Our friends at Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) have launched an essay contest around the issue of Rebooting America: Democracy in the 21st Century, which is the name of an anthology of essays they are publishing on the topic. PdF will include the contest winner’s essays in the book that will include pieces written by leading thinkers and activists and citizens like you. They are publishing the book in conjunction with their Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York City. Contest winners will also receive complementary passes to the conference.

I’m honored to join the likes of Clay Shirky, Yockai Benkler, Susan Crawford, Beth Noveck, Craig Newmark, danah boyd, Scott Heiferman, Tara Hunt, Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, Howard Rheingold, John Bonifaz, Brad Templeton, Mike Turk, James Rucker, Morra Aarons, Patrick Ruffini, Lisa Stone, Joe Trippi, David Weinberger and others in offering ideas on how to reinvent democracy in America using the Internet and Web 2.0. Here is what the folks at PdF are asking us all to respond to:

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

But PdF doesn’t just want experts to contribute to this project so they are asking their readers and the general public to submit their own ideas. Plus, they are also inviting people to read the various submissions and help decide which ones are worth including, by voting them up or down. It’s not a pure Digg model, Micah Sifry wrote me in an email, since PdF is going to make the final choices, but they are going to be paying close attention to that feedback loop.

Time is tight! Submissions are due May 1^st, and the book’s release date corresponds with the June 23-24 conference. The essays are not to be long, 800 to 1,500 words. You can get all the details here. Help us all reimagine democracy.

(Full Disclosure: Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej who run PdF are strategic consultants to Sunlight.)

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That’s what Micah Sifry, Sunlight’s senior strategic consultant and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum says today, about an E-Tech on a panel on "civic hacking" — online activists taking government data in its raw and user-unfriendly state, and making it accessible and helpful to citizens.

Sounds familiar.

The panel discussed a number of British sites launched by our colleagues at mySociety.org as well as the hacking of the UN at UNDemocracy.com, where you can now get easy access to the transcripts of the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council in structured formats, information that was previously very hard to get your hands on. Neat stuff.

"When an institution is broken," Micah writes, "more scrutiny can only help fix it."

Yup.

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Sunlight's senior strategic consultant, Micah Sifry, has a really nice op ed in the NY Daily News today, that pretty much summarizes my thoughts about CNN's YouTube debate two nights ago. (He has taught me well.) A big step forward BUT….

Imagine if the next time there's a presidential candidates debate on TV, you could go online to vote beforehand on which questions should be asked, and the top choices from the public were included in the mix. Imagine that during the debate you also could grade the candidates' answers, and see how your peers and the rest of the public were grading them, in real time.

Go even further, and imagine the debate's host turning to one of the candidates and saying, 'Hold on, senator. Three-quarters of the people watching right now on the Web have just said that they'd like you to go back to the question they just asked you, because they feel you didn't answer it at all.'

As Micah points out, all of this is possible now. Maybe with an initial success under its belt, CNN and others will go further next time. (If you missed the debate, check out TalkingPointsMemo's 10 minute video recap.) We'd certainly like to see some of this tried in some Congressional debates too.

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The Sunlight staff spent yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference (podcasts are available), a day well spent. After comparing notes this morning each of us came away with new information and new connections in the intersecting worlds of technology and politics. If you were there you know what I mean.

Probably best of all we had a chance to meet some of our colleagues (like Josh Koenig at Trellon who is principally responsible for this website) and Michael Bassik of MSHC Partners who designed our Congresspedia web ads. (We’d never met even though Michael’s office in just down the block from ours!). Alas, there were lots of folks there that I wanted to connect with, but didn’t have a chance, like Mike Krempasky of RedState.org, Rebecca Donatelli of Campaign Solutions, Joe Green of Essembly.com and Jerome Armstrong, but knowing that we were all there gives me the excuse to call them up — or email them –  to try to get together for coffee or lunch. And finally, there were some wonderful longstanding colleagues like David Donnelly, Allison Fine, and Nancy Watzman to brainstorm with about the future directions of Sunlight. All in all, quite the remarkable collection of people.

Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej are to be congratulated for this annual meeting.

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In the rush to our launch this coming Wednesday – stay tuned for how to call in to our telephonic press conference – I want to just take a moment to reflect on the extraordinary amount of strategic thinking and planning and real work product that has been undertaken in the 4 months since the Sunlight Foundation was incorporated. What we will be announcing on Wednesday – the awarding of grants to create new databases and our discussions about how to mash information together to make it even more robust, the launching of a Congresspedia, establishing three new blogs, our initial efforts in distributive journalism and on-line tutorials – is work that might have taken another organization a year to put together! Kudos to all of us.

But kudos especially to two key consultants to Sunlight – Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej. Micah and I have known each other since my days at Public Campaign where he served as a senior communications fellow. Andrew and I met later, and we always harbored an interest in collaborating in something big down the road. Sunlight is it!

Two years ago Andrew and Micah insisted that I come to the first Personal Democracy Forum conference (their third one will be held on May 15^th in NY.) It was literally an eye-opening experience.  Andrew founded the Personal Democracy Forum as a venue to explore the intersection of the world of politics and technology. Micah is its co-founder. Read their bios.

They have an extraordinary range of experience and they are, quite simply, extraordinary colleagues. Without them, what we hope will be Sunlight’s cutting edge approach to the uses of technology, would have been a longer time in coming, or perhaps, not even part of our plans.

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