NN08

Crossposted from Rock the Vote's Rock the Trail

I know we're working on getting Jon set up for a possible liveblog on Future Majority, but I thought I'd post my latest blog post at RTV about him from an interview I did at NN08.

Thirty year old Jon Powers never anticipated running for office, but after his military service in Iraq he knew that he needed to do something more. So, he started a non-profit that aimed to help keep kids from turning to extremist groups.

"War Kids Relief worked with Iraqi ministers to develop programs for the Iraqis to implement. It provided needed research on the state of Iraqi youth. It brought Iraqi youth to the attention of a Washington devoted solely to military tactics.

War Kids Relief worked to prevent a future generation of terrorists from growing in Iraq. It briefed Marine commanders on counterterrorism and the importance of engaging Iraqi youth." According to the site.

But Powers didn't stop there. He decided to run for Congress to continue his efforts to give back. One reason his site says he is running hit home with me. Evidently not all of New York is Manhattan or the Hamptons. Indeed there are many parts of New York that are just as rural as parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. Powers says that in his travels throughout Western New York he has met "folks who are worried that their sons and daughters are leaving the area because there are not enough job opportunities." Those are definitely tough issues that both parties work to navigate here in my home state.

Powers approaches issues in much the same way as people do around here. His enthusiasm as a young candidate brings something unique to the table. I caught up with him making care packages to send overseas to the soldiers as part of the Netroots for the Troops program.

• MTV is finally running its first paid political ad - and it's an attack on Senator Obama run by a third party organization. Classy. In a conversation I had with an MTV rep, they said that third party ads would be reviewed and accepted on a case by case basis. If newfangled swiftboaters can get their ads placed, I assume MoveOn or other progressives will have no trouble getting their own ads on TV, right?
• EJ Dione at The Washington Post pens the Best. Op-Ed. Ever. on the youth vote by a professional political pundit.
• McCain is getting ready to roll out new social networking features on his website to attract young voters. Because McCainspace was such a smashing success last year, right? I think Bondelli has the right take on building new social networks, but I've got no problem with McCain competing with the College Republicans to see whose social network can suck worse. Divide that tiny potential audience up and doom them both to failure.
• Jason at the Sentinel posted slides from his two excellent Netroots Nations panels on how to monetize, popularize, and all around make your blog more kickass.
• MSNBC has an interesting story about the role that nonprofits play in our elections. If you want to know about the differences between 501c 3, c4, and 527 organizations, it's not a bad place to start, even if there are some questionable assumptions about issue advocacy and ideology in the piece.
• Youth to Power made Micah Sifry and Andrew Raseij's "political beach-reading list."
• Facebook has plans to take over the rest of the interwebs . . .
• Over at his other blog, Kevin reports that Kanye West and MTV are teaming up to welcome home veterans and shed more light on the situation of our soldiers as they return home.

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.

So, I'm finally settled back in. Here's the rest of those Quick Hits I didn't get to while at the Austin airport, as well as a few more that have accumulated since.

• The Austin Statesman picked up our little youth caucus, but seemed to miss the point. The caucus was an informal meeting, not a strategy session to construct a master youth plan. And the focus of the discussion - to what extent our youth movement needed to be about GOTV and infrastructure for organizing our peers, or building an ideological consensus - was barely touched on in his piece.
• In this piece by The Washington Post, 29 year old Republican tech strategist David All confirms the complete disconnect between the GOP and Millennials. My favorite line:
  

  David All points to a page on McCain's Web site as more old-fogy branding:

• PEW reports that young voters in this election are at least - if not more - knowledgeable about the candidates' position on Iraq.
• Anderson Cooper's ac360 blog profiles HeadCount and their latest work at the Camp Bisco festival.
• The Virginia Pilot reports that young Viginians (under 25) are registering at twice the rate of their elders. Registration has increased 10% in the last year.
• Rumors abound that Barack Obama is going to show up as a surprise guest at this year's Lollapalooza, which takes place in his hometown of Chicago.
• Young People For just announced the new class of their Front Line Leaders Academy.
• Nine Latino organizations are teaming up to spend $5 million on a nonpartisan voter registration effort targeting 2 million Latinos.
• Finally, Rock the Vote is teaming up with Comcast in its effort to register 2 million new voters this election cycle. I'm not a fan of this partnership. Last year, Comcast was caught blocking internet traffic from peer to peer networks. They are on the wrong side of the Net Neutrality debate.

