RootsCampDC

Just a few thoughts to add to Alex's great roundup of our roadtrip down to RootsCampDC.

Alex and I only overlapped on a few sessions. Mostly I stuck to young voter workshops, and they straight-up blew me away. In the last few years, there's been a lot of really great entrepreneurial activity from Progressives under 30. If the sessions I sat in on were any indication, we can expect a lot more before November 2008.

Highlights:

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending RootsCampDC (put on by the New Organizing Institute) along with Mike and a few hundred of our friends/colleagues, and I thought I'd offer a few of my thoughts and experiences from, what I thought to be, a really great conference.

Mike and I drove down to DC from Philly on Saturday morning along with our friends Fred Dereau, from Living Liberally and Advomatic, and Franz Hartl, from outerspace (as well as Music for America and Advomatic). We arrived a little late--around 11am-- which meant no mimosas for us, though we did catch the first session- a huge introduction led by Zack Exley, where everyone in the room said their name, what they did during the campaign season, and something interesting they wanted to talk about. Zack also explained the ground rules of the conference--it was an Open Space Technology event, modeled after BarCamp, where anyone could host a short session (between 30 minutes and one hour), and where everybody was expected to participate. This had the potential, in my mind, to devolve quickly into a "feel good" event, where little of substance would emerge. But, this cynicism was short lived; given that most of the 400 or so people in attendance were organizers and leaders, almost all of the sessions I went to were interesting and informative.