This weekend I'll be attending RootsCampDC, a weekend-long "unconference" for "people who played a role in the 2006 elections and are prepared to share with others innovations, failures, old wisdom and new discoveries."

RootsCamp is run in the fashion of a BarCamp, an open and ad-hoc kind of gathering for techies for which there are no agendas and no official sessions until participants meet at the conference itself. If a BarCamp is a two-day event, attendees bring their sleeping bags and spend the night (thus, camp).

It's an open-source, wiki-style approach to conferences in which all participants are given the same amount of authority and are encouraged -- and sometimes required -- to present. Just as in the communities that produce open-source software, organize using social networking apps, or utilize all of the other technology we write about, the idea here is about the wealth of networks and the lack of a hierarchy.

As of this writing there are 408 people signed up for RootsCampDC. All members of the progressive community that have had something to do with the mid-tmers, they will meet to discuss lessons learned during this year's mid-terms and how to apply those lessons in 2008. Saturday morning all of the participants will meet to organize the day: they'll propose sessions to be run individually or with a group and people will look for others with the same interests.

A note: I will not be attending RootsCamp as a progressive activist, and if I am partisan it is in support of the values we hold here at PDF: transparency, open community, and online conversations enable by networked communication. PDF is a non-partisan site, and my goal at the conference will be to document how new technology and the culture that grows up around its use is affecting this political community.

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Tags: rootscamp, barcamp

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