The Personal Democracy Forum has published a free eBook called Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age. It’s full of great little essays by such luminaries as David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold and Jeff Jarvis.
Well worth downloading and having a read. I’m going to be looking to see what we in the UK can learn from it. My guess? A lot.
Update: Tom Watson blogs about it here.
Interesting article on TechCrunch about the Personal Democracy Forum taking place in New York next week:
It’s also time for more industry leaders to push politicians to take a more forward-thinking approach to how government distributes public information. We hear a lot these days about how the internet is affecting the election, which PdF will cover from every conceivable angle, but in some ways it’s far more important to look at how we can start rethinking how government works, and how it can more effectively connect with American citizens to help solve problems. PdF is expanding to two days this year to devote a whole day to this issue, and my guess is that come 2009, we’re going to have an administration (either Obama or McCain) that is more open to trying to use the tools of the social web-blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing, etc-to open up governance.
More evidence of the increasing overlap between the tech communities and the eGovernment/eDemocracy crowds – something that has recently been discussed on the UKGovWeb list as we plan another Barcamp-style event.