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The Internet can be a powerful medium for politicians to get their message across but it is also a vital means for civilians to have a say in what politicians do, participants in a political technology conference said Saturday.

Speakers at the Personal Democracy Forum in Barcelona highlighted President Barack Obama''s election as an example of how the Internet was affecting politics.

"It''s safe to say that Obama would not be president today if it had not been for the Internet,'''' said Scott Heifferman, co-founder of hugely successful U.S.-based Meetup Internet platform, which enables people to organize in local community groups.

“Besides using it to raise money, Obama knew how valuable it was to get people organized and spread support,'''' Heifferman told the conference of 400 political activists, consultants, journalists, academics and bloggers from Europe and the U.S.

The Personal Democracy Forum, or PDF, has held six similar conferences annually in New York.

Founder Andrew Rasiej said technology is changing civic society.

"What we discovered is that technology is giving power to ordinary people who can organize themselves using new tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to have an impact on the political process and to petition governments to be more responsive to their everyday needs,'''' he said.

The conference comes at a time when more and more people are using the Internet to have their say. Examples include simultaneous global protests on climate change, democracy activists using Twitter in Iran or a French campaign against legislation that threatened to cut people''s Internet connection for downloading copyrighted material.

Rasiej said that during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, out of 1.5 billion viewings of YouTube videos which mentioned Obama or McCaine, only 150 million were videos produced by the candidates.

A keynote speaker was Joe Rospars of Bluestatedigital, the 28-year-old whizzkid who oversaw Obama''s Internet campaign that drummed up the support of 13 million people.

"The key to winning was developing a deep relationship with the supporters so that they could participate", Rospars told The Associated Press.

He said the idea came from Obama himself and stemmed from his background as a community organizer working in economically distressed areas in the south side of Chicago.

Rospars said Obama''s campaign showed the "Internet lowers the barriers for people to participate in the political process".

Other attendees such as Tom Steinberg, director of Britain''s mySociety.org, pointed out that it can also be enormously successful in more mundane issues.

He cited his Fixmystreet site where people bring public pressure to bear on local authorities to tend to complaints such as holes in roads or broken pipes, petitions he says might otherwise might get lost in the labyrinth of bureaucracy.

Ellen Miller, of Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, spoke about how with very simple Internet tools her NGO is successfully battling to get millions of documents on how U.S. electoral campaigns are funded available to the public online with the aim of greater transparency.

"It sounds ridiculous in a democracy but there is a tradition of keeping the information close at hand because politicians understand information is power", she said.