Held: Saturday 8th January, TUC Congress House, London. Around 550 attending.

"The idea behind the original Netroots Nation, and behind Netroots UK is to leverage social media and other tools for political action" - NetrootsUK website

For a large number of people at the event this obviously meant to leverage social media to put the Labour Party back in power. First we fight the cuts, then we break the coalition, and then we put Labour is back in power, and all is well in the world again.

The event made much of the recent student demonstrations and occupations as well as the UKuncut protests, with these being held up as innovative examples of new networked organising that the left needs to learn from. However there are inherent contradictions here. On the one hand we talk about the power of this technology to bypass structured organisations, to change balances of power and to change methods of organising, and then on the other hand people are talking about promoting the Labour party through utilising these tools. It seemed at times as if there were several different conferences running alongside each other.

I'm not saying the whole event was a cynical attempt to capture some of the trendy momentum by headlining ukuncut and the student protests, but at times it felt like it (and others thought so too).

Throughout the day there were several themes that came up again and again and using new tools to bypass traditional structures was certainly one of them. Another important one was the influence of participant narrative and personal testimony and the need to tell emotional stories as a tactic in exposing and campaigning against the cuts. Similarly, mapping this on a geographic and local level was also seen as key, helping to illustrate the effects of the savage cuts in an easy to understand, direct and locally relevant way, and therefore encouraging local resistance. The newly launched False Economy website was promoted to be a key tool in this approach.

Aggregation was also quite a hot topic in several of the sessions, with people saying more of this approach was needed. The Blogging in 2011: building an infrastructure for the left session mentioned aggregators labour2 and tigmoo, and with Labour List planning further development and others with their eye on the top reference website positions, I'm sure there'll be some major development around this during 2011. Sadly the session really didn't address its title topic and served more as an interesting bloggers surgery.

By way of a random detour, the only tory at the event Tim Montgomerie (Conservative Home) said the biggest threat to what Netrootsuk is trying to do will come from extremists attaching themselves to the anti-cuts movement, and that the left has to be really zealous in rooting out these people. Donnacha DeLong, Vice President of the NUJ replied that the smashing of the Whitehall police van etc during the student demonstrations was not the work of organised extremists or 'the anarchists', but simply young kids angry at having the EMA taken away from them. He went on to say that this year more strikes are coming and that there will be more social unrest on the streets, and that some of it will be violent. Ending he urged more bloggers to join the NUJ in order to ensure representation and pointed out how the NUJ had defended and campaigned around bloggers, journalists and photographers targeted by the police, including Indymedia when police had seized their servers hosting citizen media websites. Tim from Political Dynamite made an interesting point where he said the best example of solidarity he had seen in 2010 was when the police forced the closure of the fitwatch website (hosted on a corporate platform) over content related to the student protests. In response, the offending content was mirrored across over 100 websites and blogs as radical techs recovered the site and set it up again on a new independent secure server.
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In the morning I attended the "Turning online activity into offline activity" session which put Jessica Riches (from UCLoccupation / twitter) alongside Teddy Goff from Blue State Digital - the firm responsible for much of the digital campaigning around the Barrack Obama victory. The session was put together and chaired by Alex Smith who co-ordinates new media for Ed Miliband (and is a former editor of LabourList). Alex kicked things off by asking the direct question of how can we harness these techniques to directly support the election of the Labour Party.

Talking about the successful use of online video by the Obama campaign, Teddy Goff emphasisied the need to ensure the appearance of honesty and integrity and noted the use of low-fi and amateur styles to sometimes ensure this. Teddy said that out of well over one thousand videos produced by the campaign one of the best feedbacks came around the state campaign update videos, where party workers told the poll facts straight, instead of glossing over with upbeat party rhetoric, and made direct requests for people to take specific actions, thus involving people in a real way. Later Alex showed his Ed Miliband campaign youtube video 'Be part of the change', of which he said he was very proud. Tragically for Alex, one of the student protestors said he thought the video was truly terrible. The same student also noted how an important factor in the university occupations was that they used concensus and participatory decision making to organise. Coincidently, when Sue Macmillan (former head of new media for Labour Party) was asked later in the afternoon if internet video was the 'next big thing', she said didn't think so, but that if you are doing video, it's got to be funny.

Jessica Riches had started the session talking about how important twitter rapidly became to the UCL occupation, providing a channel for rapid communication, far faster than waiting for someone to update a blog, or waiting for someone to check their email. She said at the start they hadn't realised how important it would be in reporting news and mobilising quickly, but their tactic of updating tweets almost as often as possible, replying to all followers and supporters, directly hassling celebrities for support, and calling for assistance and solidarity when needed proved to be very successful. With several people administering the account using CoTweet they used twitter to "make the room bigger" during meetings whilst the conversations with suporters and many of the up to 50 other occupations became a way of seeing that they were part of a movement.

