Netroots Nation: Saturday Part 2

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.