"The key to winning the Pepsi Refresh grant is accumulating daily voters. Netroots Nation has agreed to help us organize to win this grant. Sign up at this link to receive an email once a day providing you links to vote. Once the contest is over, win or lose, the email list will be deleted and your email won't be shared with anyone. So please help us recruit all the daily voters you can, and we can do this."
TFLS - Lauren - asked me to contribute to this series. She wants to continue to make NN more diverse, and through the Pepsi Challenge hopes to be able to again bring people of color, from her part of New Mexico, to Providence.
I am a White Middle-Class male. There are lots of me at these conventions. I will learn more with greater diversity, as I have learned from the diversity in the families of my wife and myself.
And New Mexico is especially dear to our hearts.
Let me explain.
The diversity in my family is through my sister's, son, whose wife is black, and who has two delightful daughters, my great-nieces. They live a comfortable life in California, where he met his wife when they both attended UC-Irvine.
But New Mexico, Land of Enchantment. Two of my wife's sisters graduated from UNM in Albuquerque. One met her husband when both serve in law enforcement together in New Mexico. His family has been rooted in a small town in Northern New Mexico for hundreds of years, long before the first of my ancestors arrived in New York City in 1862. They were married in a lovely inn halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. On my visits to NM I have found places in the state of heart-breaking beauty. For years we subscribed to New Mexico Magazine, so we could stay connected.
The other sister was for a while married to member of one of the Pueblos, and her daughter is a registered member of the tribe, now living in a very different environment in Vermont.
I have spend a lot of time in rural areas, mainly in Virginia. Here our digital divide is not so great because Mark Warner when was Governor of the Commonwealth put a lot of money into connecting the state. Other places are not so lucky.
Being connected is one thing. Yet any of us who have attended any of the conventions, starting with Las Vegas in 2006 when it was called Yearly Kos, know the difference it makes to actually meet people you have previously only encountered electronically. I have greatly enjoyed getting to know personally some people I had only known perhaps here online, or perhaps through email lists. I always look forward when some of them pass through DC where I am to connect - as I did with tfls on one of her trips to see her Congressional delegation. Similarly, I have been honored to gather with others when I am on their turf - that happened on one trip to New York where a gathering was organized in honor of my wife and myself.
There is no better place to connect - in person - than our annual gatherings for what is now Netroots Nation. I experienced that yet again this past year in Minneapolis, when at a time when our own finances were badly stretched I was the beneficiary of the generosity of others, who took the time to vote for me so that I won a DFA scholarship. I connected with old friends, and made many new ones. I saw people I had previously known only through their writing. I was inspired by the work of people of whom I had not even previously known.
The idea of helping others attend these events is not new. Kid Oakland - Paul Delehanty - was the first to organize such an effort.
What Lauren is asking requires little - that you take the time to vote for this effort and help it win the Pepsi Challenge. You can sign up to be reminded to vote - every day. Don't worry - your signing up will not subject you to other emails: NN is doing this as a service, because it is so valuable.
Recently I was again reminded of the value of meeting someone I had previously known only electronically. I was at a movie event at NEA headquarters, and i had occasion to ask the first question in the discussion after the film. We identified ourselves by name. During the reception afterwards one of the NEA directors from California came up to me. We have been on the same list serve on education for about 15 years, but until that event had never met. We had a delightful and productive conversation.
I am urging you to read the text in bold, which I will provide again, to follow the link, and to thereby help tfls - Lauren - help others by winning the Pepsi Challenge and bringing some more diversity to NN12 in Providence. All of us will thereby be the beneficiaries.
Thanks.
and Peace.
Once more: the text:
"The key to winning the Pepsi Refresh grant is accumulating daily voters. Netroots Nation has agreed to help us organize to win this grant. Sign up at this link to receive an email once a day providing you links to vote. Once the contest is over, win or lose, the email list will be deleted and your email won't be shared with anyone. So please help us recruit all the daily voters you can, and we can do this."