Later I asked Jessica how important was it that they'd had a common space to work from in the form of the occupied UCL university rooms, given the obsession with pervasive 3G connectivity and handheld devices enabling distributed engagement. She agreed that it had been crucial to forging solidarity and direction within those occupying the space, that the experience had changed the way people relate to each other, and that it was also important as a base for the reporting of what actualy happened at the demonstrations. I'd asked the question thinking about how Indymedia had in the past set up temporary alternative media centres to co-ordinate grass roots coverage of large demonstrations and wondering if there was anything that could be learnt from their ten years of experience doing this sort of thing.

It occured to me that both the student protests and the Obama victories were success stories waiting to happen, they were certainly helped and enabled via the use of social media, but there was a pre-existing groundswell of support for these causes, and people on the ground ready to work hard to make sure they happened. The original Netroots Nation movement in the US had the simple objective of mobilising support to place Barrack Obama in the Whitehouse in what has become a textbook campaign - but as was pointed out several times, we're not in the same situation here at all.

The other repeated theme of the day was the need for pluralism and tolerance (aka unity) which comically sat alongside the odd shout of 'sectarian', when someone dared to criticise the record of our last Labour government. It was said at the start of the event that we cannot create a unified leadership that agrees with everything we want, and that we need to embrace the differing priorities that people campaigning against the cuts will have - and this is of course true. Many people at the event however weren't interested in having a leadership, although they were interested in discussing the pros and cons as well as dangers in evolving more permanent structures for continuing to organise against the cuts, as in the lunchtime discusion "The student fightback - a new type of networked movement?" led by UCL occupiers Guy Aitchison and Aaron Peters.

Another distinct element at the event were the supporters of the mysociety.org stable and similar  projects - believing in the power of opening up data to assist in campaigning, rekindling interest in how democracy works, or rather doesn't, and trying to hold our leaders to account with facts.  This contrasts slightly with those who say we will not be able to fight the cuts with facts - obviously we need both approaches. Also present as partners were people from 38degrees and Avaaz, both organisations which mobilise political action via the web.

I was surprised and heartened that over 35 people signed up to the internet security session run by Chris Coltrane [update apparently around 50 turned up to it]. I didn't attend, but did see a flyer for Tech tools for activists which covers some of the same ground. You can see a video of the workshop here (and the text of his UKuncut one here).

Of course the format of the conference also reflected this dichotomy between organising styles and approaches. Half of it was like some party conference, so we had to sit through 3hrs of mostly podium plodding plenary with only 3 hours of time dedicated to two slots of more interesting side meetings or workshops. We could have easily ditched three quarters of the plenary sessions and actually had more time for skill sharing, discussion and plotting (although many did take advantage of this time by getting on with networking outside of the main hall). We didn't need pleas on the importance of fighting the cuts from the upper end of the political class, or lengthy explanations of the possible impacts of the cuts, although the explanations of poll data and the dangers of continually trying to mobilise the same group of people was a useful insight. We could also have used some more participatory methods for structuring some of the sessions. The organising left behind Netrootsuk really does have a lot to learn about this stuff. Although the free booze and networking time at the end was good!

There was a ton of other good stuff going on and some practical discussions where people were learning a lot - an event that brings together so many passionate and talented people can only be applauded.

A quick mention should be given to the presentation by Ari Rabin-Havt (of Media Matters) on the dangers of Murdoch controlled media (Fox news in particular) in the light of the NewsCorp bid for BSkyB, (see video). It wasn't news to me, and probably didn't warrant a plenary, but for those that don't know about this stuff it was a good introduction. Stella Creasy MP also made the point about the importance of "perpetual engagement" and participation as opposed to the standard (cynical?) political tactic of "perpetual campaigning".

All in all, some of the differences reminded me of the Horizontals versus Verticals debate around the European Social Forum (2) event in London in 2004. Ok we weren't talking about a bunch of trotskyists here, but some of the issues are similar, especially the use of technology to enable more non-heirarchical methods of organising. In 2004 the hard left seemed terrified of the ability of web technologies and tools to open up debate and participation. Seven years later and maybe mass adoption of internet tools can really help us bypass the worst of the vertical limitations and spread a more participatory form of politics whilst fighting against the cuts and the ideologies behind them.

Don't get me wrong, most often the online is not a substitute for offline organising, but it can support, promote, amplify and involve. The motto of Poptel, the old pioneering ISP coop seems to sum it up well for me "Connect, Inform, Empower".

Next stop, the Network X gathering in Manchester this weekend. Which means I miss the Arts against Cuts weekend and the Green and Black Cross meeting.

Netrootsuk reports - see:

From online to offline: lessons from Netroots UK
http://www.policestate.co.uk/articles/107

Other good write ups:
http://studenttheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/lessons-from-netrootsuk
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/netroots-uk-new-wine-into-old-bottles
http://politicaldynamite.com/2011/01/lessons-from-the-netroots
http://www.donmilligan.net/OFF_THE_CUFF.html
http://kieronam.net/?p=75
http://luna17activist.blogspot.com/2011/01/netroots-uk-and-limits-of-online.html
http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/netroots-elitism-and-old-fashioned-activism

List of reports:
http://www.netrootsuk.org/2011/01/netroots-uk-first-reports
http://www.nextleft.org/2011/01/there-will-be-more-than-one-alternative.html