I’ll be headed to Austin next week for the third annual Netroots Nation Convention (formerly YearlyKos), where LocaModa will be powering Wiffiti!

I attended last year in Chicago and had a fantastic time, so I’m psyched to see what this year has in store.  Caucuses, mixers, blogger sessions– it’s always a very FULL long weekend.  Howard Dean will be giving the opening keynote on Thursday night, as he did last year… and he’s guaranteed to get everyone riled up and rearin’ to go.

Of course, I’ll be blogging and twittering from the event.  If you’ll be there, be sure to drop me a line or tweet me a tweet (@jayniek).  And if anyone has any suggestions for things I need to check out while I’m there, please help out an Austin newbie!

Here’s a glimpse of last year’s event (HELLO Progressive Bloggers!!)

And, for those of you who won’t be joining me in the trek to Austin, I highly recommend hitting up PodCamp in Boston– I’d be there if I wasn’t going to be here!

Back in February, I spoke at a roundtable discussion about the intersection of new media (specifically Wikipedia) and social change.  A fun and diverse group of techies, nonprofiteers, and social media junkies came together to chat about ways that new technologies can be leveraged to encourage social activism.

One surprising discovery came when –amongst a crew of self-proclaimed advocacy nerds– we admitted that very few of us had actually edited a Wikipedia page.  The general diagnosis?  There is still an invisible hand reigning over the Wiki model; and until this is dissolved (likely as a gradual epistemic change), some semblance of a traditional authorial hierarchy will remain.
Read the rest of this entry