It's also about democracy.

A yearlong series of conferences at Virginia colleges and universities beginning this week takes inspiration from the idea that America's representative democracy got its start at Jamestown nearly 400 years ago.

Officials planning the "Foundations and Future of Democracy International Conference Series" hope the scheduled college events will contribute to thinking about democracy and, at the same time, link Jamestown with representative government in everyone's minds.

"You can call it education. You can call it branding," said Frank B. Atkinson, chairman of the Jamestown 400th Federal Commission.

Atkinson said the conference series will "educate people about Jamestown's legacy and, in the current parlance, brand Jamestown as being especially relevant to what's going on in the world today."

The series will formally begin tomorrow night at the University of Virginia with the opening of a four-day International Youth Democracy Summit and a speech by Karen Hughes, the former political adviser to President Bush who now serves as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.

The conference will be the first of at least nine events dealing with different aspects of democracy's past and future, and culminating with a three-day "World Forum on the Future of Democracy" next September at Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary.

Atkinson said last week that the federal commission has planned the series to complement the events that Jamestown 2007, a state agency, has organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's establishment in 1607 as the first permanent English settlement in America.

He compared the final democracy conference to America's 400th Anniversary Weekend, the grouping of ceremonies, performances and celebrations scheduled for May 11-13 on a large tract of land near Jamestown.

"They don't compete with each other, they complement each other," Atkinson said. The democracy forum "looks forward rather than backward."

While the federal commission will be a major host and sponsor of the final forum, the earlier forums have organized and sponsored, under the commission's guidelines, by the individual colleges and partners recruited by them.

Each conference is designed to occupy a different niche in the discussion of democracy, and the proceedings of each one will be discussed and amplified at the final conference.

"We basically wanted to bring together a lot of leading thinkers and doers of democracy," Atkinson said.

Atkinson said the event will continue a tradition of past Jamestown commemorations by emphasizing one of the most important themes of our times. He said the number of democracies has grown in the past three decades from 40 to more than 120.

"Now about half of the world's people live in democratic systems," he said. "The seeds were sown for this global advance of democracy at Jamestown."