To my mind, RootsCampDC was ultimately successful at taking an idea developed by geeks -- an "unconference" lacking hierarchical structure, where the attendees are also the presenters -- and making it tangible for everyone, including non-techie political activists.

There were a lot of people there, over 300 (BarCamp and the other RootsCamps have had far fewer participants), but the conference was pretty smoothly run. The data geeks got to talk to the policy geeks over beers, people who would have otherwise had no forum for their ideas found themselves leading sessions (a fun part of the conference was the introductory session, when everyone introduced themselves; the more interesting people were greeted with shouts of encouragement to present), and the idea of a wikified approach to politics and organizing began to make sense to some people.

The wrap-ups are slowly trickling into the blogosphere; here are a few worth reading:

- David Weinberger's "Four reasons why RootsCampDC was a really, really good event."

- Colin Delany on what he learned about working with local bloggers.

- The flickr tagset of photos from the conference.

- PoliticsTV did video interviews with a handful of attendees which they've posted on YouTube.

- What Erica at Rhode Island's Future learned about the netroots.

And of course, I posted a few times myself.

I'll update as more gets posted.

Tags: rootscamp, rootscampDC

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