Another week, another conference. This week I was over at the Personal Democracy Forum here in NYC, which focuses mostly on electoral-type of tech and activism. It’s one of the many conferences that’s still heavily dominated by white guys with a whole lotta privilege on their hands. The conference organizers have heard me (and many others) criticize them for this in the past, and it’s gotten a teensy bit better… but overall, I can’t say that having four white men (update: and a white woman) on your closing plenary shows any progress in the overall mindset. [Update: I could go through the conference schedule and bean-count gender, but I swear to you, that’s not what this post is about. Keep reading, and see if what I have to say makes sense.]

Lest I sound like a broken record, I’ve been trying to think of ways to use my own privilege and explain to those who don’t get it why this is important. (I know I said I was giving up bridge-building, but if I’m going to maintain my sanity in conference season, I’ve got to say something.) It’s easy for organizers to brush people like me off: oh, there they go making trouble again, sigh. There are times where I love making trouble (hi, smarmy Newsbusters guy and your T&A video strategy), but this is one of those times where I’m actually trying to help people make their conferences better: not just look better so that people like me will be quiet, but actually have better content. And this is how.

Perhaps others have used this metaphor before, but as I was walking and talking with my friend Dawn in Coney Island the other night, I hit on this idea of genetic diversity. You know how inbreeding is a Bad Idea? When you get too much of the same material in the gene pool, you get crazy mutations and then eventually the species dies off. Dies. Off.

Ahhhhh, but when you mix it up, when you diversify the material you’re messing around with, you get brand new traits and feature sets that would never ever have happened otherwise. You keep going down that road, and eventually you get new species, stronger species, etc. In short: it’s better. Way, way better.

A bunch of the same people from the same backgrounds at a conference are going to spend a lot of time on ideas that are either not that interesting to the larger world around them or congratulating each other on a job well done (as their species slowly dies off). Panels of folks from wildly different backgrounds are going to spark new ideas (good and bad ones, I imagine) and challenge the paradigms within which we all work. Out of new ideas and challenges come change, movement, progress.

Isn’t that what we’re all shooting for, here, when we both organize and attend these things?

For the last few years, I’ve been struggling with where I find myself on a political spectrum. Sure, I’m on the left. I call myself a progressive and feminist. I know that I’ve grown more than distasteful of electoral politics (which once interested me fairly significantly), and that Hurricane Katrina was the moment that I threw up my hands in complete frustration and rage at the general state of affairs. I’ve dabbled in arts activism, local community organizing, sociolinguistics education, feminist activism, tech empowerment, you name it. None of it seems to singly suit me anymore, and most of it angers me. I’ll say it: I have anger issues. Hello, my name is Deanna, I have anger issues. (That one was for my therapist, everyone wave at her– she’s back there in the corner, waving back at you all.)

More than anything, I’ve been a bridge-builder for most of my political career. I come from working class, conservative roots, and I have been fueled in the past by a passion to build understanding between worlds that don’t talk to each other. A lot of that has to do with the tight relationship that I have with my folks; I find myself wondering how they would react to things that I’m working on, or how a particular issue is framed. Far more than I do now I often used them as guinea pigs: Pop’s the hard-line conservative, Mom’s our swing voter.

[read the rest of this post » ]

Shameless self-promotion, because I’m honored to be included in an article with so many stellar women of the media world — check out Adele Stan’s fantastic writeup on women making media: Thanks, We’ll Make Our Own Media.

no no, thank YOU, Adele!

A crazy time here in Deannaland. I was in Cambridge this past weekend for the annual Best-Conference-Ever: Women, Action and the Media. I did double-presentation duty once again, sitting on Jenn Pozner’s panel about women, feminism and blogging, and then did my workshop on “Empowering Online Communities.” (See the presentation and the followup materials here.)

[read the rest of this post » ]

What Gerald Ford said about her: “if God created the world in 6 days, he couldn’t have rested on the 7th day– he would have had to explain it to Helen Thomas.”

Quick hit: for the folks who are looking for PDFs of the presentation I made here at WAM!, here’s links to the files for yas:

• Empowering online communities (full color), 2.3MB
• Empowering online communities (printable black-n-white), 1.1MB

Also, here’s the link to the resource list: http://del.icio.us/tag/wamweb2.0

Whatcha doin’ on Friday night? Lookin’ for a little late-happy hour action?

You’re in luck: I’m part of a huge book release event down at the Bowery — cuz I’m in the book! “Bowery Women” comes out on Friday, and this ain’t yer mama’s poetry, kids. And to reflect that, we’re throwing a huge shindig that’s FREE and has 2-for-1 DRINK SPECIALS. Dang… no better deal than that. Extra special bonus: you’ll see me on stage! Reading things! Performing!

Details on the party and the book are after the jump; hope to see yas there. Oh, and please feel free to spread the word, far and wide!

[read the rest of this post » ]