Salsa Scoop> tag: ”blog:conferences“

Salsa Community Conference: Give us your input!

by Leslie Hall

Image: Salsa Community Conference 2010

It's barely two months until the Salsa Community Conference June 24-25 in Washington D.C.

We on the Salsa team could really use your input on how that event can serve you best.

Can you spare two or three minutes to complete a short survey? Your thoughts (even if you're not planning on attending) will be invaluable in making the 2010 Salsa Community Conference a great experience for all, and in helping all our partners and users continue to get the most from their online programs.

Click here to take the survey.

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Party for Change

by Lindsay Marsh, Middle Coast LLC

Middle Coast LLC, the hottest new consulting firm in the Progressive Movement, is pleased to join every online organizer's best friend, Salsa Labs, in co-sponsoring Welcome to Roots Camp - A Night of Mayhem.

In teaming up with the good folks at the New Organizing Institute, Middle Coast and Salsa wish to honor the front line activists who make progressive change possible with whiskey, beer and delicious snacks.

Get ready to rev up your Rock Band on and carry on like the Karaoke star you know you are, and join us at Salsa’s headquarters located at the corner of Connecticut and R NW, just north of the Dupont Circle metro station. The entrance is on R st, between the Starbucks and the Teaism.

Empowering people is hard work. Middle Coast and Salsa are proud to lend a hand to the New Organizing Institute as they host "a candid reflection on all of the online and offline organizing done in 2009." Roots Camp DC begins Saturday, Feb. 20, but the party starts Friday night at 8:00 pm.

So join Middle Coast, Salsa, and NOI - a triumvirate of organizing excellence and good cheer - and kick off Roots Camp as it sprouts in the District in 2010.

Middle Coast LLC is a team of skilled professionals and passionate advocates with decades of experience in the progressive advocacy and campaign world. Melissa Byrne, Gina Cooper, Lindsay Marsh and Melissa McNee founded Middle Coast in 2009 to help progressive causes and candidates find success one strategic decision at a time.

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RootsCamp this weekend ... pre-party tonight

by Jason Z.

It's the most wonderful time of the year: RootsCamp!

Hosted by the New Organizing Institute, a great organization we're proud to call a Salsa user, RootsCamp is an essential stop on the online organizing training circuit. At ten bucks for a bustling "unconference" with political strategist and professional communicators who seriously know their onions, you'd be crazy not to come.

Since you're here in town anyway, do like the e.politics man says and join Wired For Change and Salsa Labs and get planted pre-Rootscamp tonight from 8 p.m. to late at the Salsa offices at 1700 Connecticut Avenue NW (the corner of Connecticut and R, right above the Starbucks).

'Twas the night before Rootscamp and all through DC Progressives were looking for something to see. Ready to talk about topics so varied, They begin looking 'round for a place to be merry.

When up above Dupont there rose such a cry. They said to themselves, "hey, let's go stop by!" On R street they found a party so sweet-- There was booze to be drunk and people to meet.

They wanted to drink and rock really hard But karaoke killed careers and georgetown killed bars. Come rock band! Come Guitar Hero! Come whiskey! Come Beer! Salsa Labs threw a rager, and you heard it here.

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NTEN on Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

by Jason Z.

NTEN wrote a book, zippily titled Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders, with chapters by some of our favorite nonprofit consultants on strategic IT planning and implementation for nonprofits.

Many of those authors will be on a virtual release party-slash-free webinar this afternoon at 2 p.m. Eastern.  Rumor has it prizes are involved.

While we're on the subject of NTEN, its signature event, the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, is just four weeks away in San Francisco.  The best and brightest in nonprofit technology from around the world will be there, so it's well worth the trek -- and always highly recommended as great value for anyone in the region who's never been to one before.  NTEN's blog has more to get you in the spirit, including interviews with presenters like Farra Trompeter.

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Liveblogging Lessig

Lawrence Lessig ... speaking to a packed house at the DIA user conference keynote.

Lawrence Lessig at the DIA User Conference

(ot) Seating nailed down at the power strip oasis. Why are there never enough outlets? airports are a special offender in this ... or, maybe i should think about a computer with more than 30 seconds of battery life.

DIA board member Ed Walters with the intro.

So here's LL:

We need a "declaration of independence"

... we get stuck in the "pattern of 4ths ..." we wake up every four years, and then go back to sleep.

