The DFA Netroots Nation Scholarship Program holds a special place in the collective heart of the Future Majority team. In 2008 Sarah Burris was a recipient, and Michael Connery and I were selected in 2009.

Netroots Nation is an amazing experience, and Democracy for America has been providing opportunities for progressives across the country who may not otherwise be able to attend to share that experience.

The first round of the selection process is now underway, and progressives interested in applying should do so as soon as possible and start recruiting supporters. DFA is seeking to send a diverse delegation of talented progressives to Las Vegas this summer.

This scholarship program requires the financial support of the progressive community. You can make a big difference for a progressive organizer by donating to the scholarship fund.

This is one of the best talent development programs in the country for progressives, so whether you are interested in applying for a scholarship or investing in the program, the time is now.

Submit an application for a 2010 DFA Netroots Nation Scholarship

Donate to the Netroots Nation Scholarship Fund

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During the Youth Caucus at Netroots Nation the most compelling item for discussion was whether there were youth issues or if every issue has a youth perspective.

I tend to believe the latter, and here’s why.

When most people think about youth issues (youth as in young voter, not minors) the two things that most often come to mind are college access/affordability and community service.

College access and affordability

43% of the 20 to 29-year-old population has never attended college (CIRCLE Fact Sheet). Since the is an extremely strong correlation between political involvement and education level, it is not surprising that it receives a lot of attention from politically active youth, but it still neglects nearly half of young Americans.

In addition, the rising cost of a college education and slashed financial aid budgets affect the older parents of potential students as well. College affordability is not purely a youth issue, nor is it an issue for all youth.

Community Service

Community service is one of those issues that older people have decided is a youth issue. The GIVE Act, though a good piece of legislation for upper-middle class youth, is pretty much useless to those who can’t afford to take advantage of it. Community service is not a critical issue to those young Americans whose basic needs are not being met.

Serving communities should also be something that does not fall solely on the shoulders of youth, but should be an issue for all generations.

Health Insurance Reform

Health insurance reform is the biggest issue around today, yet we don’t see it addressed as a youth issue very often. “While young adults account for only 17 percent of the U.S. population under the age of 65, they disproportionately make up 30 percent of those Americans under the age of 65 who don’t have health insurance (Campus Progress).” Young Americans are the most in need of health insurance reform, and organizations should be working to provide a youth perspective in the debate.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

It is strange that military policy does not get considered from a youth perspective more often, since the vast majority of active servicemembers are young Americans.

The Economy

Young Americans have been hit by the current recession harder than most, yet the youth perspective is rarely seen in the discourse. Job prospects for recent college graduates are dismal, and the economic climate is even worse for youth without college degrees.

The Environment and Climate Change

Youth perspectives are heard more often when it comes to the environment compared to other general issues due to the success of the youth environmental movement. However, when the issue is discussed in the mainstream media or in government offices the youth perspective is less prevalent. Conservation and climate change obviously affects young Americans more than anybody else: it will be us and our children that have to live with the consequences.

Obviously this does not touch on every issue there is, but it should start to reveal that all issues affect young Americans, and therefore should have a youth perspective in the discourse. While the establishment may want us to be relegated to a few “youth issues” like college affordability and community service, it is up to us to speak out on the general issues where our voices are noticeably absent.

Every issue is a youth issue, and it’s our job as progressive youth to prove it.

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I’m finally back to writing after my marathon conference schedule starting with the YDA National Convention in Chicago and ending in Pittsburgh for Netroots Nation 2009.

First I would like to thank Democracy for America for providing me with the opportunity to attend through their scholarship program.

I was a little underwhelmed by the panels this year compared to the offerings at Netroots Nation 2008. While this may have been due to the excitement of the Presidential election last year, I think there are some improvements that could be made to make upcoming Netroots Nations just as impressive.

1. More Variety: This year it felt like many of the panels were repetitions of other panels, and many of the panelists were used in 2 or 3 panels. While it would make sense to offer a popular panel more than once due to a packed schedule, it did not seem like this was the reason for the overlap. This could have just been a result of a smaller number of panels being proposed this year, but that could have been remedied by better promotion of the panel proposal process.
2. Panels for Online Operatives: Netroots Nation began as a blogging conference for the Daily Kos community, and the vast majority of the panels still seem to be catered to the writing audience. Now that Netroots Nation has opened up and has become one of the premier conferences for online campaign staff, it would be great to see more panels/trainings on technical practices and strategy. A few panels from NN09 did this, such as the ones on e-mail writing and social media ROI, but I think a larger offering would be extremely valuable.
3. Have Both Introduction and Advanced Panels: Most of the attendees of Netroots Nation have been to a prior Netroots Nation or YearlyKos. However, it seems that most panels are very entry-level with fewer opportunities for learning more advanced strategies or topics. There should be new things to learn even for those attendees that have been coming for years.
4. Mixer Events that Aren’t too Loud to Talk: One thing I have noticed over the last 2 Netroots Nations is that the official mixers/parties tend to have music that is so loud that it is difficult to talk with people. While I enjoy a good loud party as much as the next guy, it isn’t the best way to let a community meet each other and talk. Hopefully in the future there will be more official gatherings that are more conducive to communicating.

