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!

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.

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.

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.

It’s 3:30 here in Austin and I have already packed in a bunch of activities.

First, I attended the DNC & Obama for America: The Tools - Online Tools for Social Networking with Chris Hughes and Judith Freeman of the Obama campaign.

This panel was essentially about Obama for America’s social networking strategy. Chris did most of the talking and did a very impressive job. This guy knows his stuff. The majority of the time was spent on the my.barackobama.com social network. Chris talked about how the purpose of myBO is to enable everyday people to bring about change as easily as possible.

He talked about how the campaign focused more on function than form. MyBO may not be the flashiest and best technology around, but it is designed to be as useful as possible. However, Chris says that they are working on improving the user interface of the site.

The core of myBO is about communities and the campaign’s ability to pay attention to the community of supporters and to get them to use the tools in their own communities.

They spent some time talking about the new platform house party program, and how it is loosely structured to enable people to make their own events as relevant as possible to their communities. A couple of interesting things about the platform program: they created a really great host guide that makes organizing an event much less intimidating and they have staff follow up with party hosts throughout the process.

They talked about how myBO fits in to the Obama field program. People that were interested in helping did not have to wait for official campaign staff to come to their area in order to help the campaign. They made sure that there were a lot of things for people to do on the site no matter what their interests and preferences are.

There are three main ways that they organize on Facebook.

1. Campaign page: 1,150,000 supporters. They use it as a communications medium and do a lot with video. They use the page’s update functionality to message their members.
2. Using local groups religiously. Everyone in field organization was told that they needed to create a Facebook group locally. If a lot of people join a group in a local network it makes it more likely to show up in people’s feeds. This allows the size of the group to increase and then you have a direct line of communication to those people. There are significant ripple effects if you do it locally. One person in campaign headquarters can’t create all the groups, it is something that must be done locally.
3. Creating a Facebook application. An effective way for people who are supporters to keep up what they are doing and share that information with their friends.

MySpace. Chris calls it a phenomenally important communications tool. The pages are much more customizable and they can encourage people to embed their own logos or widgets. They have incredible flexibility. Emphasize lowering the bar to make it easy as possible with many options to get them to put stuff on their page, which results in lots of distribution very quickly. At the end of the day they want people to get engaged in other campaign activities. They are trying to incorporate all of this energy and interest into the campaign programatically while at the same time getting as much distribution as possible.

The calling tool on myBo is something that is very effective and it enables people to make phone calls from the campaign that could or would not go to a campaign headquarters to do it. It is especially effective for the elderly and people living in rural areas.

During the question period Chris was asked about peer-to-peer from someone from PIRG’s New Voters Project. Chris says that the campaign has reached the same conclusions that the research has: peer-to-peer contact is extremely effective in reaching young voters.

Rob Dolin sent me a tweet during the panel asking why the campaign chose to create their own social network instead of just using existing ones. This is the answer: most of the users of the myBO functionality tend to be older than those people that already are active in current social networks. It enables everyone that is interested to participate with a full campaign functionality that is not available within current social networks. It also removed the difficulty of data integration.

Dean’s Registration Kick-Off Rally

Next was the rally with Governor Dean kicking of the DNC’s new voter registration program. Over 100 people were outside in the heat and were definitely excited. Dean actually talked a bit about young voters and their importance, and a young College Democrat spoke earlier as well.

Youth Caucus

We just finished up the youth caucus. We had good attendance and a very engaged discussion that did not want to end when our time was up. A lot of topics were discussed, including coordinated leadership pipelines, what is the youth movement, what are the important themes for young people, and a lot of discussion on young people that never went to college and how to reach them.

Jim Slattery, US Senate candidate from Kansas, dropped by and talked about youth issues. It’s great to see candidates really putting the effort in to make young voters an important aspect of their campaigns.

Now I am sitting in the hotel lobby writing this post. I think I will be going to the OpenLeft Caucus at 4:30 and then the Readers and Writers mixer, followed by the Howard Dean keynote.

Funny thing just happened. A couple of guys were walking by in the hotel that weren’t associated with Netroots Nation, and one says to the other: “there are a lot of people in this hotel using laptops, huh.” I bet this lobby looks really strange to people that don’t realize that there is a blogger conference going on.

I’ll have more later.

I’ve been here in Austin since 2 pm yesterday and have spent most of the time chilling with Sarah Burris, a fellow Future Majority writer.

Let me tell you, there is nothing more amusing than watching a ton of bloggers frantically trying to find power outlets for their laptops.

Last night we met a lot of the ActBlue team at the event at The Cedar Door, met some people, had a good time.

I’ll be writing more as the sessions begin.

Here is Sarah’s recap so far.