"our 'thursday night out'" + thunder sound effect. nice.

everything is focused on this one year, as if it can save us.

but ... of course it can't.

thesis: the framers failed. apostasy! what's next, Charles Beard???

ergo: "no golden past" ... we're much better today in many ways.

number of lobbyists and cost of lobbyists in 2000 have both doubled. (maybe that latter is the collapse of the dollar ...) -- business is willing to "invest" in them.

as he says that congress' approval rating is lower than bush's, a baby starts to cry.

"crony capitalism" is at the core of the government ... he calls this more subtle than Daniel Webster 19th century outright bribery. doesn't seem much more subtle to me.

"question people on the right need to ask is, how much extortion-enabling regulation is out there, and would public funding to elections stop it?"

but the left gets the wrong answers to the right questions. sort of vague on that one.

there are easy cases! his copyright extension case, of course, is one.

25% of our diet can come from sugar, according to the FDA, blowing off the WHO.

here's some photography:

Lawrence Lessig at the DIA User Conference

Lawrence Lessig at the DIA User Conference

global warming ... another easy question. contrasts popular media still treating global warming skepticism as legit vs. the scientific literature, and the harm of massively delaying any possible remediation.

after the example of world-screwing ecological catastrophe, saying that "trust" is the most fundamental problem caused by all this might be a little questionable...

telco immunity's up next ... democrats who switched on telco immunity got twice the contributions of dems who didn't.

"we need more than every four years in this quad-annual hope-fest" ... "we need something more sustained than this if we're to get change"

hence ... Change Congress ("[beta]" ... nice.)

references Creative Commons, which the above pictures are posted in.

so, change congress is about:

1. no $ from lobbyists/pacs
2. reform "earmarks"
3. support public finance of public elections
4. support total transparency

cites Barack Obama getting the DNC to pledge not to take lobbyist money. (where does he stand on obama's no-public-financing move? does he give any credence to the line that public financing of elections as a baseline value is obsolete?)

he says he "flung" himself from california last night at 2 in the morning. how lame am i to be hung over after the mere salsa party last night?

"there is a flaw at the core of the people's house ... that flaw is dependence. we need to change that dependency. but we won't change it through the quadannual practice of thursdays." -does he mean tuesdays? i'm totally not getting the reference. i should probably get out more.

compares it to alcoholism ... you have to solve the alcohol problem before you can do anything else -- so it's not necessarily the *worst* problem, it's the *first*, most fundamental problem.

-----

into the Q&A

-first question is on obama and the public financing. glad i wasn't the only one who caught that.

"do i have to answer that question?" -- justifies it as realpolitik because of those dirty-fighting 527s. guarded concern ... concern that it erodes confidence in whether obama is really about hope we can believe in. hmmm.

lessig is "absolutely 100% convinced that this is what he believes in, public funding for public elections" -- not every pol can realize this obama effect of demokratichny internet-driven big-money-out campaigns.

lessig remains very pro-obama, and troubled by what others will see from this change -- and the telco change, which i hope was someone's pending question. "the world doesn't need to see this kind of change." ... but he's unconditionally backing obama.

-to the next question, he adds that he *does* think the move to distributed small-dollar fundraising is progress ... and that leads to "dependency" on "the people" which is what the framers wanted. a couple of endlessly debatable propositions there, too.

moots anonymizing donations as a parallel solution to the anonymous ballot ...

-doesn't think he's necessarily going to succeed (also true of copyright work) ... he has the luxury of being a tenured professor. fewer and fewer of those in these days of academic proletarianization ...

but he actually thinks the Change Congress mission is not that far necessarily from succeeding. could happen within three years if everything breaks right!

-question about reform of corporate statutes -- the "corporate persons" power to act against the public interest.

ll responds, essentially, that the supreme court isn't going to change that stuff. proposes that destroying the power of the corporation to have disproportionate influence on the process is another road to the same destination.

Lawrence Lessig at the DIA User Conference

DIA's own Jeanette Russell asks what progressives can do now to help...

Lessig gives an admittedly geeky answer -- support/use/build open source software as an infrastructure for reform.

"we have about eight years when we understand the code, the technology, better than they do. and there's a potential to leverage it in a surprising way ... we've got to do it now and we need to do it quickly ..."

