SCHEDULE OVERVIEW

Here is the current schedule for Saturday June 27th and Sunday June 28th.  We are using an adaption of the open space method, which means that most sessions will not be scheduled in advance.  Instead, attendees may chose to become presenters, and can claim any empty spot in the schedule.

Some of the sessions have been scheduled in advance, though even these are subject to change.  Some presentations are being webcast.  This is available at livestream.com/pcamp and livestream.com/pcamp2.

{SCROLL DOWN FOR FULL SESSION DESCRIPTIONS}

PRESENTATIONS AND WORKSHOPS

Not all of the sessions will be planned in advanced, but we’re reserving some spaces for individuals who we know are doing interesting and important work on participation.

MARK ELLIOTT, COLLABFORGE

At CollabForge, Dr. Elliott has led several successful public engagement projects for government agencies and NGOs in Australia.  These include 2008’s Future Melbourne project, the world’s first city plan to be developed in a wiki.  His methods are based on his pathbreaking doctoral research, in which he developed a comprehensive framework for understanding mass collaboration.  More about Mark Elliott.

Mark will lead a presentation on engaging citizens in collaborative planning and policy-making using participatory tools and methods.

GALE A. BREWER, NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL

As Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, Councilmember Brewer recently proposed comprehensive legislation for making New York City’s public data accessible and machine readable.  She will host a discussion at Participation Camp on Saturday at 2:30 pm to discuss this legislation and get feedback from the open government community and interested citizens.

The bill, Introduction No. 991, can be read in full here.

THOMAS LOWENHAUPT, CONNECTING.nyc

Learn how the dotNeighborhoods – astoria.nyc, chelsea.nyc, flatbush.nyc, riverdale.nyc etc. - that will open in 2011 will help council members stay on top of neighborhood developments and connect with voters. Thomas Lowenhaupt, founder and chair of Connecting.nyc Inc.,  the not-for-profit that’s guiding New York to imagine a .nyc TLD (like .com and .org but just for New York City) developed in the public interest, will present. Thomas was vice chair of Queens Community Board 3 in 2001 when it approved the Internet Empowerment Resolution calling for the acquisition of the .nyc TLD.

PETER CORBETT, iSTRATEGY LABS

As CEO of iStrategy Labs, Peter Corbett was the creative force behind Washington D.C.’s hugely successful Apps for Democracy contest.  By engaging the software developer community in a contest atmosphere, he turned a $50,000 municipal investment into $2,300,000 in civic applications.

In his workshop, Peter will briefly discuss the innovative “cradle-to-grave” approach they’re using for the second installment of their contest.  Then he’ll facilitate a discussion on how we can continue to effectively engage the technology community in building a better democracy.

STEVEN CLIFT, e-DEMOCRACY.ORG – {virtual presenter}

Steven Clift, founder of e-democracy.org, is a pioneer of online participation in democracy.  Starting with the world’s first election information website in 1994 in Minnesota, today e-democracy hosts local issues forums in 15 communities across three countries.

Steven will host two virtual sessions at PCamp.  The first is an open brainstorm on building online participation at the neighborhood level.  The second is an extended Q&A e-democracy’s 15 years of experience, tailored to participants who are new to the field.

MARY JOYCE, DIGIACTIVE

Mary Joyce is the co-founder of DigiActive, an all-volunteer organization facilitating grassroots digital activism, and was the Manager of New Media Operations for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.  Her session, entitled “Citizen Participation in a Networked World”, will explore the ways that citizens can influence policy based on the collaborative powers of social media, working from international examples.  She will also join Gaurav Mishra in a session discussing the efficacy of social media activism.

GAURAV MISHRA, VOTEREPORT.IN – {virtual presenter}

Gaurav Mishra is the founder of 20:20 Web Tech, Votereport.in, and a leader in India’s Gov2.0 scene.  Joining us all the way from India, he and his partner Selvam Velmurugam (joining from Seattle), will give an in-depth look at both the votereport.in project and the gov2.0 ecosystem in India.  She will also join Mary Joyce in a session discussing the efficacy of social media activism.

TIM HWANG, THE COOPERATION PROJECT

From 4Chan to Facebook, Tim is an expert on the intricate mechanics of online participation.  He now works as a researcher at the Cooperation Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  Tim is also hilarious.  He organizes ROFLcon.

He plans to speak about the potential for gaming open government data.

MARK BELINSKY, OPENMYCITY

Mark serves as director of Digital Democracy, but at PCamp he will lead a session on the OpenMyCity project.  The goal of OpenMyCity is to find the best ideas about how to make use of municipal open data by asking citizens and organizations to answer a simple fill-in-the-blank question: “If I knew ___, I could do ___.”

OpenMyCity is backed by a coalition that formed around the Pioneers conference that took place recently in New York and Amsterdam.  At PCamp, Mark will lead a workshop to build a plan for capturing as many stories as possible.  This effort provides a human component to the technological and legislative efforts already happening around municipal data.

CATHERINE WHITE, ITP

A former lawyer from London, now an ITP student and Berkman Center intern, Catherine White conducts research at the intersection of technology and democracy.  Her work on the “noisy idiot” problem suggests that there’s a lot of work to be done if we’re to succeed at building a participatory democracy.  In online forums, some “noisy idiot” inevitably pollutes the discussion and ruins the enterprise for all.  Catherine will analyse the problem, explaining why solutions have failed so far, and will engage the group in search of new answers.

SHIFTSPACE §

ShiftSpace is an open source layer above any website.  Users can create a “shift” on any web page – leave a note, change the images, or even edit the source code – which any other ShiftSpace user can see.

The ShiftSpace team will lead a critical discussion on how citizens can interface with government using the web, highlighting some of their own experiments in this arena.

