If you heard Russ Feingold speak at Netroots Wisconsin 2010 (Video Real Soon Now) you may have noticed that he mentioned the $10,000 raised by Netroots in the state for his Cheddarbomb online fundraiser. I thought I'd talk a little about how this came about, since I think it illlustrates a few points about how these things can succeed, and how they can become viral.
There will be more photographs and video coming from the conference - but here's a start: -- Thanks to Carol Gruba! You can add your own photos and videos to this Flickr group by signing up in the group pool here.
Despite a few planning implosions and communications issues, most everyone I've talked to who was at Netroots Wisconsin Saturday had a good time, and I think it all went pretty well.
We have a lot of people to thank. I'll probably foget someone here, but -
One Wisconsin Now - our major sponsor - for giving us the financial capability to get going, and for providing two great talks at the conference.
John Quinlan for his help in getting the conference rolling, promoting it, and helping to get us going on the venue -- Get Well Soon, John.
The Sunlight Foundation for sending out Lacey Maffettone and Nicole Aro, who gave such great talks and were such good eggs about everything.
The staff at the Madison Senior Center including Karen Cator, for being so amazingly helpful before and during the conference, and for giving us such a great place to meet.
The anonymous sponsor who chipped in just because he wanted to support us
The candidates and their staffs who came in the afternoon and rounded out the day with great speeches and their enthusiastic presence. You capped off a great day for us, and we really appreciate that you found time in such a hectic campaign to drop in and meet us. I also personally want to thank all the candidates for managing to not all show up simultaneously - I have no idea how that happened, but I'd been having that nightmare for days, and it's finally stopped. In particular I want to thank Melissa Ryan from the Feingold campaign for all her help, and for being such a force of nature.
My wife Lori, for all her help on the day, for everything in general, and for not killing me during the preparation for the conferenc,e even on days when I deserved it.
Lastly, but not least, I want to thank everyone who came to the conference, participated in such a whole-hearted manner, and brought an astounding level of enthusiasm to the event. You were great, and it was a pleasure meeting you all. I also want to thank you for showing up in numbers that managed to make the event a success financially, thereby fixing the other nightmare I've been having for some time. It appears we managed to make a little bit of money to put forward to future events and work.
You'll be hearing more in the coming weeks - at the moment I'm going to be busy for a couple days catching up with everything I've ignored for the past week.
Scott Hassett, Democratic candidate for Wisconsin Attorney General, will be part of the Netroots Wisconsin 2010 Meet the Candidates session. His campaign office just confirmed with us,
Tom Barrett, future governor of Wisconsin, will be one of the candidates at the Meet The Candidates session of Netroots Wisconsin. We've just confirmed Barrett's attendance at the conference.
We will, as an experiment, be attempting to live stream some of the conference sessions from Netroots Wisconsin. The stream will appear here on the Netroots Wisconsin web site. We make no guarantee that this will actually happen, or how good the video quality from the conference will be, as we're not in a position to do much testing before the conference. Watch this space!
AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)
If you heard Russ Feingold speak at Netroots Wisconsin 2010 (Video Real Soon Now) you may have noticed that he mentioned the $10,000 raised by Netroots in the state for his Cheddarbomb online fundraiser. I thought I'd talk a little about how this came about, since I think it illlustrates a few points about how these things can succeed, and how they can become viral.