Personal Democracy Forum kicks off Monday in New York. This will be PDF’s sixth event, with this year's theme being "We.gov,” as in all the ways that we, the people are using technology and new media to transform politics, campaigns, media, governance and civic action. This is one conference I never miss willingly (I think I've only missed one!) and I'm honestly not that much of a conference-goer. I think of it as my annual "brain food." I can't wait.

A “two-day tech + politics brainfest” is how Tim O’Reilly described PDF last week.  PDF will be tracking the state-of-the-art online politics, exploring government 2.0., looking at the new tools for organizing that are being used, as well as looking at the future of political journalism, blogging and networked media.

I’m excited to see old and new friends, many who are keynote speakers. A radically truncated list includes emerging technology expert (and Sunlight board member) Esther Dyson; senior fellow at Demos and PDF senior editor Allison Fine; now-former Washington Post “White House Watch” blogger Dan Froomkin (Dan posted his last earlier today…A must read!); New York State Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin (I blogged about him earlier today); journalism prof and Buzzmachine.com blogger Jeff Jarvis; Obama administration CIO Vivek Kundra; Craigslist founder (and Sunlight board member) Craig Newmark; law professor Beth Noveck; “Here Comes Everybody” author Clay Shirky; campaign re-inventor Joe Trippi and “The Cluetrain Manifesto” co-author and blogger David Weinberger. Really there are too many good people coming and speaking to mention

Congratulations, in advance to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, PDF’s co-founders, and Sunlight’s senior technology advisors. It’s going to be a very exciting couple of days.

Maybe you can join at the last minute.

My good friend Allison Fine has an interesting post about the “power and limits of storytelling” via social media on her blog. As an example of best practices, she also embeds this cool video about telling the story of Red Riding Hood with social media:

Social media obviously us the ability to tell stories in more visual and powerful ways, allowing us to more adroitly communicate our messages. Allison lists YouTube, human rights advocates at Witness and National Public Radio as examples of folks using video effectively to tell stories. She also highlights the work of Andy Goodman, a longtime advocate (and another very good friend!) for using storytelling for causes.

Allison cautions how advocates need to be careful, however, not to let powerful stories drown out the real message they are trying to communicate. “It’s easy to listen to the loud voices because they’re, well, loud, but much harder to listen to the quieter ones who probably represent the norm of the experience with your effort.”