As chairman of the board of directors of Netroots Nation, I'm excited. Because this is where the fun really starts: watching your proposals come in to
create our conference agenda, ultimately filling up a massive grid of awesomeness that provides our attendees with an overstuffed buffet of options, reflecting what the Netroots cares about each year.
If you'd like to help us set our agenda for San Jose, your proposals for panel discussions, roundtables, training sessions and the like are due February 8, 2013.
What we're doing this year in San Jose from June 20-23 (register now!—rates will only rise), as we do every year, is build our schedule from the grassroots up. Your proposals define what it means to be in the Netroots—what issues we care about, what perspectives we believe are worth hearing—making the conference itself a way to educate ourselves, informing and inspiring activism for the year that follows, as well as broadcasting our priorities to the political community at large.
We need your ideas. Whether it's a particular policy area that we should be discussing, or skills that need teaching, or lessons worth sharing, we're looking for ways to build off the successes of 2012 into a stronger progressive movement for the next four years and beyond. Each session should offer a Netroots hook and cover interesting topics from new perspectives—though, of course, some of that can involve bringing in non-Netroots folks to educate us and listen to us.
We want forward-looking ideas that provide attendees with tools to make change and ideas to build upon. Feel free to browse our archive of previous sessions and check out our video archive to see what has been done in years past, but don't be afraid to think outside the box with regards to topic or format. As Raven broke it down two years ago, we get a lot of great submissions:
Here's how things break down for this year in terms of total submissions:
Domestic Policy: 26 (includes topics like education, health care, judicial policy, etc)
Economy: 29 (includes labor related panels as well)
Environmental Justice: 14
Equality/Social Justice: 55
Foreign Policy: 15
Media/New Media: 37 (includes state blogging, media topics, technology topics and everyone's favorite: meta)
Movement/Elections: 73 (includes Congress, elections, fair elections, messaging and progressive movement building topics)
Online Organizing: 36 (covers online, offline and bridging topics)
In the end, we've got 70 slots to fill -- ten time slots (three on Thursday, four each on Friday and Saturday), seven different panels in each slot -- so this is a difficult and competitive process. Many good ideas will get combined and modified, and we will try to include as many topics of grassroots interest as we can within these parameters. And I
personally want more of these ideas coming from this community, and want to work with you to make it happen.
When you're brainstorming, here are a few things to think about:
- How does my idea help the broader progressive movement?
- How will it empower activists to take what they've learned and use it for the greater good?
- Do my proposed panelists represent diversity—of ethnicity, gender, geography, age and viewpoint?
- Did I build in interaction with the audience?
Click here to read the full list of guidelines and submit your idea. (We take these guidelines seriously—there are numerical grades, spreadsheets, conference calls, the works.
Nolan has written about it at length.) As you'll see from the guidelines, your ideas need not be fully formed at this stage, but we will want to see a good level of thoughtfulness and planning. (You can't just give us a title and say "and I'll find three awesome people to talk about it—maybe Elizabeth Warren can come." Be as specific as reasonably possible.)
The deadline for submission is February 8. Feel free to email me at adam (at) netrootsnation dot org if you have any questions about this process, or just ask them here. Netroots Nation started right here at DailyKos, and many of its best ideas still come from here. I hope we'll see you in the Silicon Valley.