Last week I road-tripped it down to RootsCampDC with my fellow Future Majority blogger Alex Urevick, and a few friends.

Alex has a great roundup here on our blog that I recommend everyone read (we rarely overlapped sessions, so its a good supplement to this piece).  

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.

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Crossposted at Future Majority

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending RootsCampDC (put on by the New Organizing Institute) along with Music for America founder and my co-blogger at Future Majority--Mike Connery-- 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.

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I spent the weekend at the RootsCamp, which was a huge success. The ad hoc meetings that I attended yesterday were: a Forward Together de-briefing of the internet activities of the PAC by its staffers, Joe Trippi talk about 2008, State blogs, and a technology roundtable. Then today I went to a what worked in the states and a VAN meeting. There is always a lot of networking that goes on with these sort of events, but the set-up of creating meetings and topics on the fly, really made for some terrific learning opportunities.

In the FT PAC debriefing, we had representatives from 3-4 of the Presidential campaigns; in the technology roundtable, we had the DNC and Catalyst at the same table; and in the state-based meetings we    learned about what happening all over the country through blogs. I came out of it with a real strong inclination to push forward on moving the ball forward both through integration of the technology platforms through data sharing solutions and better coordination of the state and national political blogospheres. And that's largely what I'll be working on in 2007, so more on that later.

One thing that Trippi said that made a ton of sense was that the right would go real right for '08. This 'eye' is a blogger that I've been lurking on for a few months, and he's got a couple (here and here) of posts worth reading and following the links through, for more of what's happening on the rightside of the blogosphere. Basically, the conservative side of the political blogosphere is looking to have their Dean-like moment next year. Meanwhile, as RootsCamp made obvious to me, the progressive side of the blogosphere is moving into fullscale integration of the netroots with the political machinery of the Democratic Party (like it or not), and toward a national coordination and funding of the 50 state-based blogospheres. We are a long way from arriving at those two goals, but compared to the rightside of the blogosphere, we are much further toward that happening. Of course, they've got a whole propoganda machine that they fit into as just another cog in the wheel, and we have nothing like it on the left... but it's at least encouraging to note that though McCain might be clearly favored in the mainstream, he's not even close being assurred the nomination by the Republican base. I'm still thinking it's Huckabee that will breakout in Iowa as the choice of theocons.

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The big story left out of the post-election coverage is that in 2006, Democrats finally came up with an answer to Karl Rove's get-out-the-vote "72 Hour Program."

Rove built a volunteer-driven machine from the ground up, backed by the full unity of a ruling Republican Party. The Democrat's answer was was much harder to come by. But this year, finally all cylinders were firing at once -- and what an amazing sight it was to see:

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