Of course the best thing about Netroots Nation is meeting people you have been working with and talking to online face-to-face. It was great meeting many of you, and for those that I wasn’t able to meet up with in Pittsburgh, hopefully we will soon.

What are your thoughts/ideas about NN09 and how to make future Netroots Nations better? Share in the comments.

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Thanks to the help of many of you that supported me, I was chosen by Democracy for America to receive a 2009 Netroots Nation Scholarship.

I want to specifically thank Sarah Burris, Hillary Hunt, Maritza Lopez, and Michael Connery who all went above and beyond in recruiting supporters and helping me during the application process.

Speaking of Michael Connery, he is competing for one of the round 3 scholarships, and your support would be very much appreciated. For those that don’t know Michael is the founder of Future Majority who literally wrote the book on the youth vote. I along with many others would not be where we are today without him.

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I applied for a DFA Netroots Nation Scholarship and I need your help. Please go to the link below and support me. Thanks everyone!

http://democracyforamerica.com/netroots_nation_scholarships/401-kevin-bondelli

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Here are a couple of my thoughts about the Netroots Nation conference as a whole.

Gratuitous Use of Paper

Tony Cani was the first of our group to really point out the ridiculous amount of paper being used at a progressive blogger conference. Starting with the attendee bags to the handouts for every little product, issue, and event, unwanted paper was everywhere. Over at Grist there is a good commentary about the paper use as well as pictures of all the paper in the registration bags. Tony had some really great lines about the paper use: “It’s amazing how every progressive organization’s desire to limit paper use ends with the opportunity to hand something out for their organization” and “If only this were a conference where you knew people would be able to access the conference materials online” *note sarcasm. Next year Netroots Nation plans to be more environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral, so we will see what changes will be made.

The Youth Are Here

Another observation made by a lot of the serial attendees is that the demographic now includes many more young people. Wiretap has a story about this, which quotes me on the issue, that you should check out. I think that the transition from YearlyKos to Netroots Nation might have helped open the conference up to more young bloggers. When YearlyKos was first conceived, it was designed to be a really large meet-up for the contributors to DailyKos, a Demographic that is much older than people imagine. As we move towards a general netroots conference from a site community specific one, I think that the number of young attendees will increase. Here is my quote from Wiretap that covers it a bit more:

“Blogging is not as exciting a tool for Millennials as it is for older generations. Social networking and other very quick tools for sharing themselves trump the blog as a form of expression. The older generation has never been able to express themselves to an audience before, yet are not entirely comfortable with this next step that Millennials have taken. For older generations, blogging is the new pamphleteering. I also think that the older generation writes more for the sake of writing where Millennials are writing for their friends.”

Twitter is Useful

Twitter was used quite effectively at the conference. The use of the #NN08 hash tags allowed people to see what fellow attendees were saying, where they were at, what surprise guests have arrived, and to meet up with other people.

I had another interesting observation about Twitter in one of the panels I was sitting in on Saturday. I sent out a tweet with the link to my recent coverage of the conference on Future Majority, and I see the person sitting in front of me get the tweet, open the link, and read it without even realizing the guy that wrote it was sitting right behind him.

I think as Twitter becomes more ubiquitous and people have more experience using it at events we will learn more about how twitter can be a very useful and effective tool for communicating at conferences.

Conclusion

I had a great time at Netroots Nation meeting a lot of people that I had only worked with online previously, as well as people I met completely for the first time. I’m looking forward to doing it again in Pittsburgh next summer.

Those were just my thoughts about the conference, what did you think? Leave a comment and share!

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The next panel I attended was the one from our youth crew, From Online Engagement to Offline Activism. The panelists were Michael Connery, Jane Fleming, Tony Cani, Matt Browner Hamlin, Maria Teresa Petersen, Sam Dorman, and Andrew Villaneuve.

