NewFounders, formerly known as Rise Party, held its first annual conference yesterday. Addressing anyone who wants to “reshape the future of politics in America,” the one-day confab in Chicago was the unofficial, slightly early, tech-drenched birthday party for the Resistance. All that was missing was the great big cake.

I was impressed by how smoothly the entire event ran. It was a very ambitious schedule with a lot of moving parts, but on the whole things seemed to come together quite nicely. The day opened with some excellent remarks by Genevieve Thiers and Raffi Krikorian, featured a smattering of additional panels at the main stage, broke out into smaller discussions for a few hours, and then returned to the main stage.

The conference was quite interesting both because of what was on the agenda - and for what wasn’t. In something like chronological order over the course of the day, here are some of the key themes that emerged:

  • Injecting usability into politics. That is what Thiers spoke about, and I think it really is a very succinct description of the bulk of tech-affiliated Resistance projects. Writ large, the flood of techies working on Resistance apps are looking for ways to bring their skills to the fore in order to make politics more usable. With the goal stated so succinctly, we can step back and examine it critically: are we achieving that goal? And is that the right goal in the first place?

  • Building a technology platform for Democrats. That was the thrust of Krikorian’s remarks. He views this mission, which drives his work as CTO of the DNC, as broken down into two pieces: modernizing the DNC’s voter file, and building an ecosystem where innovators can deliver new technologies to Democrats all over the country.

  • Sustainability for Resistance groups. This topic actually did not get a lot of focus on the official program, but it was the subtext of dozens of different discussions. From what I’ve heard, many groups are largely funded by the “sweat equity” of the founders and their fellow volunteers. Everyone, it seems, is looking for ways to fund their projects, and everyone is worried about how long they can sustain the momentum of their efforts before burnout sets in.

  • Duplication of efforts. Closely related to the question of sustainability, there’s a fair amount of concern about the apparent duplication of efforts among Resistance groups. There seems to be a lot of activity, for example, around Call-to-Congress apps. Do we really need so many different apps, each doing more or less the same thing but in very slightly different ways? Obviously - founders are free to do what they wish to do, and their co-workers and users vote with their feet. So for the moment the answer is “yes, if the market (of energy, donations, etc.) will bear it” - but that’s a big if.

  • What is going on with data? The official agenda gave a great deal of focus to the question of data science in service of progressive causes, and I was glad to see it. In my view the quality of our forecasts is one of the biggest problems facing the progressive movement, and it’s also the problem that has so far seen the least amount of focus from Resistance groups. Dan Wagner from Civis gave an excellent ten-minute talk about the problems with forecasting and the directions the field needs to take - that alone was worth the price of admission.

  • What are the problems we’re missing? For all of the tremendous efforts of Resistance groups, this question came up again and again throughout the day. Many people seem to be wondering whether there are problems that need to be addressed - but which are not getting sufficient attention.

I think this conference was very valuable, because it helped a lot of people take a little step back from the day-to-day of their activities to ask these important questions. I know I’ll be returning to some of these questions soon, and hope to have some more in-depth thoughts in the near future.

A birthday party is a great chance to celebrate - which we did, with a terrific rendition of the national anthem by Hamilton’s Miguel Cervantes. But it’s also an important moment to stop and reflect, and this week, the Resistance got a chance to do just that.

Image courtesy of Roya Ann Miller