Mary Colvig mentioned this on the Monday Mozilla call, and I wanted to follow up with more information. Briefly, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the sponsors of the Personal Democracy Forum conference to be held June 29-30 in New York City. To quote from the conference blurb:
More than 1,000 top opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists will come together to network, exchange ideas, and explore how technology and the Internet are changing politics, democracy, and society.
As part of our PdF conference sponsorship we get a table in the exhibit area and some passes for Mozilla folks to attend the conference. If you’re interested in the intersection of the open web and government and politics and live in the NYC area (or can get there on your own), then I invite you to help staff the Mozilla table at this event. Your assignment: talk to the conference attendees about the mission and values of the Mozilla project (choice and innovation, the open web, the participatory Internet, etc.) and great Mozilla products like Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3. Your reward: a chance to hear some of the best speakers around talk about how politics and government are being changed by the web and the Internet, and participate in the discussion yourself.
I attended this conference last year, and it was a great experience. If you’re willing to commit to help us at the conference, please contact me (hecker -at- mozillafoundation -dot- org) directly before 12 noon EDT on Friday, June 12. (I have a deadline to turn in the names of our attendees.) Note that if I get more volunteers than passes then I’ll make a selection based on people’s past contributions to Mozilla combined with some sort of random lottery if necessary.