Twitter diplomacy from opposing conferences in Minneapolis #nn11 #ro11
by Nick FaberTuesday, June 21st, 2011
Last weekend, Minneapolis hosted dueling conferences for online political activists. Netroots Nation, the progressive conference, was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center, while RightOnline, its conservative counterpart was just a couple blocks away at the Hilton. While the short distance was enough to keep the orange lanyards separated from the green, a quick twitter search of the conferences’ hashtags (#nn11 & #ro11) shows that some partygoers were as interested in each other’s conference as their own.
Unfortunately, much of the Tweetage is negative – from both sides. There are tweets about crashing and disrupting each other’s conferences, about whose speakers were better, who had smarter attendees, which conference was better attended….
But if you sift through the combative and the contentious, you’ll find some peacemakers in the stream, tweeting across the aisles, seeking common ground in Minneapolis, including one from an unlikely source.
