Netroots Nation will be heading to Baltimore, Maryland next summer for its nineteenth incarnation (the seventeenth to be held in-person), Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas announced today during the Friday evening keynote of the country’s largest annual gathering of progressive activists and movement leaders.
Begun in 2006 under the leadership of Gina Cooper and originally known as YearlyKos, Netroots Nation has preserved through multiple recessions, the Trump error, and the coronavirus pandemic. It pivoted to an online-only format in 2020 and remained remote for 2021 before reverting to a hybrid format last year.
NPI has participated in all nineteen Netroots Nation conferences to date, from 2006 to the present. It’s an annual tradition for our team.
Netroots Nation has been held in over a dozen different cities during its nearly two decade history, though it has yet to visit the Pacific Northwest. Three cities have hosted it twice: Las Vegas, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Ten cities have hosted it once: Austin, Minneapolis, Providence, San Jose, Detroit, Phoenix, St. Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. Denver was slated to host in 2020, but those plans were scrapped when the pandemic hit. Washington, D.C. was set to host a slimmed down in-person NN in 2021, but the plug got pulled on that too.
Baltimore will now become the fifteenth city to host Netroots Nation.
“Many famous African Americans in history have called Baltimore home, including Thurgood Marshall, Frederick Douglass, Isaac Myers, Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway,” the conference organizers noted on the advance registration page they’ve set up. Baltimore is the home of the Baltimore Museum of Art, which holds the world’s largest collection of Matisse paintings in the world. The first United States post office system was inaugurated in Baltimore in 1774. ”
“Are you intrigued?”
The 2024 gathering will be held on July 11th, 12th, and 13th — almost exactly a year from now. NN23 will precede the ugly spectacle that will be the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee (scheduled to run from July 15th to 18th) and conclude a little over a month before the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago (scheduled to run from August 19th to the 22nd).
The venue will be the Baltimore Convention Center, located in the city’s Inner Harbor neighborhood at 1 W Pratt St, Baltimore, MD 21201.
The closest hotel is the Baltimore Hilton, which is connected to the convention center via a skybridge. Presumably, that’s where many attendees will be staying.
As in past years, organizers say the conference will offer more than one hundred and forty hours of panels, trainings, keynotes, and fun social events.
If you’re interested in registering, you can do so here. In-person rates begin at $325/person and will increase to over $400 as the date of the convention gets closer. The true per-person cost of the convention is about $1,500, which reflects the enormous expenses associated with staging large events like Netroots Nation.
