As chairman of the Netroots Nation Board of Directors, I've already open things for one round of feedback this week, but it's the weekend and you may have even more to say now with more time to detox. Or you may not have been around when I did it.
Anyway, there's a few issues I want to really get people thinking about while they're still fresh, things we're tossing around on GetSatisfaction but which can bear more analysis here.
If you have any thoughts on any of these issues (or anything else), please share:
- The schedule, horizontally and vertically. By "horizontally," I mean "are there too many sessions in each timeslot?", and vertically refers to the number of sessions per day we're holding. Clearly, Saturday could have worked out better, but I'm wondering more globally as to whether people are just overwhelmed by what's going on and feel like they're missing too much and just end up exhausted every day.
- Related schedule question: do you like what we do on Thursdays with caucuses and workshops all day, or should we be introducing substantive panels and discussions that day as well? And, for that matter, what will it take to get you to stick around on Sunday?
- Diversity. We know it's important. I'm glad we were able to provide prime slots to leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Donna Edwards and Van Jones, and to have so many top-flight bloggers of color and women bloggers on our panels, but we can do more to have speakers and an audience that's more broadly representative of the online (and offline) progressive political community. Tell us specific things we should look to do.
- The exhibit hall. Did you go? Did you enjoy?
- The panels themselves -- did you like the formats? Did you feel like there was a fair balance of panelist participation and the audience's voices? Were things too formal? informal? just too awesome?
- Green issues. We've heard you on the amount of paper in the registration bags, on issues with recycling/composting of lunches, and have heard smart suggestions on encouraging a sponsor to provide reusable water bottles next year. What else can we be doing to minimize our impact?
This is just a partial list. But
we want you in Pittsburgh next August, and we'd love to know how to make your experience even better.
[If there are topics you'd prefer to discuss privately, reach me anytime at adam (at) netrootsnation [dot] org.]