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I agree--multi day conference next year!
By JMendelson Jul 20th 2005 at 12:28 am EDT
I definitely agree on the multi-day conference idea. The College Democrats conference generally does this and it leaves a lot more time for networking, more great speakers, and training sessions. I went to last year's event with well over a thousand progressive students and we heard from tons of amazing speakers and also had many grassroots training sessions with Democratic GAIN. This year's Dems conference is this Thursday-Sunday and we have Hillary, Kerry, Dean, McAuliffe, and many others, as well as more Dem GAIN training. The Campus Progress conference was great as well--I never had a chance to hear Bill Clinton before--but having any conference for only one day does limit how much you can fit into it, in terms of speakers, training sessions, and networking.
You Are Commenting On This Post:
National Conference: Recovering and Reflecting
Following the 1st Campus Progress National Student Conference and a convention in my home state, I'm just starting to recover. DC is something else. And this Conference is something else. I met so many people who have done and are doing work all across this country that is great. And I met even more with plans in the works to do even better work.

I finally met, in person, friends like Asheesh and Ezra. I made new friends. I missed some people that I would like to have met (with 600 people, it would be near-impossible to catch them all). What can you do?

Still, I'm incredibly impressed by how the whole event came off. If you only watch one video of the conference, make sure you check out the opening panel on the battle of ideas. The panelists did a great job. If you watch another, watch the one on economic policy. I'm looking forward to downloading the videos of the panels I couldn't be at.

At this point, though, now that we've had an opportunity to look back, what would you want done differently? The greatest thing about blogs is that they allow for the dialogue, so, please, jump in and tell the folks at the Center what you would want to see done differently next year.

Talking to others, I can say that one of the frequent complaints was that there wasn't enough...time. The day we had was packed, fun, emotional, and exhausting. But we've got hundreds and thousands of young leaders across this country seeking skills and education to go out and do good work. One day was not enough.

One of my other concerns was that the skill trainings were all related to communications. All four were great and loaded with excellent panelists, but where were the basics of campus organizing, the Student Government Elections 101, or the live version of Nico Pitney's guide to quick, dirty, and great research.

These are some of my thoughts and thoughts I heard from others I met with.

What are yours?

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