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.

I'm at the airport now headed home from Netroots Nation and feeling beat up and burnt out from four days of panels, networking, and - as is always the case at this conference - partying. I totally concur with Kevin that for a conference of by and for bloggers, it's amazingly hard to get any blogging done at the conference. There are just too many people to talk to and panels to attend and you end up spending the vast majority of your time offline.

The Young Voter PAC Celebrity Bar Night event - co-sponsored by Future Majority - was a huge success last night. I think the draw of Darcy Burner, Markos, and others behind the bar brought a lot of folks in, and we also benefited from the fact that our party was the last official party of the conference and it seemed to have good word of mouth most of the day on Saturday. In fact, so many people showed up that we ran out of contribution forms for the FEC compliance and we had to frantically run off copies. It created a bit of a bottleneck (and some grumblings about the line being too long and too slow), but as far as problems go, those are good ones to have. Don't know how much the event raised for the Young Voter PAC yet, but the event went as well as it possibly could have and I think it brought in a good amount. Sarah and Jane both have pictures from the event and video of the celebrity bar tenders. Those will likely go up in the next few days once we all get back to our respective homes and properly recover from the weekend.

One of the other casualties of the conference (aside from blogging) is my feedreader, which will take some time to get through. In the meantime, here's a few things I've been able to pull out so far:

• Tech Republican reports that young Republicans are starting to encourage their party to reach out to young voters. Check out the talking points - very similar to what we've been saying to Democrats for the last four years - real peer to peer outreach about the issues:

  The trick is not coding a killer Facebook app or producing a phenomenal YouTube video. Those things are necessary, but not sufficient to create a real youth movement. The real challenge is instead (1) to identify the issues most important to youth voters; (2) to craft a Republican message to respond to those issues and concerns; (3) to deliver that message in such a way it feels authentic and real--the trick to being successful online as David Almacy explained yesterday; and (4) to pass the finished product along to youth voters through the right online portals (social networks, blogs, etc.).

• PEW Research suggests that cell phone-only users may not be skewing the presidential polls (by leaving younger, and likely more progressive, voters out of the sample pool). However, the study they quote found that including a cellphone sample in their poll increased Obama's lead over McCain by three percentage points. They don't quote a margin of error, so I really don't know what to make of this . . .

Oops, getting called to board now. I'll have to post the rest later.

I'm attending a panel right now about using social media to build an audience for your blog. It features Matt Browner Hamlin, the Online Director for the Mark Begich Senate Campaign (fomerly of the Dodd campaign and Students for a Free Tibet), Jason Rosenbaum of the Sentinel, Josh Nelson and Cheryl Contee.

Jason and Josh just are discussing best practices for getting content noticed on social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Buzzflash and Stumbleupon and they made an important point. It's very hard to get noticed by A-list bloggers or to break through the clutter on Daily Kos to get on the Recommended list or promoted to the front page. If you don't have solid connections to those bloggers already, trying to get them to link to you is not a great strategy to get noticed and build traffic (even if the audience of those blogs might seem like the most low-hanging fruit). While it may seem daunting to try to break into these social news communities, it can be a more efficient and successful strategy than trying to break through in the A-List blogs.

Other useful tips for using these site:

• Live or die by the headline. Most people try to convey their point and get people to click through to their article. That's a mistake. If you don't get on the front page, you are not going to get a lot of hits. So your goal in writing a headline should be to convince the reader to give you a vote.
• Be good community members. Don't just spam the site, but contribute other interesting articles not written by you.
• Engage the commenters. Just like on Daily Kos, you have to engage the community to build traffic and votes. And on sites like Digg, the number of comments can impact the algorithm and play a role in getting you on the front page.
• Have a small pool of allies - readers or cobloggers - to help jump-start your article with a few votes. It takes no time and on smaller sites like Buzzflash it can quickly help you get to the front page.

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.