Puppet Slam 2008

I haven’t seemed to muster the energy to write about my experiences at the Personal Democracy Forum last week. This is odd, because I took copious notes during the entire event, tried to lock as much as I could in my memory, and do the very best job I could of meeting people despite not knowing a single solitary person at the conference and not working in any way remotely connected to politics! I owed it to the friends and family who helped pay my way there to make the absolute most of my time at it.

Maybe my lack of posting on it is burnout—from the conference, and all the rest of the stuff I’m doing now as a result of it. Rest assured, I am trying to make sure the conference was concretely worthwhile, and am actively pursuing, every day, a number of ideas and motivations that have arisen recently. I’ll be making a trip to DC later this month to continue my pursuit, and in the meantime I’m paying way more attention to places like OpenCongress and other projects spawned off of the Sunlight Foundation. OpenCongress seems by far to be the most successful project they’ve funded, as searching for any bill number puts them on the first page of Google results, and some of their pages have a simply absurd number of comments. I’m really impressed by the design, scope, and simplicity of the site.

Also, I added ridiculous charts to ohnomymoney, so, you know, go review my financial history since May if you want. See if I care.