Ask and ye shall receive.
As you might have seen a few days ago, I wrote a diary surmising that maybe, just maybe, we should take the opportunity Barack Obama and the DNC has given us to put some input into the Democratic Party platform and work a bit on it at Netroots Nation.
Well, no sooner than 24 hours after that post, I got an e-mail from NN organizers saying they were planning on doing just that, and BTW, WMTL, would you help us organize the effort?
Me and my big mouth...follow me over the fold for the details...
Next week, in collaboration with MixedInk, folks from around the Netroots will have the opportunity to work on the DNC platform for submission prior to the Convention:
This year's Netroots Nation marks the launch of a bold experiment in participatory democracy: Together, the Netroots will craft their very own political platform in advance of the Democratic Convention! Come join this working session, where we'll use MixedInk's web-based collaborative writing tool to begin putting our best ideas and language together. The effort will continue in the weeks following the conference - and the final, collectively written platform will be presented to the DNC before the convention in Denver. Come help kick off the process! Laptops encouraged (but not required).
We will be doing this in TWO sessions while at NN. Both sessions are tentatively scheduled for 10:30 a.m., one on Friday, July 18th and the other on Saturday, July 19th. Come with your laptops, pencils, scratch pads, Big Chief tablets, whatever you are comfortable with in getting some ideas down for this unique opportunity.
And if you want to take pity on me for increasing my workload inadvertantly by posting a diary on Wednesday, feel free to e-mail me to help out with the effort on one or both of the days.
This really is an exciting opportunity. I was at a local Obama meeting last night, and one of the delegates to the Convention was mentioning how when she served on the Platform Committee at prior conventions, this would be unheard of: "They'd HAND us the platform when we got there...we were expected just to vote on it." She was excited at what the Obama campaign and the DNC have crafted for this year: actual citizen input.
I'm excited too. Let's make this a great effort next week in Austin.
UPDATE: Links to the NN Agenda for this project are here (for Friday) and here (for Saturday).