Very nice question from Tauna at Connecticut Parent Power about crossing ideological/partisan divides instead of being the same people talking to the same people.

ll: reform won't come from democrats alone, nor partisans alone -e.g., "good for them" (the Republicans) being stronger on earmarks.

ll was born and raised a republican, youngest member of the convention that elected Ronald Reagan. "I did not know that," as Walter Sobchak said.

his pitch to republicans is that getting money out is an investment to make it *possible* for them to downsize government and, you know, drown it in a bathtub.

"people on the right" are "people too" ... "i used to be one of them!"

question about whether there are some more fundamental things at work here in the human capacity to do this stuff.

ll remarks that institutions of government are hundreds of years old. echoes his past lines on the "code" in the constitution ... e.g., his media reform conference presentation, which we've posted before ...


-in america, "you can actually shame the members of government." (well ... some of them.)

last question is from "a lobbyist for a nonprofit" -- "would we exist?"

-ll embraces some role for lobbyists ... for providing information, helping legislators do things they want to do anyway, but draw the line at the bribery/extortion racket.

that's it for LL ... lots of people over to talk to him on the side after a huge ovation.

-----

apropos of nothing, this is a very short excerpt of his remarks on telco immunity earlier.


... and, for no particular reason, a slide he used of "the people" (or was it "poor people", contra the ones who can buy influence?) (artwork genesis unknown ...)

Slide from Lawrence Lessig presentation at the DIA User Conference

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Still a few more seats at the user conference -- book 'em by Friday

Monday's registration deadline for the DIA user conference has passed, but you might have noticed you can still get to the registration page. Here's the deal: there are about a dozen spots left. We'd like to fill them, but we also need to have a final-final head count for the hotel by the end of the week. So registration is going to be held open to tomorrow, Friday, June 20. That's the stone-cold, after-the-deadline deadline; we won't be able to handle on-site registrations, so if you're still juggling plans or otherwise uncertain, get in touch with us and let us know what's up no later than tomorrow.

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Lawrence Lessig to Keynote DIA User Conference June 27

This. Is. Hot. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor, free culture paladin, social change advocate -- man, in short, about the technology activist town -- has just been officially confirmed to keynote the upcoming DemocracyInAction Community Conference. The conference takes place June 26-27 in downtown Washington, D.C.; Lessig will address the morning plenary on Friday, June 27th on "Change Congress". Maybe you caught him at the recent National Conference on Media Reform? You'll find him on the expanded agenda also just released. Did we mention (repeatedly?) that that's on top of two days' wall-to-wall Salsa training, online strategizing, and elbow rubbing with the best and brightest? Did we mention there are only three days left to register?

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Not to keep harping on the DIA User Conference, but this is the last week to register for the DIA User Conference

Don't put it off another day -- register now! The speakers list is coming together, and dang if it isn't a fine one. Rub elbows with the likes of:
  • Marty Kearns (Green Media Toolshed, Net-centric Campaigns)
  • Judith Freeman (New Organizing Institute)
  • Marc Laitin (Consultant)
  • Colin Delany (e.politics)
  • Jenn Smith (Watershed)
  • Allyson Kapin (Rad Campaign)
  • David Taylor (Radical Designs)
  • Rosalyn Lemieux  (Consultant)
  • Alan Rosenblatt (Center for American Progress)
  • Trina Zahller (Oil Change International)
And crib organizing notes from the best and brightest, like
  • MomsRising
  • Center for American Progress
  • Oceana
  • 1SkyBrave
  • Step It Up
  • Oil Change International
  • CIVIC
  • True Majority
  • Genocide Intervention Network
  • Code Pink
Did we mention that you're running out of time to register?

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Have You Registered for the DIA User Conference Yet?

Last-minute shoppers, the June 16 deadline for registration is fast approaching. Maybe you've been busy. Haven't had time yet. Been waiting on a few things to fall into place. We've all been there. But the calendar has rolled over to June and space is limited, so now's the time to make the time to register.

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DIA Community Conference 2008, Coming Your Way!

It's here! In the spirit of providing the best learning opportunities, networking possibilities and progressive leadership for 2008 and beyond, we've been working hard on preparing our first ever community conference. We're talking two days of hands-on, interactive training from DemocracyInAction staff and your colleagues in other member organizations! The conference will take place in Washington, D.C. on June 26-27th at the Hotel Palomar. If you haven't checked the location out yet, it's a sustainably developed hotel in the heart of Dupont Circle with fabulous conference space (think windows in every room) and delicious meal plans (vegans and veggies, rejoice!)

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