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RootsCampSL Day 2 Report

RootsCampSL rolled on in its second day, with Ruby Glitter facilitating a two hour discussion about the races won and lost in our home towns, States and across the nation on Tuesday. 35 of us discussed what worked and didn't, what we were thrilled by and disappointed about, and what we look forward to and what we fear regarding our community and Party politics in the years ahead.

Among the ~30 participants over the course of the two hours, geographies represented included:

Minnesota

Long Island, New York

Connecticut

Trinidad and Tobago

Seattle

Indiana

North Carolina

Arizona

Colorado

Maryland

Tennessee

Netherlands

and activist roles represented included:

DailyKos members

Meetup participants

MoveOn.org phone bankers

IT Coordinator for the Ned Lamont Campaign

MobileActive

DigitalDivide.net

Policy maker for the UN World Summit on the Information Society

Technology implementer for activist groups

Open-Source Adovacy Software (CivicSpace)

PhD student

Organizers for ACORN

Campaign worker for Kissel in North Carolina

Planned Parenthood

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Highlights included:

• Frustration of not being able to connect to meaningful volunteer work through the local Democratic Party

• Hearing in the middle of our session that Allen had just conceded his Senate seat to Jim Webb!

• First-hand accounts of local races: the Al Wynn-Donna Edwards Primary race ("esablishment vs progressive) in Maryland, the Kissel-Hayes race in Charlotte (a Dem loss by 200 votes), and the Mike Nofing District Attorney race in Durham, NC (made famous by the Duke rape case), and the Linnea-McDermott Congressional race in Washington.

• A sense that attack ads FAILED as a strategy for Republicans in Minnesota and Virginia

• A sense that GOP voters supported economically progressive policies like raising the minimum wage almost as much as Democratic voters

• A desire to be able to support more Progressive candidates, including third-Party candidates from the Working Families Party, the Green Party, etc., without undermining the ability for Democrats to beat Republicans in important elections, possibly through "fusion" and instant-runoff voting

• A sense that blogs ARE making a big difference in keeping the local media in these areas more "honest"(VA and NC) but not in others (WA).

• A sense that North Carolina will be the first Southern State to turn "blue" again because of the large military presence-- they know the true cost-- and the rebounding popularity of populist politicians like John Edwards

• A sense that when today's high school kids-- who regularly build "political coalitions" online in World of Warcraft and other MMORGs-- reach voting age, they'll be a powerful poltical organizing force

• A debate about the balance of power in Congress between Progressive Democrats and the new crop of conservative Democrats, including a discussion of how responsive or not the DNC is to its base in any given local geography, and how empowered or not the DNC Chair is to effect change

• A sense that we need to build peer-to-peer relationships within our Party across geographies and ideologies--- rather than organization-to-organization relationships as in the case of coalitions like America Votes, in order to avoid in-fighting over funding, etc.-- hence the focus of many of us on "Network-Centric Advocacy."

RootsCampSL continues on Friday at 1pm SLT/PST with a training session on the basic tools and methodologies of Second Life for new Second Life users, and then continues at 2pm with an in-depth session on the Ned Lamont by Aldon Hynes, Lamont's technology coordinator.

Read the full Day 2 session transcript here

Missed the Day 1 report? Read it here.

Visit the RootsCampSL venue now!

Snapshots from RootsCamp Session 2: