Netroots Nation 2008

Carnahan's are a pretty big name in Missouri politics as public servants who have gone above and beyond to lead and serve with distinction. The first (possibly only) campaign my cousin (who is 10 years older than me and have always looked up to) was a Carnahan campaign. I haven't stopped hearing about them since.

But as a next generation voter and politico in my family, I've discovered my favorite Carnahan in Robin for her relentless pursuit of fair and accurate voting laws.

Give the post I did yesterday about the Durbin/Schakowsky/SAVE Student Voter Bill extravaganza, I wanted to also highlight some of the dangers Missouri faced in had the new voter ID bill passed. These laws and other "policies" enacted by renegade county clerks can result in the disenfranchisement of hundreds if not thousands. The bill presented yesterday seeks to help with some of those stumbling blocks, but the states can do so much more. Look to Robin Carnahan as a guide. As her site says

"It is also my job to protect the voting rights of every eligible citizen. Not 95% of our citizens. Not just Missourians who have a drivers license or a passport. But every eligible Missouri citizen.

I caught up with Secretary Carnahan at Netroots Nation where she educated many of us about election laws and their impact on voting. She took a few minutes to speak with me about how these laws affect young people.

note: I have no idea why this video is still processing, its had 10 hours... re-uploaded and 5 minutes later works... conspiracy??

So... finally I have video uploaded to YouTube from Netroots Nation.

My post for Rock the Vote is here and includes this video. But below I want to share interviews in their entirety that include everything they have to say. To see all the videos I'm uploading here's the YouTube channel.

There were a lot of things to talk about. Notably the myth that bloggers are young. I knew that, but had never quite seen that in action. There were many of us that were certainly under 30 and more under 40, but such a huge number of them that were older, x-hippies maybe... I think there is an assumption that we are all young and the reality was odd.

The next thing I found moving and a huge compliment was the overwhelming number of candidates that were there to court bloggers. In Kansas, most people (except the Slattery's) haven't discovered technology, and communicating with bloggers is something only few do because some see it as a loss of message control. To have so many candidates, BIG candidates asking for our help with covering their campaign or their issues was a huge compliment. Al Gore telling us that our ability to get a message out and drive traffic to an issue was the ultimate pick-me-up.

Another major plus was that the candidates there seem to all be on board with young voters and recognizing the importance of the youth vote this election. In fact both Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Howard Dean seemed to have received the same talking points and crafted the same message. Their hope is pined on young people. Pelosi goes so far to say that the impatience of youth is something she values and appreciates. Its an interesting spin from the Thomas Friedman et al's of the world who want to talk about how we want it now... Turns out, sometimes its good to demand things. They also both agree that this is a generational election - and the old vs. new dichotomy is being emphasized.

The best conversation I had with Rep. Pelosi was about technology. (video should be totally uploaded soon, it was still processing) I love young voters, but given my outspoken activism on Let Our Congress Tweet and my obsession with looking at how we can incorporate technology to connect constituents to their members better and more effectively... hearing her perspective on her outreach, how she encourages other members to do it, and her ideas about the Franking Rules were all things I wanted to understand more.

I understand where she's coming from, I really do. The last thing we want is to allow members to campaign on the taxpayers dime... I mean what's next!? Public Financing?!! Steps from anarchy... And I should have been ballsy enough to follow up, but this was the first time I'd met her before... so I was seriously nervous. Looking at how we can connect people with their Representatives isn't about campaigns... I can be used that way, but I think the more important thing is to connect people to their member from an issue and policy stand point and for services. If there are previsions in place to protect against the "campaign" stuff... then why would the rest be bad? Next time I won't be as much of a candy ass... I promise. Lets also note that I didn't get a Let My Congress Tweet Button, which makes me deeply saddened.

Libertarian Presidential candidate Rep. Bob Barr crashed NN and attended a few panels. Most notably he said two things: First, young people, he said, are pulling away from the two party system. Secondly, he said that young people were courted in the 80's but that they were allowed to fall away because no one let them be part of the policy agenda.

First comment he's right, young people do like to be decline to state or independent voters... but unfortunately for Bob it doesn't mean Libertarianism is suddenly a sexy thing that can get enough young voters to win Bob's election. The second comment is key and its something Pelosi alludes to. Creating a partnership with young voters and funneling that into how we can impact policy once the election is over will be the key to the future if a President and a party can give them a seat at the table.