One of the concepts was that the online space is strengthening the capability for activism. One example is the click to call widget used recently on the FISA issue. Sam Dorman mentioned that online activism is in its infancy, and that not too long ago it purely consisted of sending emails.

Sam also mentioned that we should not seek to be setting trends but following them and figuring out how we can leverage them.

Tony Cani talked about how Millennials are the most advertised-to generation in the history of the world, and that one of those reasons was President Reagan removing the restrictions on advertising to children, which enabled companies to create cartoons that were essentially 30-minute infomercials for their toys: GI Joe, He-Man, Transformers, etc.

Maria Teresa Petersen had some great information about young latino(a) voters and ways to reach them. The fact the MySpace is still their most popular hang-out even with the rise of Facebook. Text messaging is the method that they use to organize themselves, as evident from the immigration protest in 2006. One of the most interesting things Maria said was that one of the most effective methods used to increase turnout was partnering up with local DJs to spread the information. I believe she said that effort resulted in a 9% increase.

Some of the online tools that came up for discussion in the question and answer period were Eventful, and the ability to get a certain number of people to pledge to attend in order to make an event happen, and Sprout widgets.

Someone asked what a Sprout widget was during the panel, so I thought I would create a real quick and basic one to give people an idea.

The widget enables you to include a number of different pages and media into a single widget space without having to have visitors leave and go to a bunch of external sites. One example of a widget being used for organizing purposes is the Rock the Vote registration widget.

Following the panel there was the Netroots Nation Keynote. I’m not going to lie. It was long and boring. The 10-minute long envelope fundraising shtick that they did was just about the final straw. The pertinent information from the keynote was that Gina Cooper will be stepping down as Executive Director of Netroots Nation and that next year’s event will be held in Pittsburgh, PA.

The final event of the night was the Young Voter PAC/Future Majority/Living Liberally After-Party.

The turnout was actually really great. The celebrity bartenders served drinks and a lot of people got together to end the conference. The highlight of the event was probably one of the most meta things I have ever seen: Sarah Burris and Colin Delany concurrently video interviewing each other. I took a picture of it. Here is Colin’s coverage, and here is Sarah’s.

My next post will be my final thoughts about the entire conference.

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Sorry I’m only getting around to writing this now, but the level of exhaustion I was experiencing yesterday was quite prohibitive of writing.

Saturday kicked off with the keynote by Speaker Pelosi and the surprise visit by Vice-President Gore. I only caught the last 20 minutes of their forum, but here is a video of some of Gore’s speech from Veracifier:

I missed Larry Lessig’s keynote when I was catching up on blog stuff and writing my previous post, so the next panel I attended was The Obama Moment: Bringing Networked Knowledge Into Obama’s Washington with Andrew Rasiej, Gina Cooper, Peter Leyden, Rep. Brad Miller, and Silona Bonewald.

The first point that was interesting was that viewership of online videos on YouTube, especially Barack Obama’s longer speeches, is probably much higher than the stated number of online views. The reason for this is that views only count when a person has watched a video to its completion. With videos of speeches that are 30 minutes long there are probably many more viewers that watched a large portion of it yet did not complete the entire video.

There was a lot of talk about a fundamental shift in the media ecology that has now changed the culture of government, and they echoed a lot of ideas about people using technology to organize themselves that Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Attendees were encouraged to demand to share power w/ Obama. It was mentioned that it is not yet clear if Obama is the first top-down campaign of the 21st Century or the first bottom-up one. It is up to us. They also made the point that there is far too much attention paid to elections and not enough on governance.

One of the ways they said technology could change the way we govern ourselves is through our cognitive surplus and crowdsourcing, though Silona Bonewald pointed out that when she spoke to Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia he preferred the term community-created to crowdsourced. Ways that this can affect government include FixMyStreet.com in the United Kingdom, where people can report damage to their local streets and bring it to the attention of their local governments. Unfortunately politicians in the United States are not really enabling these kinds of advances. “Politicians may have blackberries but they don’t have vision.”

Silona Bonewald talked a lot about open data and the need to re-examine backbone architecture. There is a lot of interesting and useful mash-ups that could be created if the data was open and accessible. She thinks there will be a lot of data mash-ups in the next year, even with the problem of the openness of the data and licensing issues. Silona’s quote: “There is a lot more data out there and I would love to get my paws on it.”

Silona also pointed out how great Obama’s tech policy is, especially the creation of a national CTO. The panel seemed to agree that we should take Obama’s tech policy as a model in creating the policies for other issues, and that we need to be more ambitious.

