LIVE from Providence: Opening Day at Netroots Nation 2012… in pictures!

Good after­noon from Prov­i­dence! We have had a busy day so far here on the first day of the sev­enth annu­al Net­roots Nation, as you may have noticed if you’ve been fol­low­ing our morn­ing con­ven­tion coverage.

Though we try to be as descrip­tive as we can when we’re cov­er­ing pan­els, keynotes, and spe­cial events, a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words, as the old adage goes. So, for your enjoy­ment, here is a short pho­to essay depict­ing the first morn­ing of Net­roots Nation 2012. All the pho­tos were tak­en by me and curat­ed by Patrick.

The Rhode Island Con­ven­tion Cen­ter, which is host­ing us for the week­end, is one of the best venues we’ve ever been in. It is nice­ly laid out, with plen­ty of com­fort­able seat­ing in the open space, lots of water sta­tions, . The walk from the exhi­bi­tion hall and main hall to the pan­el rooms is appre­cia­bly short, and because the walk involves ascend­ing or descend­ing a series of esca­la­tors, you always get a view when you’re mov­ing from one place to another.

Two sets of pan­el ses­sions were held this morn­ing (the first at 9 AM, the sec­ond at 10:30 AM). I attend­ed a pan­el called The Heart of the Beast: How the Grass­roots is Tak­ing on Big Bank­ing in a rather spa­cious ball­room which had seem­ing­ly a zil­lion chairs set out for peo­ple to sit in (many of them were filled due to high inter­est in the pan­el). The pho­to above is of that panel.

The exhib­it hall is adja­cent to the main hall, as it was last year, and includes a blog­ger lounge (spon­sored by Dai­ly Kos, as seen above) and dozens of booths staffed by pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions, cam­paign ven­dors, and socially/environmentally con­scious businesses.

The pan­els we’ve been to so far have been well-attend­ed. We under­stand from the Net­roots Nation orga­niz­ers that we may set a new record for reg­is­tra­tions this year, which would be pret­ty cool. The sec­ond pan­el I went to (Win­ning Smarter: Using Data to Trans­form Elec­tions) was held in one of the small­er ball­rooms and there was hard­ly an emp­ty seat in the room due to high interest.