Dan, I'm so impressed by that panel (you, Beth, Todd... this is an all-star cast!) that I really think it's your moral OBLIGATION to cancel you participation and demand that all the panelists leave Philadelphia and go to Washington and help the Congress hash out a deal.
Really.
if you guys can't do it, no one can.
Then play Quizzo by the White House.

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This Too Will Pass, for the guts in your cerebrum.

But not on a panel.

I really think part of the role of alternative media is to experiment with various ideas and platforms. The mainstream media (which I guess I am a part of now) then copies the good stuff and tries to make money with it. It's a weird dynamic and I sort of wonder how long it will last.

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Check out "It's Our Money"

And in the spirit of that, I'd seriously recommend patting yourself on the back for your allotted time. What I mean is, from my experience with these sorts of colloquia, people get the most charge out of actually seeing how things were done. This could be as small as showing how YPP was arguably instrumental in the whole ongoing voter's return case, or some similar tour of instances of YPP discussion that led to some positive, progressive "good." The platitudes of an empowered media are easy and the principles I'm guessing could be reiterated by anyone on that panel. I think people want to see something more along the lines of a concrete delineation of how something works, rather than anything like an article of faith or theory, or what have you.

In short, treat it like a show and tell, and have fun with it. From experience, you'll likely have a better engaged audience, even if the first question you get during Q&A is "what's a blog?"

Ben, I don't really buy the mainstream successes are indy sell-outs thesis you're selling, so to speak. I don't think "indy media" as traditionally defined has any special claim or experimental investment over new media than the mainstream does. "New media" is rather something that both have been faced with and have developed rather different strategies to capitalize upon it. I'd actually argue in the long run mainstream, politically lazy media has it worked out better than what has evolved out of traditional "alt or indy" media outlets. I think a certain audience insularity has developed among the more and more digitally dependent "alt voice", that might multiply the number of sophisticated and savvy voices out there ... as it grows out of touch with a broad reader base. When it comes down to it, (politically-oriented, as opposed to underground-look-at-me-kick-myself-in-the-jimmy-oriented online) alt media consistently loses out to the mainstream media in a search-engine driven marketplace. In short, I think some of its power beyond insular networking may be lost as alt-media/journalism becomes more reliant on tiny boxes typed into as opposed to boxes littered through a city.

But then again, I chose not to visit this board again until I was good and drunk, so maybe what I'm trying to articulate is utterly incoherent.

wow, my friend Dan UA is a panelist. They were really in dire needs to fill that chair I guess. ;)

1) Blogs (read: YPP) as a place for citizens to interact with elected officials and folks running for office in an environment that can be alternately critical, hostile, enthusiastic, activist. Sometimes all four at different times with the same politicians;

2) Blogs (again YPP) as a think tank for the rest of the political ecosystem, from legislation to journalism. There are a lot of ideas banging around, and they filter through all the way up to folks saying them on TV;

3) Blogs/YPP as editorialization-by-ridicule, in a very Gen-Y, The Daily Show style, that can be astonishingly direct and effective;

4) Blogs/YPP as a place for honest-to-goodness amateur investigative journalism. That, after all, is what a lot of the fight over access to resources like election results is all about; individual YPPers can comb the data and find the honey. (I still feel proud of some of my public-record combing in the mayoral primary; others have different stories.)