Next I went to A New Era of Possibility: Looking at America’s Role in the World After the Bush Presidency. I was drawn to this panel for two reasons. First, my education at Arizona State University was in international relations, and second, one of the panelists was a fellow young Arizona Democrat Andrei Chernei, author of The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.

Simon Rosenberg of NDN started off by saying that we need to look at the next 10-20 years in a completely different way and we should be very optimistic about America’s potential.

Andrei related the political climate and opportunity of 2008 with that of 1948 and the Berlin Airlift, the subject of his book. 1948 was a time of immense improvisation when America needed to decide what would be its special way of acting in the world since it had emerged the world’s only superpower. Specifically, a way of acting that would not just be grounded in our politics but grounded in our beliefs.

Today much of the thinking about the national security of the United States is stuck in the framework that threats must come from other nation-states. However, many of today’s threats — global poverty, global disease, terrorism and extremism — do not come from a nation-state.

This is the first time in the history of the world that the majority of people live in democracies. Governments are going to play an enormous role in solving global problems, but not the only role. There will be many more bottom-up solutions. The solution to global warming is when you convince the factory owner in China to use efficient light bulbs. For disease, getting them to practice hygiene and safe sex.

We must inspire other people to see America as a force for good, to engender a faith in America.

Michael Moynihan mentioned that after the fall of the Soviet Union there was great promise, but that seemed to change after 9/11. We face a dichotomy of fear versus freedom. The American people were traumatized following the attack, yet President Bush and his administration did nothing to assuage that trauma. If anything, they contributed to it. It has reached the point that terror alerts have become white noise. However, Moynihan believes that this Democratic Presidential Primary has gone a long way to help lift us out of our fear.

We are entering an era of great possibility. In the Bush administration, the rest of the world was seen as something to fear as opposed as possible partners in solving the world’s problems.

Obama’s international visit can be seen as the homecoming of America as a global leader.

We can now imagine a global coalition of grassroots using technology to solve the climate crisis as well as other global issues. We need to start doing positive things to bring people together instead of separating them.

We need to get out of the mindset that we are under siege, and instead enter the mindset of relentless optimism. We are living in a time of extraordinary progress in the world, but we don’t see that here in the United States.

A question was raised about the strategy for talking about global warming and the climate crisis. Should we use language that highlights the threat or language that highlights the possibility? The panel’s answer is that it should be both. People need to know the importance of taking action and should understand the threat, but we should not exaggerate it. The problem with the language of the Bush administration is that it scared people to the point they couldn’t take action. The importance is to not be naive but to also not be overwhelmed.

I’ll have the second part of my Saturday coverage in my next post.

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It’s crazy how hard it is to find the time to actually write a blog at a bloggers conference.

Yesterday morning I went to the From Dean to Obama: Four Years in the Internet Revolution Panel. Both Joe Trippi and Karl Frisch were dropping some comedic gold throughout the entire panel. I think the most valuable comment was from Joe, who said that we are in an awkward transition between an era where authenticity is valued (the  internet) and the era of the 30 second spot. Because of this, snippets of our authenticity end up being taken out of context and turned into 30 second spots.

The next panel I attended was called What’s Next for the Next Generation. The panel was actually just a long infomercial for Qvisory. They bill themselves as an AARP for young people. The problem is that they are trying to become the AARP at their inception, and that isn’t possible. Qvisory offers a lot of great tools for young people to manage their finances, get health care, etc. Unfortunately they are stuck in the mindset that they need to be an advocacy organization as well. They would totally be more successful marketing Qvisory as a service and not as some lobbying entity. The AARP did not start out as the powerhouse it is today. It took a long time to build their organization to the point of being an advocacy organization as well. Qvisory doesn’t get that.

Another problem is the fact the Qvisory spends all their money on consultants to design their logo, website, etc. and then when we brought up strategies to spread the word to people they said they don’t have the resources. Hey, guess what. If you don’t spend all your money on consultants that are going to come up with a crappy name you would have those resources. And oh, by the way, you can get people to promote your organization that aren’t being paid to do it. They don’t get that either. And the sad part is that Qvisory actual offers a very good service that young people should know about.

After that a bunch of us youth vote people hung out for awhile waiting for the coming parties. Somehow, the entire Future Majority team and Ian McGruder thought it was an hour earlier than it actually was, so we ended up missing the Huffington Post/GQ Politics party. Luckily Kos had a party as well and we ended up at that.

Speaking of the Kos party, this just may be me getting older in the youth vote movement, but what is the deal with having a party where people are supposed to talk to eachother and socialize with a band playing so loud you can’t hear anything? Seriously, it was annoying, and it was Zydeco.

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