… I’ve not stopped blogging! I’ve just been really swamped and having my intellectual batteries recharged.

Frankly, I’ll admit they were feeling flat, but I got some really juicy posts I’m mulling over. In the mean time I’m just trying to catch up on life – it’s been an exciting 7 days. Here’s a list of what I’ve seen/been up to with lots of links to great people and wonderful orgs. Feast on the great people to great things in the world – I know I have!

I spent the weekend at FooCamp – a gathering of the Friends of O’Reilly – where I hosted sessions on “Why is there no Open Data in Open Source communities?” with old friend and Wikimedia Metrics lead Diederik Van Liere, “The End of the World: Will the Internet kill the State or Will the State Kill the Internet” with Vivek Kundra and then “How to Negotiate with Someone and Stay Friends” on my own. All the sessions had amazing participants but, of course, the real renewal came from other peoples’ sessions and the great conversations that happened all over.

From there it was a red eye flight from SFO -> JFK and taxi straight to the Personal Democracy Forum. If you’ve never been to PDF I highly, highly recommend it. Great speakers on the dangers and opportunities that arise around the intersection between technology and politics. Van Jones, Susan Crawford, Todd Park, Cheryl Contee, Masha Gessen and many others gave great talks.

Thanks to the generous support of the Omidyar Network I also moderated a panel on the Open Government Partnership (OGP) with Juan Pardinas from the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, Marko Rakar a Croatian OGP committee member, John Wonderlich from the Sunlight Foundation, and Caroline Mauldin from the State Department. The conversation balanced opportunity with criticism and, we had great comments from audience members like Anne-Marie Slaughter, and most interestingly, the room was packed. I thought a topic as technical as the OGP would only gather a small audience, but could not have been so wrong. Finally, Mozilla had an interesting sessions with Beth Novak, Clay Shirky and Mark Surman on teaching hacking as a way of building citizenship skills.

Following PDF on Monday and Tuesday I headed over to the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday to give a small luncheon talk and do a panel with Warren Krafchik of the International Budget Partnership. Title: Innovations for Open Government: Can Transparency Promote Accountability, Equity, and Economic Inclusion? the speedy team at the council has already posted an audio recording which you can listen to here. Very grateful to Terra Lawson-Remer for inviting me to come speak and for the engaging audience who prompted Warren and I with great questions.

And, in the midst of all this, I’ve been joined in New York by my wonderful partner and our cute little son which of course, means that I’m being more father than blogger at the moment.

But, as I mentioned above all of this has gotten me renewed on a lot of different questions so am looking forward to blogging about all of this in the near future. I apologize for the scarceness of blog posts of late. Trust me, it won’t last long!