Democracy Independence: Sharing News and Politics in a Connected World is the title of a major conference I will be attending from June 28 to June 30 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Put on by the Media Giraffe Project, it involves traditional, citizen journalists, political strategist, educators, bloggers, developers, technology and media researchers from a huge geographic area.
The Media Giraffe Project is a non-partisan, interdisciplinary research project of the UMass Journalism Program, which started just over a year ago. While I sent them information about our Online Democracy Project, there was no response.
The conference is in two parts, a roundtable summit (the part I am attending and most interested in) and a conference consisting of how-to sessions.
The purpose of the roundtable is to look at changes in the practice of online journalism and politics. I intend to blog the entire event using the breaking news section of this web site, along with other contributions as I prepare to go, which will appear in the main site.