I'm at the JetBlue terminal in JFK, waiting for my flight to Las Vegas to attend YearlyKos. I'm talking on the Friday morning panel on "Election Reform." The panel's at 8am, alongside three other strong panels...so I'm thinking that more people will probably learn what I have to say if I just post my notes on this blog as well as my DailyKos diary (though if you are one of the four people who reads this blog you know what I have to say already). I'm still writing those notes, however...so you'll have to wait.
On the drive down to the airport, I was reflecting that I've been going to citizen conventions like these for years: the Nuclear Freeze annual meetings in the early 1980s...the "Media and Democracy" conferences that Don Hazen and crew used to put on in the late 1980s...the "Third Parties '96" gathering of independent progressives...the Reform Party's crazy conventions...the Working Families Party's annual conventions...and of course a smattering of national political conventions (Atlanta 1992 for the Ds...San Diego 1996 for the Rs...Los Angeles 2000 for the Ds...and both Boston and New York in 2004 for the Ds and Rs).
And all of those very different events were fun and revealing, each in their own way. I'm heading to YearlyKos curious about a couple of things: to what degree will this be like a de facto Democratic mid-term convention (which would be a good thing, though this is hardly representative)...to what degree will this be like a summer camp reunion of people who have never met face-to-face but "know" each other through the intensive collaborative space that is DailyKos...and to what degree will people use the uber-networking potential of being at a somewhat top-down political convention (far less top down than anything any of the politicos coming will have ever experienced I'm sure, but still top-down in the sense of having "A-list" blog celebrities and keynoters soaking up a lot of attention) that is ALSO fully wired to subvert the normal pattern of boring panel after boring panel and turn this into a sideways-up festival of grass-roots expression and energy.
It could get interesting...
Posted by msifry at June 8, 2006 10:32 AM