Event

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to participate in three events in the next few weeks looking at the challenges and opportunities for the United States in a changing Latin America and along our border with Mexico. Capping these events will be a major speech on Friday April 1st here in Washington by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. Secretary Napolitano will discuss the Administration's vision for a "21st Century Border" with our Mexican neighbor, the progress being made nationwide in effectively enforcing U.S. immigration law, and the steps taken to ensure the strength and integrity of the entire immigration system. 

Our event on March 29th with Under Secretary of State Judith McHale and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and our conference "Forward Together/Avanzando Juntos/Avançando Juntos" on April 11th are open to the public. Due to space limitations, our event with Secretary Napolitano on April 1st will be available to the public by live webcast only. Information on each of these events is below. We hope you will join us.  

A 21st Century Border - A Speech by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano
Friday, April 1, 9:30 am
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We are proud to announce that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, will be giving a major policy address to NDN/NPI on Friday, April 1st.  The Secretary will review the Administration's vision for a "21st Century Border" with our Mexican neighbor, the progress being made nationwide in effectively enforcing U.S. immigration law, and the steps taken to ensure the strength and integrity of the entire immigration system. 

Following her speech there will be a special roundtable discussion with:

John Morton, Director, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Alejandro Mayorkas, Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
David V. Aguilar, Deputy Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Alan Krieger, Mayor, Yuma, AZ
Al Zapanta, President, U.S. Mexico Chamber of Commerce 

The speech will begin at 9:30am.  Due to space limitations, at this time only a live web-cast of the event will be open to the public.  Information about the webcast will be forthcoming.  

Public Diplomacy & Social Media in Latin America
Tuesday, March 29, 12:00pm - 2:00pm
SAIS Rome Building, Room 203, 1619 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC
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As mobile phones and social media networks tie together more and more people across the Americas, these new technologies are enabling individuals to connect and communicate within countries and across borders. On March 29, NDN and the New Policy Institute will co-host a forum with the Latin America Studies Program of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) to discuss how these technologies are affecting diplomacy, politics and governance in Latin America.

A keynote speech by Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith McHale will address how the State Department is advancing U.S. foreign policy in Latin America through increased engagement, including constructive and meaningful people-to-people exchanges, local and regional media outreach and the use of multiple social platforms to establish direct relationships across the region.  

Following Under Secretary McHale's speech, a panel discussion will explore the impact of social media and other network technologies on governance and civil society in certain Latin American countries, including Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico. Panelists will include:

• Christopher Sabatini - Senior Director of Policy, Americas Society & Council of the Americas
• Carlos Ponce - Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellow, National Endowment for Democracy
• Oscar Salazar - Founder & CEO, Citivox; Co-Founder, Cuidemos el Voto
• Ricardo Amado Castillo - Consultant & Researcher, Social Media in Latin-American Politics
• Sam duPont - Policy Analyst, NDN & New Policy Institute (moderator)

Forward Together/Avanzando Juntos/Avançando Juntos- A Conference Looking at the Changing Politics of the Americas
April 11, 8:45am
Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC
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NDN and the New Policy Institute will conduct a major day-long conference looking at how this fast-changing region might be able to do more to move forward together, in the years ahead.   The day will feature major addresses by influential thought leaders well experienced in the region, including Governor Bill Richardson, the Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council Dan Restrepo, and the Ambassador from Mexico to the United States Arturo Sarukhan and a panel discussion with Latin American Ambassadors to the United States.

Additionally there will be a very special conversation about the state of our common border with Mexico with mayors from sister citiies on both sides of the border - Mayor Arturo Garino of Nogales, Arizona and Mayor Jose Angel Hernandez Barajas of Nogales, in the state of Sonora in northern Mexico.  This important discussion will be moderated by Chappell Lawson, former Executive Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the Commissioner U.S. Customs and Border Patrol at the Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Lawson is the  co-author of one of the seminal pieces of academic work on the future of the U.S - Mexico border region, Managing the United States-Mexico Border: Cooperative Solutions to Common Challenges. He is currently an Associate Professor at MIT with a concentration in Latin America.

Rounding out the day will be an in depth conversation about the economic ties that bind the United States and Mexico together. This panel will feature representatives from both U.S. and Mexican businesses and governments.

In a couple weeks, Global Mobile and NDN/NPI's Latin America Policy Initiative will be co-hosting an event with SAIS looking at the impact of social media, mobile phones, and other new network technologies in Latin America. Back in January, I published a report looking specifically at Mexican civil society, how those groups and individuals had adopted new technologies into their work, and how they could do better. This event will be an expansion on that, and you'll get to hear from people much wiser and more knowledgable than I.