We've talked about this before, and I'm really beginning to see it more and hear that policy makers are hearing it. The question remains, however, if there will be any kind of plan in place for a post-election strategy for young voters to impact the policies and candidates' legislative agendas January moving forward. Bob claims a major reason we lost young voters was because this wasn't done. I think he has something there.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome had some caused as much a stir in the halls as Bob Barr did. His comments were more focused on the authenticity of candidates and incorporating heart and soul with brains. That makes sense, I think one thing Tony Cani brought up at the Online/Offline Panel on Saturday was about the extent to which we've been marketed to to death. Could that be a reason that we crave authenticity? Or that we weigh the recommendations and endorsements from friends higher than tv commercials?

There were many other great interviews I did with bloggers, individuals, and politicians from Robin Carnahan, Secretary of State from Missouri who fought the ID law there like you wouldn't believe, Charlie Brown in the CA-4th one of my favorite candidates, Jon Powers New York Congressional Candidate, young candidate, and former soldier who we're hoping to have here doing a liveblog in the next few weeks, and Joe Garcia running for Congress in FL-25... Who tells us all below that if we come out to help on his campaign they have a beach house waiting for us... I'm kinda thinking about that actually.

Robin Carnahan I want to post when I do a larger piece about voting rights, and Jon Powers I want to post when we're about to do his live blog. Also.. I just haven't had enough time to upload them all after cutting everything. As I mentioned there will be much more and I'll post them as the become available. I sadly did NOT get to talk to Vice President Al Gore. And of all people who would be great to talk to about young people and their role in combating climate change, you'd think he'd want to talk about that that... but it didn't happen. Here's to hoping sometime this season I can talk to him about his WE campaign and what he thinks about young voters.

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.

Sorry it has taken so long to post a report from Netroots Nation - it's easy to get sucked in here talking to all the people that I only get to see once or twice per year. If you don't feel like we're shedding enough light on what's happening, you can go check out the live Ustreams from four or five of the ballrooms here at the convention center.

Kevin and Sarah have both been here longer than I, and they've got great write-ups of what's happened so far. In particular, you should all go and read Kevin's thorough recounting of the panel on the DNC and Obama for America's online tools.

I wanted to add some thoughts to what Kevin wrote about the Youth Caucus. First, apparently there was no pre-organizing involved in this event. In fact, I think the NN08 organizers just put it up on the schedule without consulting anyone about it. As a result, people milled around for awhile and then Nate from the Roosevelt Institution got everyone to sit together and began a conversation. Next year, there should be a lot more planning involved in this event. Other caucuses featured elected officials, or had pre-set agendas. Something a little more structured might be useful for all the young attendees next year.

The discussion - started by Rob Anderson from Campus Progress - revolved around one central question: What is this "youth movement?" Is it about an age demographic, or is it about a generational policy agenda (and which should it be)?

I was pretty burnt out yesterday from my early flight, so I didn't contribute much to the discussion. That was actually a good thing - it was nice to hear what younger folks are thinking five years into this "youth movement." A day late, I'd like to inject just one thing into the debate.

You can't really talk about this thing we all call the new progressive "youth movement" without context about how it arose. Five years ago, there were very few organizations working with and on behalf of young people in progressive politics - the PIRGS, USSA, College and Young Dems. For the vast majority of young people, recently politicized by 9/11 and the Iraq War, these organizations were viewed (sometimes rightly) as either ineffective or culturally out of touch. There was a vacuum - real and perceived - in youth politics. We lacked the structures to identify and mentor new leaders, and the institutions to engage a significant part of the youth electorate.

Out of that came a lot of entrepreneurial activism to create those structures, and when we talk about a youth movement in the last five years, that is what we are referring to - the movement to create those institutions and engage young voters in the process.

The question is itself significant in that we've finally arrived in a place where a lot of those structures are in place, young voters are being taken seriously, and now building infrastructure is no longer enough in and of itself. We have to ask the question "to what end?" A few years ago, that question wasn't even possible because none of us were gathered together in any coherent way with anyway to influence the debate. That's a great place to be in and it's light years ahead of where we were five years ago. Let's recognize that.

I also want to highlight a point that Matt Lockshin of California YDA brought up. Despite all these gains, there is still a huge population that is not being served by these institutions we've created. Young people in underserved communities, communities of color, and non-college youth are still not engaged in to what we are doing in any significant way, in large part because we focus on very different issues, we talk about these issues in vastly different ways, and most importantly, these issues affect our lives in very different ways. That's a huge gap that needs to be filled and it actually bridges both of the issues we discussed, the infrastructure and the issues.

One final note - as a number of people have pointed out, Netroots Nation seems significantly younger than in previous years. Are the netroots getting younger, or is the event just gaining a higher profile among younger activists? Don't know.