Redefinition of the word PUBLIC

I’m at the Personal Democracy Conference in New York and after only one hour this seems very promising.This is the dream conference for tech, politics and media geeks. You can join in the conversation on Twitter at #pdf09 (at this point, 2538 tweets are written – a very talkative crowd, the biggest trending topic at Twitter right now, after Iran…) You can also check out this site to see who the most active Twitter people are. You can follow my tweets from the conference here.

The most interesting line so far in the conference came from Andrew Rasiej (one of the organizers) when he was moderating a panel with Joe Rospars (Obama’08) and Mark McKinnon (McCain’ 08) He said that the word PUBLIC (also meaning documents) must be redefined. “Public should be redefined as open to everyone – searchable, readable, accessible online.”

Excellent.

I hope lots of politicians, bureacrats, companies, organizations, etc will read and understand his words, and stop sending out datasets in PDF format.

The next challenge is to redefine the word PRIVACY, but that is another huge topic that I will have to leave for later.

I’ve started writing for the PDF blog, and my first blogpost is about Political geeks in Europe, take a look!