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale will give a keynote on how State's public diplomacy efforts in Latin America have evolved with changing tools.  Her speech...

[W]ill address how the State Department is advancing U.S. foreign policy in Latin America through increased engagement, including constructive and meaningful people-to-people exchanges, local and regional media outreach and the use of multiple social platforms to establish direct relationships across the region.

And she'll be doing a long Q&A, taking questions both from the audience and online.  Following her talk I'll be moderating what I expect to be a really interesting discussion with a few people working at the intersection of new technology, politics and civil society in different Latin American countries.  Panelists will include...

Chris Sabatini is senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and founder/editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly. In a recent column at the Huffington Post, Sabatini explained how the U.S. embargo on export of ICTs to Cuba has, if anything, prevented any chance of an Egypt-style uprising there. He'll be elaborating on this issue and speaking about the potential impact of internet access in Cuba.

Carlos Ponce is a Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy and the general coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy, a network of over 210 leading civil society organizations across the Americas. In his native Venezuela, Dr. Ponce successfully founded and led the Justice and Development Consortium—an NGO that develops justice-reform and conflict-resolution programs at the local level—and worked as executive secretary of Venezuela’s National Human Rights Commission.

Oscar Salazar is a social entrepreneur in the technology space and a political activist. He is currently the CEO of Citivox, a platform to enhance citizen-government communication and improve quality of life in communities in his native Mexico. Salazar is also co-founder of Cuidemos el Voto, a web- and mobile-based tool to improve election monitoring and protect voters’ rights.

It promises to be a fascinating discussion, and I hope you'll be able to come.  Space is very limited, though, so please RSVP soon.  If you can't make it, we'll be webcasting the whole event live.  Here are the details:

Tuesday, March 29, 12 pm - 2 pm 
SAIS Rome Auditorium, 1619 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC
RSVP  |  Watch Webcast

Please join Simon this coming Tuesday evening, May 12, in San Francisco for a very special NDN presentation on one of the most important developments in American politics -- the emerging power of the Millennial Generation, the largest and most progressive generation ever in American history.

NDN is proud to host Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, authors of the critically acclaimed, best-selling book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics. In their prophetic book, Morley and Mike predicted that two powerful forces of generational and technological change would combine in 2008 to completely transform American politics. Those who best understood this wave of change rode it to victory, while those who stubbornly clung to the politics of the past were drowned by a rising tide of voters' demand for change.

The event is free and open to the public. It will take place on Tuesday, May 12th at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco at 5 Embarcadero Center in room Seacliff B from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.  To RSVP please click here.  You will be able to purchase signed copies of Millennial Makeover at the event, however if you cannot attend, we encourage you to purchase the new paperback version here.  Please feel free to share this invitation with your lists and communities, online or off.

New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michiko Kakutani named their book as one of her 10 favorites in 2008, and the book has just been released in paperback edition with a brand new chapter that looks back at the impact this generation had on the 2008 election of President Obama.

Morley and Mike will showcase their very compelling presentation about generational politics in American history and how this emerging generation may very well be the basis of a new and long-lasting 21st century Democratic majority. (With close to 94 million Millennials eligible to vote by 2020, the GOP risks decades in the minority if it fails to connect with this demographic).

Their new presentation has been updated to include the election of President Obama, the first 100 days of his Presidency and civic-minded Millennials commitment to national service. You won't want to miss it.

NDN has been lucky to host Mike and Morley more than once over the years and recently brought them on as our newest fellows.  You may be interested in watching the kick-off event of the launch of the paperback book tour here.  And to read up on Mike and Morley's thinking, check out their blog posts for NDN here. 

NDN is excited to invite you to a special forum this coming Tuesday, May 5, where we will be joined by the editors of three of the nation's smartest publications -- Franklin Foer of The New Republic, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect and Michael Tomasky of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas -- to reflect on the early days of Barack Obama's young presidency and what lies ahead. 

President Obama's poll numbers remain stratospheric. The Republicans are at a loss, a party plagued by infighting and an inability to respond to a popular president. The Administration has taken unprecedented action in the financial and auto industries, won passage of a massive economic recovery package, shifted America's foreign policy and been confronted by a global health crisis.

