Peter Bradwell, Niamh Gallagher and I are representing Demos at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York. Larry Lessig opened the day, challenging us to think about how to give people ownership of their content, and what that means for politics. Tom Friedman and Eric Schmidt were the keynote conversation, talking about living in a flat googlised world, and Yochai Benkler told us about the democratisation of information production.

Most of the discussion has been about the 2008 campaign elections, but finally, in a session called ‘navigating the New Media System’ Jay Rosen, Walter Fields and others are starting to articulate range of activities that people are engaged in that are political, from journalism to posting photos of potholes in their neighborhood online. 

As Jay said, “when people participate, it causes them to search for information and causes people to think. Participation is good – the candidates might not think this way, but everyone around them should.” He also said “I want a blogger covering just Hilary’s hair during this campaign” – check out his new site offthebus.net (coming soon) to see if he gets his wish.

We’re going to keep blogging at the FYI project page

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