At dinner the night before this conference, I sat by Micah Sifry and Dave Weinberger and we were talking about the challenges of collecting what a large-scale constituency thinks and distilling it in a usable way. In online dialogue and online advocacy, we obsess about how best to sift through thousands of messages from thousands of people and derive priorities, consensus and strongly-held views. AmericaSpeaks has a process they call "theming" for their face-to-face town meetings, in which a team of real people reads a raw feed of notes from meeting participants and creates a real-time report back to the larger group. There's tremendous power in seeing what you say and feel reflected back to you and knowing that there are others who feel similarly. But it often remains hard to see how that emergent opinion can escalate into the hands of decision-makers and directly influence policy. The decision-maker audience…

Posting wireless from the rooftop bar at Soho House, swank location of the dinner kicking off tomorrow's Personal Democracy Forum. Hubbub of the sound system, view of the new Gansevoort Hotel... Preparing to send the next newsletter for our Peace Building Dialogues. Next to me, checking mail, Sanford Dickert, erstwhile CTO of the Kerry campaign. I called him "Sandy." Annoyed with myself. Okay, and Dennis Quaid just walked in. Sheesh.

I never thought Dean would be the nominee, but the little excerpts from his Portland, Ore. appearance with John Kerry remind me that I miss his pith and passion. Compare Dean's jabbing, upbeat style to the oratorical circumspection in Kerry's quotes. Just makes me wish for a little bit o'Clinton or Buchanan in the mix. Yes, I said Buchanan. If you've got someone pithier and punchier, feel free to let me know.