I found this to be a really thoughtful piece by Gregg Levine for Al Jazeera; obviously, I'm interested in your thoughts:
“I see this as the third wave of Netroots,” said David Dayen, a contributor to a number of digital news sites, including Salon and The New Republic, who has attended every Netroots Nation conference since its inception when it was known as Yearly Kos, an in-person gathering of bloggers and community members of the left-leaning political blog Daily Kos.Our staff is stacked with Kossacks who helped organize the first YearlyKos as volunteers; this site remains firmly embedded in Netroots Nation's DNA. But (especially for those who've attended in recent years), how do you feel about the evolution of the conference? What can we be doing differently? more of?“The first wave [participants] were bloggers and blog commenters,” noted Dayen, who himself was a longtime writer for prominent blogs like Calitics and Firedoglake.
“Mostly national bloggers and reader/activists,” added Marcy Wheeler — another 10-for-10 Netroots attendee, and the founder and driving force behind Emptywheel, a widely referenced independent blog, which mostly focuses on national security and intelligence issues — noting state bloggers joined soon after. Yearly Kos became Netroots Nation in its third year, pointedly expanding beyond the Daily Kos diaspora.
The second wave, according to Dayen, saw the conference turn into “a trade show for the professional left — for unions, liberal organizations and political operatives.”....
But in the eyes of Dayen, last year’s Netroots Nation conference in Detroit and this year's Phoenix gathering represent a third evolution of the event. “Remnants of [the first] two waves still attend,” he said, “but now we're on the third wave, which is a grassroots movement hangout, largely localized, based on the event venue, but also more broad, and at this point mostly focused on social justice.”
“I think that’s right,” said Netroots chairman Hasan, “and I don’t think that’s a complaint.”