DEVENDRA KUMAR PUNIA, FORE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT – {virtual presenter}

Dr. Punia is an associate professor at the Fore School of Management in New Delhi, India.  He has been involved with e-government research and practice for the last ten years.  Recently, he led an e-governance project in the revenue sector for the district administration. The question of using open source versus proprietary software was dealt with in a peculiar manner. Similar efforts in other states have yielded varying results, and the feasibility and use of open source is a big question mark for the citizen-oriented projects. Dr. Punia will share his experience of leading an e-governance project using open source software.

VANESSA SCANFELD, MIXEDINK

MixedInk’s collaborative writing platform enables thousands of citizens to weave their best ideas and language into a single comment, letter, policy, rule, or bill.  It combines the wiki concept with a Digg-like community rating system. The White House Open Government Initiative invited the public to help craft a set of collective recommendations for making executive branch agencies more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.

JIM GILLIAM, WHITEHOUSE2 & ACT.LY

Jim Gilliam is a geeky activist with big ideas. He created act.ly, a Twitter application for petitions, and shortly before the 2008 election, he started White House 2, a website imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet. He is currently turning this into NationBuilder, a platform anyone can use to bring democracy to their government, business or non-profit in a radical and fun new way.  Before that, he co-founded Brave New Films with Robert Greenwald, grew it to a million members, and produced four documentaries.  His blog, Make the Future, is at jimgilliam.com.  He’ll discuss either act.ly or NationBuilder, depending on what people want to hear about.

STEF VAN GRIEKEN, NEW VOTING FOUNDATION – {virtual presenter}

Stef will give a presentation about the use of electoral compasses to identify key candidates for parliament in the Netherlands. The application matches candidates to voters based on the party program’s and individual political views. The success of these tools have been enormous in the Netherlands. Currently, for the parliament elections about 65% of the Dutch used a tool to find their favorite political party/candidate.

MARC LOPEZ, NUESTRACAUSA

A veteran of Catalan politics, Marc will present on his latest project, NuestraCausa.  It is a network and a platform of projects about collaboration between governments and citizens.

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ED PASTORE, METAGOVERNMENT – {virtual presenter}

Ed will deliver a talk entitled “Making Direct Democracy Practical”.  This presentation outlines the drawbacks of representative democracy in various contexts; and explores the historical criticisms of direct democracy, which has proven incapable of supplanting representative systems. It then details several emerging projects which are actively working to overcome the limitations of direct (or otherwise more inclusive) democracy by applying sophisticated web technologies. The finding is that massively-participatory democracy is not only practical but most likely inevitable.

JOHN DUMBRILLE, GREENSANDBOX – {virtual presenter}

A former Greenpeace activist, John Dumbrille writes technical documentation and presentation materials for MonkeyMedia Software. This spring he co-founded bowegover.ning, a project for transparent governance in his local community. In his talk, “Unbundling Governance”, he will discuss the concept of self-governance, and why an independent, grassroots approach is important.

GABRIEL FLACKS, NEWSACTIVIST – {virtual presenter}- -

Gabe, a teacher at Champlain College in Montreal, Quebec, will give a talk entitled “Teaching Participation: the Newsactivist Curriculum“.  A few years ago, Gabe started to experiment with the idea of linking news stories to actual actions that individuals could take make a change.  This idea evolved over time into  a curriculum for his college students.  Based on the Ning platform, NewsActivist provides a simple recipe for any teacher that wants to teach citizen journalism and civic participation.  The program, which culminated in each student actually engaging with and volunteering for a cause of their choice, shows us to how we can teach the next generation to make civic participation an integral part of their lives.

GAMEPLAY AND COLLABORATION

At Participation Camp, we’re creating opportunities for real hands-on participation and deep involvement beyond the standard conference session.

COLLABORATIVE SCULPTURE

The centerpiece of PCamp will be a sculpture designed entirely by our participants:

We’ll supply the ping pong balls, the glue, and a space.  The rest is up to you.  What will emerge?

NOMIC

Gameplay helps us think differently about participation.  Since we’re focused on democracy, we thought that Nomic would be a good fit:

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.

—Peter Suber, the creator of Nomic, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362.

You can learn more about the many variations of Nomic on Wikipedia.  We’re designing a version that will fit the timetable of the conference, and will equally engage physical and virtual participants.

Can’t wait? Join the warmup game in progress now.

OPEN 311 CODE SPRINT

Throughout PCamp, ITP’s workshop space will be open to collaboration on open government Internet applications.  On Saturday, we’ll hold a sprint focused on Open 311: an initiative to make municipal data more readily available to programmers who want to make useful applications.  Philip Ashlock from The Open Planning Project will help coordinate development of Open 311 related projects in conjunction with Open311.org.  Peter Corbett, organizer of Washington D.C.’s ongoing Apps for Democracy Contest, will provide direction and best practices based on D.C.’s Open 311 API.  We also encourage contestants of Apps for Democracy to work together at PCamp, as their July 1st deadline approaches.

Interested developers should check into channel #open311 on irc.freenode.net.

On Sunday, the workshop will remain open for any projects that grow out of Saturday’s efforts and the

LINKCUBE

LinkCube is a pair of networked units stationed in linz, Austria and New york allowing people to take pictures together in real-time. Using real-time data exchange, the users, who are geographically distant, are presented on screen as if they were right next to each other. This closeness lets users get momentarily acquainted with other humans to whom they would not otherwise be exposed. What results is a set of playful interactions and the ultimate photographs serve as a tangible record of this memorable virtual experience.

One linkcube unit will be stationed at ITP throughout the conference.  Linkcube is part of the 80+1 project.