Home on the Range Made it home last night in spite of delay. (Those of us in Texas use that phrase a lot less these days, fortunately. :) I had lots of time to reflect on the past week.

What strikes me as the coolest thing about the NOI training is that we had access to the best of the old school and the best of the new school at the same time. Marshall Ganz's stories from the MLK and Cesar Chavez days are still bouncing around in my brain. (I highly encourage everyone to check out Marshall's website that Zack linked us to -- it has video, charts, and summary text.) Learning the Google tools for use in a campaign was another great experience. The data track exercises as a whole were also quite good too, although I wish I could have attended the email writing exercise that went on concurrently. In general, learning from people active in recent campaigns from the local to the national level was what made this training so great.

The last-minute addition of a RootsCamp was a great idea. I hope it becomes an NOI tradition. A similar idea that I would like to see for future NOI trainings is an evening of rotating practicums/workshops -- things like "Make a video and post it on youTube," "Build a basic website," "Set up a mailing list and send an html email," "Set up a campaign infrastructure in googleapps," "Run basic queries on a voter file database," and so forth. Divide into small groups and rotate through the classes (~1hr each) so that everyone samples each of the new tools in a guided, hands-on way.

I can't wait to pass on as much as I can of the training to my fellow progressives in Lubbock. My advice to my fellow NOIers is to do the same: wherever you land, find a dozen or so passionate progressive people, pick an NOI topic that blew your mind, and teach it to them.

To all my new friends from NOI: thank you, good luck, and let's keep in touch!

--Kenny  ¶ posted by Dem-X @ 3:07 PM