? One that I would not have experienced without the Google Fellowship and PDF?s recognition of the work my fellow authors and I have done on this site, which I am of eternal gratitude.

The conference provided tremendous insight into developing web presence, establishing a bond and communication with your audience, and tools that can over night transform a site from drab to dapper.? The information of connecting with constituency and remodeling government websites to better connect and be more transparent with the citizenry is vital to the success of government in general and additionally vital to the revitalization of the GOP and conservatism in general.

This is a conversation that I hope more conservatives take more seriously and can join in on in the future.? It is no secret that the left ignored talk radio early on and allowed the center-right to take a dominating lead.? One that is irrecoverable for the left, as multiple failed attempts with Air America make astoundingly clear.? It should be very becoming very apparent to the right that if they ignore the convergence of technology and politics in the same arrogant manner that the left did to talk radio that at some point the strangle hold in the areas of internet technology and constituency connectivity will equally be unrecoverable.

Show stoppers:

Best Moment: Finally hearing Tara Hunt explain live and in her own words what ?Whuffie? is.? Equally great was getting to finally meet Tara after spending months Twitting with her.

Worst Moment: As mentioned in a previous column, the final panel of day one with Josh Silver, Executive Director of FreePress, was unbearably one sided.? Conservatives question the positions of telecoms as well.? But with no one there to present the center-right view on the future of telecommunications with regard to Internet regulation and expansion, the debate was completely one sided and a slaughter fest for Silver.? My memory may not be entirely accurate, but at one point I believe he rolled them over and actually stuck a fork in the gentlemen from Comcast & AT&T.

My Jaw Dropped To The Floor And The Girl Next To Me With The Mac Had To Pick It Up For Me Award: Easily goes to Apture.? If you are running any sort of online content machine or blog and do not have this application installed you will without a doubt be left in the dust!? This app allows you to finally start linking to outside content without sending your readership away from your site, keeping them right where you want them to be; reading your material and clicking your ads.? If you haven’t noticed, it has already been seamlessly integrated into our site.

Most Fun Presentation: Michael Wesch, The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity.

Most Thought Provoking Presentation: Danah Boyd, The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.

I want to encourage more conservatives to take this intersection more seriously, and see them next year at PDF 2010.

Thanks for a great conference.? I was very happy to be a part of the conversation!

-nick

Six month from now things will be very interesting.? The first campaigns since the 2008 presidential race will begin cranking their engines.? It will be the first big test as well.? Letting all of us evaluate who “got it” after the last go round.

One has to understand that when they attend these sorts of events that there is certainly a goal of objectivity.? The reason for attending is to discover the areas in which politics and technology are intersecting.? How is technology, or possibly more specifically, the Internet changing politics?? Are these changes creating the evaporation of results from the previous models?? If so, how do we incorporate these new tools into our area of politics to create new successful models?? That’s what we are hear to discover.

The reality though is that people that are passionate about anything can’t keep it from seeping out even when they are trying to hold back.? There is nothing wrong with this.? I take zero issue with individuals who wear their heart on their sleeve.? At least it’s out there.

But at some point a balance issue develops.? If panels are mostly chaired by a certain orientation of political enthusiast, the point of view is always the same.? If the audience to which they are speaking is of the same enthusiasm, then they are preaching to the choir.? The cheers and hardly applause comes because of political orientation and alignment and not because all political technology enthusiast share the same goals.

We don’t.

Case in point was the fine display of two sheep being led on stage for the final panel of the day.? The sheep, in the form of two teleco representatives, had their achille’s slit so that they couldn’t escape and then were promptly ritually massacred by the Picadores Josh Silver.? Silver, well known in tech policy circles for avoiding any concerns or facts outside of his own talking points was suburb in his beat down.? I honestly couldn’t tell if the teleco reps were ill prepared or just trying to play the saint for the audience, the obvious antagonist.

But why was this happening?? Silver has a particular motivation and a goal, and not one with which all parties in the tech policy community would agree.? Why was no one with a differing point of view sitting on this panal?? Not to defend the telecos, but to ask questions from a differing foundation, or to call Silver’s bluff.? Where was Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or Adam Thierer who started Technology Liberation Front?? Where was Timothy B. Lee, CATO fellow and Ars Technica contributor? (Who in my humble opinion has hands down written the best scholarly explanation of network neutrality available.? Which is mighty humble of me, if I do say so, considering I’ve written on it myself.)

I did appreciate hearing the audience gleefully suck up every drop the FCC commissioner Blair Levin had to say; especially the part where he told us that they were creating a plan.? Really? The plan he is referring to of course is the National Broadband Strategy which comes due in February of 2010.? What hardly anyone knows though is that the US Department of Agriculture who has used the Rural Utilities Services (RUS) division to improve broadband distribution in the past has been awarded funds for distribution from the stimulus.? RUS plans to distribute its roughly $2.5 billion by September 30th, 2009.? The National Telecommunications and Information Administration?who received the bulk of the broadband stimulus funds?will hand out their dollars in three phases occurring Spring of 2009, Fall of 2009, and Spring of 2010.

Spend first, formulate your plan later, Mr. Levin?? Sort of seems counterproductive to planning at all.

Conservatives are boned at PDF 2009.? There is certainly not enough representation amongst panel members.? Some of this is absolutely not the fault of Personal Democracy Forum.? We are under a liberal Administration, and that administration appoints liberal bureaucrats.? An invite to Robert McDowell or Meredith Attwell Baker would have been nice.? Maybe they were invited, and turned it down.? This too is a possibility.? At least Cas Sunstein with his Fairness Doctrine-esque “electronic sidewalks” for the Internet isn’t present.

I’m not laying the wood to PDF.? Yes, from initial indications it doesn’t appear that the ideological sides are well balanced, and possibly they don’t know where to look.? The real trouble however is the attendees.

The Personal Democracy Forum doesn’t help conservatives.? Because conservatives aren’t there to be helped.

The numbers are simply overwhelming.? I’d guestimate that the attendance is somwhere close to one thousand.? I’d also venture to say that there are roughly five conservatives there.? And I’m incorporating the one libertarian I saw with a Ron Paul button.

I’m dismayed.

I know these folks are out there.? I’ve written about them.? So where are they?? After this past Fall why aren’t ogles of people from the right side of the aisle on Capitol Hill all over this event?? Did the speakers shy them away?? I don’t really think so.? I’m a strong conservative-libertarian, and have been for years.? And while there are a few people in the speaker list that irk me on the average day, I wouldn’t let them keep me from attending when the majority of lectures and panels are simply focused on an examination of content in some form, a discussion of getting content to an audience, or about tools to help you be more efficient and productive.

This is subject matter that conservatives need to hear.? Maybe PDF needs to market themselves more to conservative circles on the web?? Possibly all conservatives on the web are poor and couldn’t afford to attend?? It could be that conservatives don’t fit in with all the Apple fan boys present at the conference.? If there were more Dell owners then it might have been more balanced.

All thought provoking questions.

These are just initial reactions.? I’m sure I will be thinking more about it into the second day of the event as I look for reasons for the paltry representation.

Secretly though, I think the liberals in the crowd are ecstatic.? Why wouldn’t they be?? It’s like someone serving up a box of free gold to anyone who shows up at the box and takes the gold.? And only liberals are showing up, so they get to take home all the gold.

You can’t teach a dead dog new tricks.? And you certainly can’t expect to win a fight you don’t show up to.

Very much looking forward to Tuesday.

-nick