Call for Participation
Democracy Technology Online Conference 2005 (DTECHCON)
http://intelligentdesigns.net/Democracy
Bringing together innovators who create participatory technology, in a neutral forum.

There is no doubt that participatory technology (blogs, wikis, online voting, forums, social networking, and so forth) is changing the world. Can it be used to bring about fundamental changes in democratic societies and to enable regular citizens to participate in the democratic process? Is direct democracy becoming a realistic option?

This first online conference seeks to bring together developers and visionaries who believe in that possibility. It is held on the IRC channel #worlddemocracy on irc.freenode.net and currently scheduled for Saturday, November 26, at 20:00 UTC. You can use http://worldtimeserver.com/ to convert this into your local time.

Goal

Our primary goal is to bring together people who may not be aware of each other’s work in the field of participatory technology. Thus, the conference provides participants with a forum to shamelessly advertise their projects, to answer questions and criticisms, and to simply network with others who are interested.

“Speakers”

Participants can simply edit this wiki page:

http://intelligentdesigns.net/Democracy

to register in one of the available presentation slots. Those not interested in presenting a specific project are welcome to attend. Presenters should have personal experience with participatory technologies, preferably as developers.

How to conduct an online presentation

How do you present a project on IRC? Why not just let people read up on it online? There are two immediate benefits to an online presentation: interaction and reaching a known group of people simultaneously.

Hence, any IRC “presentation” should be more of a conversation, with you, the presenter, giving background, providing links where appropriate, and answering questions. For this reason, there are no separate “discussion” slots as would be typical in a conference presentation — the presentations are the discussions. Be ready to take questions at any time, and as a “listener”, be ready to interrupt the speaker freely to ask questions.

Have a set of URLs handy, preferably not requiring user accounts. A URL should be immediately understandable. Taking some screenshots of a working system may be better than asking attendees to explore it on their own.

Neutral ground

The website through which this online conference is organized, intelligentdesigns.net, is an open wiki for sharing ideas. It is not associated with any organization or leading personality. The IRC network, freenode, also has no such association. Presenters need not worry that this is an attempt to co-opt them for a particular organization, effort, strategy, or website — it is simply an open forum.

Questions?

If you have questions, please leave them on the wiki talk page:

http://intelligentdesigns.net/Talk:Democracy

This conference is deliberately a largely nameless process. It was conceived by journalist and author Erik Möller (moeller AT scireview DOT de). If you have technical questions, you can contact Erik directly.

Spread the word!

Please spread this document to anyone who you feel may be interested in participating in this venue. This announcement is in the public domain.

Formatted for easy copy & pasting into emails, etc.