I’m proud, pleased — and you can’t imagine how relieved — to report that Insightus’s groundbreaking conference in Durham, North Carolina last week, Data & Democracy for 2018, was a great success. That was due in no small measure to:
- The 100+ registrants who trusted us enough to fork up thirty bucks each to attend the conference, from states including California, Michigan, New York, Washington D.C., Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, and of course North Carolina
- The 19 speakers and panelists, who mostly came on their own dimes, from states including California, Washington D.C., Missouri, New York, Kansas, Michigan, and Massachusetts
- The many wonderful Kossacks who pitched in — some as volunteers, some as speakers, and some just to lend moral support, including Denise Oliver Velez, navajo, peregrine kate, MsSpentyouth, Chris Reeves, Tom Sullivan, Gordon20024, cbgbz, and Fish out of Water
- Seven fantastic volunteers who kept the trains running on time and down the right tracks: some old friends, and some new.
- Daily Kos itself, for pitching in well more than just a couple of bucks to get our beloved hurricanophobic navajo clear across the country to participate in a panel discussion with our equally beloved Sister Dee (which I’ll feature in the next diary in this series)
But far and away the greatest credit for the success of this meeting goes to our keynote speaker, Anita Earls of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, perhaps best known as the winning attorney in Covington v. North Carolina, which established that North Carolina’s legislative districts are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders — a decision the U.S. Supreme Court itself unanimously concurred with.
Anita didn’t know me from Adam when I reached out to invite her to speak. I’m not even sure whether she’d ever heard of Insightus. But to my astonishment, she accepted my invitation. And just like that, everything changed. Our assumption that the conference would be an intimate gathering of maybe 40 to 50 hardcore data junkies and voting rights activists (if we were very lucky) was thrown out the window, and we hurriedly began to make plans for 100+ attendees, with all of the many logistical complexities that would entail.
I’m not going to take up a lot more space here, except to urge you to take an hour to watch the video of Anita’s speech linked to below. It’s simply incredible — a master class in the critical importance of data in the fight for voting rights, presented by a speaker with the rare ability to catch you and hold you by the heartstrings in rapt attention as she gently and lovingly details a subject that, in lesser hands, could easily put a room full of people into a collective coma. If you want to really understand the war on voting rights in America, and how the good guys can (and do!) win, this will be one of the most profitable hours you’ll ever spend.
And if you’re really hardcore, Anita’s 66 slide Powerpoint deck is here on Google Drive.
If you happen to have earbuds or headphones, you’ll find the audio here benefits wonderfully from them.