Netroots Nation: Saturday Part 1

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.