It's two hours after the end of today's panel on Organizing Lessons from Egypt, and I'm still buzzing from the emotion of Skyping to Ethar El-Katatney in Cairo, hearing from experts Biko Baker, Nadine Wahab and Adel Iskandar here in DC and reading the incredible back channel conversation that was happening simultaneously on Twitter with the hashtag #noiegypt.

It will take me a while to fully digest the events of this evening, and tonight was only the beginning of a discussion about what is happening in Cairo and what occurred to bring the world to this moment. In the meantime, I left the panel with a trio of takeaways.

1. Wael Ghonim - the Google exec and creator of the Facebook page, We Are All Khaled Said, is both charismatic and humble - engaging all of the protest supporters with a real, human voice. Is this kind of leader an essential component to building a movement? Where are the progressive humble, charismatic leaders of today?
2. According to Nadine and Adel, the size of the protests increased when the Internet was turned off in Egypt. Clearly online activism was important to building the protests, but wasn't sufficient. At some point you need to leave your computer and take offline action.
3. Humor is an important component of social change. Ethar spoke of the funny protest signs in Tahir Square, and of the #whymubarakislate hashtag. We can't take ourselves seriously without being able to chuckle at the absurdity of the human condition.

I promised a few of the attendees links to the videos we watched and Facebook pages we looked at tonight. I hope you'll take a few moments to tell us what you thought of the panel.

1. The Opening Video, with images of the Egyptian protests set to Kanye West's Amazing.

2. The Arabic language We are All Khael Said Facebook page and the English language page.

3. Video of the June 2010 protests in Alexandria circumventing the Emergency Law against gathering in large groups.

4. The closing video from Syrian artist Omar Offendum made in solidarity with the Egyptian protesters.

If you missed the panel, we've archived footage from the event on our YouTube channel. If you have thoughts, I'd love to see them in the comments. Thanks to everyone who came out for an amazing event.

Follow Anthea on Twitter or email her at anthea@neworganizing.com. Photo from Flickr user M. Soli, licensed under Creative Commons.