Joining NDN President Simon Rosenberg to talk about the new politics of the day will be Tomasky, who also is the American editor-at-large of The Guardian (UK), on whose Web site he writes a blog; Foer, who also wrote the international bestseller, "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization," which has been translated into 27 languages—from German to Indonesian; and Schmitt, who was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation where he helped to develop a new initiative on The Next Social Contract, an effort to find the underlying principles and policies appropriate to the emerging economy.

So please join us Tuesday, May 5, at 12 p.m ET, with lunch beginning at 11:30 a.m. If you're not in Washington or can't break away from work, the forum will be live Webcast at http://www.ndnblog.org/livecast starting at 12:15 p.m. We also will be taking questions from our livecast audience and you can submit your questions online at questions@ndn.org.  To RSVP for this event, please click here. For fuller bios, event location and other information, click here. 

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday. In the meantime, please read these great articles written by Tomasky, Foer (and colleague Noam Scheiber) and Schmitt on Obama's 100 Days. Each has a unique and fascinating perspective.

100 Days: Setting the Tone for America, Michael Tomasky, guaurdian.co.uk, 4/29/09

The Nudge-ocracy: Barack Obama's new theory of the state, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber, The New Republic, 5/06/09

The Myth of 100 Days, Mark Schmitt, The American Prospect, 4/29/09

Major political candidates spend more on television advertising than on any other facet of their campaigns. And currently, the world of television is undergoing a sea change. More people watch cable today than broadcast and by the end of the year about a third of all homes will have a DVR, with 60 percent of those skipping all television commercials. Meanwhile, more and more people are watching commercial TV on the web. These are amongst the many changes which compel us to Reimagine Video and signal The End of Broadcast.

To discuss all this, the New Politics Institute and NDN are bringing together leading private sector practitioners to discuss the profound and historic ways the ruling media of politics - television - is changing and how new technologies must be mastered to reach new audiences.

Joining us will be:

Todd Juenger, leader of TiVo's Audience Research and Measurement business, which provides detailed insight into how TiVo viewers consume and interact with television programming and advertisements.

Tara Walpert, President of Visible World, Inc., a company that uses new tools to customize and target advertisements so that the right message reaches the right audience at the right time.

Evan Tracey, the founder and chief operating officer of Campaign Media Analysis Group, the leading custom media research company for politics and public affairs advertising expenditure data.

Simon Rosenberg, President and Founder of NDN and the New Politics Institute.

We believe this event will provide you with a practical understanding of how to navigate the changing world of television and how to make the most effective use of new technologies. So please join us on Thursday, April 24, at 12 p.m., in the ballroom at the Phoenix Park Hotel, 520 N. Capitol St., NW, Washington, DC.

Please make sure to RSVP here. If you have questions, please contact Courtney Markey at 202-544-9200 or cmarkey@ndn.org.

Finally, be sure to hold the date, May 9, for The New Tools and New Audiences of Campaign 2008, a day-long event on how to best harness the potential power of new technologies and demographic shifts.

The emergence of a whole new set of rapidly changing media and technology tools and several important new audiences is helping create a new politics of the 21st century, one very different from the century just past. To help progressives adapt to these new developments, NDN and NPI have developed a set of powerful resources, including papers that will help you:

Go Mobile, Reimagine Video, Target Your Marketing, Leverage Social Networks, Advertise Online, Buy Cable Smart, Engage the Blogs, and Speak in Spanish.

Additionally, we've done a great deal of research on some of the most important new audiences of today's politics, including millennials, Hispanics, those who live in the exurbs, influentials; and have taken a good hard look at how America itself is going through perhaps its most dramatic demographic transformation in its history. As we recently wrote in a major magazine article, interacting with these communities in new ways has created a new politics that progressives can emerge from stronger than ever. In fact, progressives are already making great strides by starting out with an advantage in what we call the virtuous cycle of participation - the ability to build a community, raise money from it, then engage and grow it - which is further enabled through the use of technology.

To learn more about all of this, we've put together two great outreach events that will help you better understand both the new tools and the new audiences. First, our Reimagine Video: The End of Broadcast event will be on Thursday, April 24th. We'll hear top experts analyze the profound changes in the dominant media of politics to date, television, as well as the impact of cable and DVRs. Second, our New Tools, New Audiences event is on Friday, May 9th. At this day-long gathering, we're going to discuss the critical role the new tools and new constituencies played in the presidential nomination process and that they can be expected to play in the general election in the fall. We will then conduct practical breakout sessions that will focus closely on how each new tool might be used by advocacy efforts of campaigns and organizations, big and small.

As always, you can keep in touch with all of this on NDN's website, www.ndn.org, and blog, www.ndnblog.org.