Greetings from Texas

Hey folks- over the next two days I’ll be posting dispatches from the Netroots Nation conference in Austin. The beauty about a conference for bloggers is that nobody gives you a funny look when you’re in the audience for a panel hacking away at your laptop.

I’m waiting for my first panel to start:

Transparency, Participation and Reinvention in Government in the Next Administration Through Web 2.0 Tools and Culture

In January 2009, a new campaign will begin to improve our federal government itself. Under Gore, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government implemented nearly 1,200 recommendations to make government work better, many of which leveraged technology. Eight years of Web technology evolution later, “Web” and “open-source” culture are mainstream. How can a new administration leverage Web 2.0 technologies, and the participatory transparent culture that goes along with them, to make our federal government work better in 2009?

PANELISTS: Micah Sifry, Justin Hamilton, Andrew Hoppin, W. David Stephenson, Jeanne Holm, Silona Bonewald

I’ll follow up with my thoughts on the panel in a bit.