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.