After an hour of introductions in which the 400+ attendees of RootsCamp introduce themselves, the session organizing starts. A mass of people who want to lead a session, as individuals or in groups, swarm around a whiteboard to write their session titles, attendees find sessions they want to see, and off we go.

Zack Exley of the New Organizing Institute starts things off with a quick reminder about the structure of RootsCamp (an un-conference based on FooCamp and BarCamp) and instructs the crowd to introduce themselves by saying their name, association, and three descriptive words ONLY, admonishing us to keep it short or we'll be heckled. The free mimosas everyone's drinking are a hot topic.

The participants come from progressive campaigns around the country, software vendors, technology firms, and, of course, advocacy groups like Moveon.org and the NOI. They're in good spirits; they've had their first successful election in years. There's a lot to talk about.

One word that keeps coming up in the introductions: data, such as, "John Doe, Acme Campaigns, data data data." It's a conference where the cool people are the ones obsessing over data and geekdom is the top aspiration, moving many people to boast of their knowledge and love of Drupal, the open-source content management system.

More to come after attending a few sessions.

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Tags: rootscamp, rootscampDC

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