It is Monday about 8 am in Austin Texas. I write this partly as a chance to ground myself. I’ve been all over the place for the past several days, meeting diverse collection of people and this post will recount a little bit of these travels.

Last Thursday evening, there was a fundraiser for Nancy DiNardo. Nancy is the new chair of the Democratic Party in Connecticut. She was treasurer for Diane Farrell’s 2004 congressional bid and chair of the finance state committee. She has been highly involved for a long time. The fundraiser was at Ellen Camhi’s house. Ellen is town chair in Stamford, and is a Democratic National Committeewoman. Like Nancy, Ellen has been highly involved for a long time.

I was a little disappointed that the fundraiser ended up being pretty much just the party faithful. There were very few grassroots people there. There were very few young democrats. The only exception seemed to be those that were elected officials, and most of them had parents that had been elected officials. It was a great fundraiser, but the lack of new blood worried me. It was the sign of a dying party.

Yet the grassroots are out there. After the party I hopped on a midnight train to Washington. I got in at seven, checked into the hotel, showered and went to a long day of meetings about grassroots activists. The group was a somewhat ad hoc gathering of many friends that I’ve met through the Dean campaign. This was the mirror of the fundraiser. Most of the folks there were younger and had not been highly involved in Democrat. Yet these were the people that were very involved, very motivated and very organized.

For the Democratic Party to thrive, these two worlds need to be bridged, and we made some good efforts to start bridging these worlds. We had some very productive talks with people from the DNC, from DFA and from NDN.

Unfortunately, I needed to leave early for my next adventure. I flew down to Austin for SXSW where I am a panelist on “How to think about democracy and technology”. Breakfast on Sunday was an odd gathering of digital artists and activists. A lot of the discussion focused around Ars Electronica and digital art projects around the globe. I was particularly interested in the feral robotic dogs and the webcam that jumps off of a bridge.

Ideas of a feral robotic dog rodeo were floated, as well as the idea of a network of Ars Electronica events around the globe. As I sat there, and listened to people talk with passion about beauty and sustainability, about connecting people in new ways, I just sat back, absorbed things and savored the whole milieu.

We finally got over to SXSW and it took forever just to register. It wasn’t that the lines were long. There was no line by the time I made it to the registration desk. Instead, there were lots of friends along the way that needed to be talked with. Again, it is the connections that matter.

I attended two keynotes. First, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about his new book, Blink. The topic was about how people make many decisions in the blink of an eye, and sometimes the decisions would be better decisions if made with less information. It was an interesting talk, and the question of how this related to politics was raised. The discussion afterwards did not think that this applied well to the journalistic or political realms. Some of us discussed the aspects of deception in the journalistic and political realms and how that affected snap decisions.

The second keynote was by Dan Gillmor. He spoke about his book, We the Media. Having read much of his book and been on mailing lists with him, there wasn’t much new material there for me. However, as I sat in the audience thinking about how these thoughts would influence the panel I was on, I had an aha moment that pulled together a bunch of themes.

Gillmor talks about arriving at the realization that many of his readers know more about specific subjects that he does. It should seem obvious that this is the case, but in an era of experts, we all tend to think of ourselves as the experts and forget the experts around us. During Kim’s campaign, we talked a lot about tapping the expertise of the people in our community and about how little this is done by politicians. What would it be like to have more politicians coming from a starting point of recognizing that there constituents know more about subjects that they do. This could become a strong framework for deliberative democracy. Perhaps those of us encouraging new political candidates can encourage them to work from within this frame.

In the evening, I went to a party of people concerned with telecommunications policy. It was good to be surround by highly geeky wonks, and the discussions were a lot of fun. Another underlying theme re-emerged there. The power of networks comes from the diversity of the networks. It is by embracing diversity in our networks that we can move beyond the divisive black and white (or red and blue) thinking.

I have been fortunate to spend the past several days traveling in some somewhat diverse circles. I have been blessed by this and look forward to the events of the next couple days.