Category Archives: Talks & Conferences

We Media has a widget that lets you see what people posting to its blog are saying. The widget downloader offered me a choice of no less than 14 different social softwares to which I might be adding the tool…but no vanilla HTML offering. So I picked one by guessing. To view this you'll probably have to visit my blog, rather then going via the feed, and you will certainly have to enable shockwave for content from widgetserver.com. (Note that I have no idea who is behind widgetserver.com but as of this writing my computer is still working.)

In fact, I believe “widget” may be the buzzword du jour. A pitch happened in front of my eyes this evening, most of which consisted of an offer of widgets.

I attended the opening cocktail for the We Media Conference this evening at the UM School of Communications, and will be at the conference most of tomorrow; (I'll miss almost all of Thursday due to teaching and other commitments.)

There are three things that are unusual for me about this conference.

The first is that it's a rare pleasure to have a conference come to me, instead of having to take a plane ride somewhere, and I'm very grateful to Blyth Daylong and the good folks at the UM School of Communication for making it affordable for me ride along. The list price of admission is pretty high, and full fare would well outside my price range, even without having to pay travel.

The second is that I'm not speaking. One way in which I usually ration my conference attendance is by mostly just going to the ones I speak at. (CFP is the most common exception.) That keeps down the expenses, but it means I miss out on some fun ones, and also may make for a certain samey-ness that it may be time to bust out of. Perhaps I should just go to stuff more often? (Any suggestions?)

And the third is that this is a Media conference: it isn't either of the two types of things I usually go to — either academic lawyer and cyberprofessional lawyer events or techy geek policy events. The pre-conference materials sound different from what I am used to: less specific content and far more ebullience. Indeed, judging from the cocktail party people I met, there are far more people at this who know my brother than there are people I've met before (and half of them think I'm him). It's good to meet new people, and different kinds of people; if I'm lucky I'll learn a lot. If not, at least I get a cultural experience.

OTOH, I did meet a Slashdot editor at the cocktail, so there are some familiar types floating around. But overall, so far, it seems as if the thing in my life which is most likely to connect with this crowd is being a director of a startup hyper-local media company which eventually went under. The one time I mentioned that to someone this evening, their eyes lit up: I had just come into focus for the first time.

It is certainly a varied group. In addition to the various small media moguls and big media moguls and assorted big media assistant moguls, there are people pitching the next big thing, and (tomorrow at least) some people with deep pockets. And of course the lady from the US Dept. of Defense PR shop who was explaining to me how nice Gitmo is, how well everyone is treated there, how much prisoners in the US jails would rather be there then the vastly worse US jails, and that the high suicide rate is because the people there are hard core ideological opponents of the US — which I took to mean they do it to make us look bad. I kid you not.

But I also had the pleasure of meeting a visionary, Corinna J. Moebius of Imagine Miami, an organization dedicated to building community in Miami-Dade via civic networking. It would seem, based on what I've observed here in the last 15 years, to be an almost hopeless task given the various linguistic and cultural divides and the absence of civic pride, civic tradition, and even civic spaces. But listening to Ms. Moebius for a little while makes it evident that she has the sort of passion for what she's doing that actually makes things happen….

Great online summary of my talk from yesterday — translated into French — by Belgian reporter and blogger Mehmet Koksal at Election reporter: Introduction au système électoral américain.

I loved the conclusion: “Cela a l'air compliqué mais, croyez-moi, c'est assez facile à suivre pour n'importe quelle personne ayant grandi dans le fédéralisme belge.” (That may look complicated, but believe me, it's fairly easy to follow for anyone who has grown up under Belgian federalism.)

I hated the picture of me, but I also loved the fact that the event which a francophone Belgian blogger finds worthy of an embedded movie…is the food at the reception.

I gave a talk today to a very charming group of visiting journalists from all over Europe who were invited by the US State Department to observe the US primary election process. And they're starting here in Miami.

I promised I would post a link to my slide presentation. Because I wasn't sure that all of our visitors were necessarily traveling with powerpoint, as an experiment I've converted the file to a flash presentation. Please let me know if this doesn't work for you.

Cross-cultural conversations always reveal surprising assumptions. My biggest surprise was when, after I'd explained how we register to vote, someone asked whether party preferences were a public record or were covered by privacy law. I said this wasn't private — and half the room looked startled and shocked. It seems that in many European countries, where primaries are rare to non-existent and thus there is no need to make party affiliation public, the very idea that one might be forced to disclose it feels like an assault on the secret ballot.

Questioners also asked about the danger of retaliation: can you be fired for belonging to the wrong party? Since party affiliation isn't a protected class statutorily or constitutionally, I had to say that in private employment you could be fired for being a Democrat, a Republican or whatever. (Of course in public employment there are a number of statutory and constitutional protections that, other than in top policy making jobs, tend to protect civil servants.) But, I explained, I thought that such cases were very rare. This clearly didn't go over as very convincing.

Looks like Orin may have to wait for that beer: I'm not going to the AALS after all, but instead am at home, felled by some horrible stomach bug.