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?

I’m super excited to announce that my new segment on GRITtv with Laura Flanders has launched! I’ll be doing regular segments featuring all things tech: politics (like episode 1, here), life hacks, sanity checks, gadget giddiness, you name it. Have suggestions or hot tips? Send them to blog AT deannazandt.com!

Hey y’all! I’m here at Personal Democracy Forum I’ve got a Nokia N95 (thanks, Micah!) and I’m gonna be running around all day talking to folks for GRITtv. Watch live!

(If I’m not on live, then it’ll just show a white screen… look at older clips here)

Just a quick note of announcement here (especially for you RSS people that never come to the site, haha): I’ve updated the design of dz.com to reflect a little more “practice what I preach.” Why yes, look at that fancy new sidebar, with my lifestream, where else you can find me online… oh, and is that a tag cloud? Yay. Tag clouds are just about my favorite thing in web 2.0. Also, ye RSS peeps: you’ll find now that there’s two feeds to choose from: one with just my blog posts (same ol’, same ol’), and one that will give you my lifestream (blog posts plus twitter, digg activity, what-have-you).

In addition to being a little bit more practical and up-to-date, this will also serve as some public documentation of my upcoming month in Berlin and other parts of Germany, so stay tuned for news and enjoy!

I’m not-so-slowly and very-surely running out of hard drive space on my little laptop, which is the central nervous system of all things DZ– especially now that I have a killer camera and am taking gianormous photos. WhatSize tells me the main culprits of space usage are my old mail archives (obsessively retained since early 2005, when I first went Mac) and of course, my pictures.

So, I’m wondering: what kinds of parameters are folks using for moving things to archive versus keeping on a running machine? The OCD-pack-rat in me likes having my entire world at my fingertips whether I’m home or not, but obviously this isn’t sustainable. (…she says as she’s downloading 7GB of pics from aforementioned camera.)

Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, to twitter me, or to drop a line.

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.)

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