Personal Democracy Forum (often referred to as PdF) is a website and annual conference that follows how the internet is changing politics, governance, and advocacy founded by Andrew Rasiej and co-Founder Micah Sifry.

Website

Personal Democracy Forum has over twenty contributing editors who track, report, and reflect on the newest trends of technology in politics. The sister website techPresident

Techpresident

techPresident is a nonpartisan political website founded by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry which tracks how the internet is impacting U.S. political campaigns. It was created in 2007 to monitor the 2008 United States presidential election...

followed how the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns utilized these new technologies and how these technologies are enabling citizens to affect the race.

Conference

The Personal Democracy Forum conference is an annual event held in New York City that began in 2004. The mission of the conference is to have political professionals, technologists, and non-profit executives educate each other on how technology is changing and what the future of democracy and advocacy looks like.

Notable speakers in the past include

• Vint Cerf
  Vint Cerf
  Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with American computer scientist Bob Kahn...
  
  
• Ana Marie Cox
  Ana Marie Cox
  Ana Marie Cox is an American author and blogger. The founding editor of the political blog Wonkette, she is currently the Washington correspondent for GQ and is The Guardian's lead blogger on US politics. She previously worked at Air America Media.-Early life:Cox was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico...
  
  
• Elizabeth Edwards
  Elizabeth Edwards
  Elizabeth Anania Edwards was an American attorney, a best-selling author and a health care activist. She was married to John Edwards, the former U.S...
  
  
• Mayhill Fowler
• Thomas Friedman
  Thomas Friedman
  Thomas Lauren Friedman is an American journalist, columnist and author. He writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East, and environmental issues and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.-Personal...
  
  
• Gilberto Gil
  Gilberto Gil
  Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira , better known as Gilberto Gil or , is a Brazilian singer, guitarist, and songwriter, known for both his musical innovation and political commitment...
  
  
• Arianna Huffington
  Arianna Huffington
  Arianna Huffington is a Greek American author and syndicated columnist. She is best known as co-founder of the news website The Huffington Post. A popular conservative commentator in the mid-1990s, she adopted more liberal political beliefs in the late 1990s...
  
  
• Lawrence Lessig
  Lawrence Lessig
  Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...
  
  
• Josh Marshall
  Josh Marshall
  Joshua Micah Marshall is an American Polk Award-winning journalist who founded Talking Points Memo, which The New York Times Magazine called "one of the most popular and most respected sites" in the blogosphere...
  
  
• Craig Newmark
  Craig Newmark
  Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...
  
  
• Douglas Rushkoff
  Douglas Rushkoff
  Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media...
  
  
• Robert Scoble
  Robert Scoble
  Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. He has three children; one from a previous...
  
  
• Joe Trippi
  Joe Trippi
  Joe Trippi is a long-time American Democratic campaign worker and consultant. A mainstay in presidential politics, Trippi has worked on the presidential campaigns of Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Dick Gephardt, Jerry Brown and most recently John Edwards...
  
  
• Eben Moglen
  Eben Moglen
  Eben Moglen is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, whose client list includes numerous pro bono clients, such as the Free Software Foundation....